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Copyright © 2024 CGTN. 京ICP备20000184号
Disinformation report hotline: 010-85061466
The logo of the NFL. /CFP
The National League Football (NFL) salary cap for the 2024 season will grow by $30.6 million to a record $255.4 million, an increase of 14.6 percent, the league announced on Friday.
The NFL uses a "hard" salary cap which means no team is allowed to spend even one dollar over the cap. The number for the 2023 season was $224.8 million. It was projected to rise to between $240 and $245 million. Teams had to adjust their rosters based on that range including waiving players or negotiating contract restructures.
Now that the teams are granted more cap space, they will have less pressure in team building, especially for those with payrolls above the cap, namely the San Francisco 49ers, the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks.
The NFL salary cap was introduced in 1994 and continued to grow by around $10 to $15 million between 2013 and 2020. The number dropped from $198.2 million to $182.5 million in the 2021 season because of projected revenue losses caused by COVID-19. Though it jumped back to $208.2 million in 2022, it still took the league years to pay back all of the player benefits that were deferred in 2020.
The logo of Super Bowl LVIII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers at at Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada, February 11, 2024. /CFP
Back then, the team owners and the players reached an agreement to keep the NFL running. Part of the deal was to defer some of the player benefits which were repaid in the following years. Such repayments were subtracted from the final calculations of the league's revenue every year, hence limits on the revenue growth projections, which were directly tied to the number of the salary cap.
"The giant leap in the salary cap is partially the result of the full repayment of all amounts advanced by the clubs and deferred by the players during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as significant new media deals coinciding with recent regular season and playoff expansion," the NFL said in a statement.
The NFL signed new media rights deals for more than $110 billion over 11 years in March 2021. According to ESPN, many believe that 2024 and 2025 will be the first years for the deals to stimulate the league revenues to grow.