“Tie the cap to league revenue” sounds fair until you realize owners spent 30 years engineering what counts as league revenue.
The Braves don’t just sell tickets. They own The Battery. Mixed-use development. Hotels. Restaurants. Parking. None of it counts as baseball related revenue.
Cubs own the rooftops across from Wrigley. Rangers built Globe Life District. Cardinals own Ballpark Village. The Mets are building a casino.
The players fill those seats and attract the fans. The players make that real estate valuable. The players are the product that turns a parking lot into a $500M development.
But Freddie Freeman’s contract counts against the cap. The Battery’s hotel revenue doesn’t count toward the pool.
The NFL cap works because owners can’t spin gate revenue into a shell LLC and hide it from the players. MLB owners can and do.
A cap tied to “league revenue” in baseball is a ceiling built on a rigged floor.