Just to bring back a zombie thread...
1) most CBAs for professional sports leagues split revenue roughly equal between the players and the teams (I believe the last NBA CBA was 52/48 if I remember correctly). I wouldnt necessarily call that unfair or skewed towards favoring the owners.
So as to my point about negotiating power... how much of their own time (the most limited of resources) do owners collectively contribute to professional sports vs the athletes, workers, trainers, marketers, cooks, cleaners, etc? The fact that you think they should get roughly the same extracted value as those who actually create the value is a contrition to power of accumulated capital, their value is they have a bank account, they can be replaced by any bank account whereas a ticket taker needs to physically show up and athletes need to develop skills over decades.
2) conversely, if you take operating losses into affect and put it about asset appreciation, the owners often get a raw deal on a strictly number basis. But the owners are a) already fantastically wealthy b) betting on the increased value of their asset to justify their losses. See Arthur Blanks comments on his MLS franchise or look at the sale price of recent sports franchises for reference
This might be true of some owners but collectively the market wouldn't exist in the way it does if owners generally didn't think they could get value from their investment. To be fair though that value might be speculative (like current e-sports betting the market will grow eventually) or complimentary (like being able to leverage access to games to garner favor in other businesses).
3) players have more leverage than you think, unfortunately the owners are one unified "block" whereas often the players/unions aren't always working on the same level. You're telling me if LeBron/Giannis/Kawhi/etc didnt start their own league with optimal TV rights that the NBA owners wouldn't cave in a heartbeat?
Yes exactly my point, it is all about leverage. Getting 300+ people to stay a course is more difficult that 10-20. If those people only have a handful of years where they can ply their trade then the sacrifice of 1 week or 1 year is significantly more than an owner who may plan to hold the team as an asset for decades. To address your idea about some star players creating a competing league they would need to go through all of the significant barriers to entry, owners already have a league so they don't have to deal with that.
