The NFL has allotted $255.4 million to each team, raising the new salary cap by $30 million, teams can now spend more money than ever.
NEW YORK, NY– Barring Covid, the NFL has never seen a decline in their salary cap. This year will be no different. Ahead of the beginning of the league’s new year, the NFL has announced that each team’s salary cap will increase by around $30 million. Each team will now be allotted $255.4 million to construct their roster alongside an added addendum of $74 million per team to be used towards player benefits such as performance incentives.
The rise in this year’s salary cap marks the largest single-season increase in the league’s history. The cap is a result of an increased social media presence, deferred Covid-19 payments, and an overall growing fanbase for the league. This year, the NFL gained traction amongst new markets, with examples being pop culture enthusiasts in the form of the media attention on superstars Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift as well as a larger global footprint with the NFL adding games in Spain and Brazil for 2024.
This means that free agency this year might be a little bit slower as teams can now afford to pay players that otherwise would’ve left. The 2024 league year and signing period begin at 4 PM EST on March 13, following a two-day negotiating period.
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However, in terms of a percent change, the new salary cap figure doesn’t look nearly as impressive. From 2023 to 2024, teams will have an additional 13.61% more salary cap space, per Spotrac.com. That follows the 2022 offseason increase of 14.08% (the initial Covid-19 rebound), the 2006 increase of 19.3% and the 1998 increase of 26.38%.
In order to calculate the salary cap, the league distributes a portion of its revenue evenly out. NFL revenue comes from three sources: media revenue, NFL ventures/playoff revenue, and local revenue. The players’ total is then divided by the league’s 32 teams to give each club its individual salary cap.
What this means, we don’t exactly know yet, but we have some ideas. Sources around the league, according to Yahoo Sports, speculate that the increase might benefit “middle-tier” players the most.
Yahoo Sports spoke to multiple executives around the league.
“Everybody’s gonna look at the increase and say, ‘Man, there’s gonna be this spending spree because everybody has a lot more money to spend,’ which is not a holistic view with the market,” the executive said to Yahoo Sports. “What people don’t understand is that there’s been a number of clubs that have been, from a cap perspective, operating in the red for two to three years. So are they going to use this added room to get back in the black or are they going to use it to spend?
The analogy I’ve made is if you’re maxing out your credit cards every year and then all of a sudden you get a big bonus at work, are you paying off your debt or are you going to accrue more? Just as we see in reality, there’s going to be some teams that will continue to spend and continue to be out there. But I do think that there’ll be several clubs that will say, ‘This is gonna be our time period to get healthy.’”
The explosion in gross NFL revenue is not expected to decrease as the league taps into new markets and other ventures. What this means is the league will continue to put out a high quality product with better talent year-over-year, or so we can hope.
