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Doing a Sports Deal? Get
Personal
When the National Football League adopted a liberal free agency rule in the
early 1990s, allowing players to more easily jump to new teams for lucrative
deals, no superstar was expected to earn more than future Hall of Famer
Reggie White, an intimidating defensive lineman whose contract with the
Philadelphia Eagles was expiring. |
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"Everybody said that free agency in football is not going to work because
everybody will go to New York or Los Angeles, and nobody will go to Green
Bay," said Kenneth L. Shropshire, director of the Wharton
Sports Business
Initiative and author of a forthcoming book on negotiating and sports.
"Reggie was the first big-name free agent and he had the power to go
anywhere -- but he ended up going to Green Bay, the last place anybody
thought he would go."
According to Shropshire, who shared his insights in a recent
presentation
titled, "Negotiate like the Pros: Negotiation Lessons from Sports for
Business," the Packers were able to lure White to their remote Wisconsin
outpost because of two things that meant more to the athlete than money. One
was a church in nearby Milwaukee where White, also an ordained minister, was
eager to preach, and the second was an act of faith that Green Bay was where
he would finally get the Super Bowl ring that had eluded him in
Philadelphia. (It was, in 1997.)
White's saga points to two critical elements of
contract negotiations
between sports teams and professional athletes:
American sports deals are
more often an art than a science, and intangibles such as relationships can
sometimes trump the bottom line.
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