The player rep for the Pittsburgh Steelers is telling members of that team to prepare for a lockout from the NFL within the next four seasons.
Five years ago, all football fans came close to losing at least part of the regular season as the owners locked out the players during a labor dispute. Eventually, cooler heads would prevail and fans had their entire 16 game season.
According to one NFL player who serves as the player rep for his team, that story could play out again in the near future. Pittsburgh Steelers guard Ramon Foster, who serves as the rep to the NFL Players Association for the black and gold, spoke with ESPN about issues involving player discipline for teammates like Le’Veon Bell and Martavius Bryant.
Further into the interview, Foster dropped some knowledge that another lockout could be in store for the summer of 2021 – and this one could be worse than before:
"“It’s coming. They’ve hired certain people on their legal team, the NFL has, and we have to be the type of players and union that’s not borrowing money from banks and stuff like that to survive a lockout, a strike. That can’t happen this time around. We have to be smarter this time around because there are a lot of things we’re going to be fighting for and a lot of things they are going to want and we’re going to want, too.”"
Related Story: Mike Tirico takes subtle shot at NFL during Olympic coverage
At this point, the NFL is as popular as it has ever been before and is running circles around the other leagues as a whole (even the LeBron rich NBA is riding second place nationally). With that, it would be hard to think owners and players would want to end that cash flow – but when you get too many egos in one room, it’s hard to say nothing is possible.