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.
"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.
In addition to White's case, Shropshire cited other athletes-- such as former baseball superstars Cal Ripken, Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles and the late Minnesota Twins slugger Kirby Puckett -- who shunned free agency because they believed their long-term economic value would be enhanced if they stayed in the cities where they were popular.
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