“Loyalty that is
bought with money, may be overcome by money.” SENECA
Actually this
quote tells a lot about what I try to explain in this blog.
In these days a
lot of opinions and explanations about loyalty from team with players can be
found in Swiss media. Legendary players who are in the winter of their careers
fight for new contracts and not always it comes to a “happy end” for the
players. Two years ago there was the Davos village-farce with the Von Arx
brothers, right now there is a big rah-rah-rah about the SC Bern and Martin
Plüss and also there is something brewing with the ZSC Lions and Mathias Seger.
All these situations have something in common. Great, aging players who played
many years for the same organisation, were part of championship-teams and this
in leading roles. The same goes for Mark Messier when he captained the New York
Rangers 1994 to their first Stanley Cup since 1940.
These “icons” became older
and the new player-generation, in average better trained, educated and more
skilled, started to make pressure and the organisations had and have to decide
about a new contract.
There is a lot of
talk about loyalty and thankfulness again when reading about Martin Plüss, SCB and
Mathias Seger, ZSC Lions in these days. I don’t agree with the sometimes
emotional discussions because I can’t see lack of loyalty from the teams in all
these cases. For me loyalty happens a lot in all our teams but not so much on
the professional level. There are hundreds of volunteers in each
pro-sports-team who spend thousands of hours of their lives for their
organisation and they don’t get paid more than sometimes a sausage and a parka
with the team-logo. They never question the conditions the club offers them,
they just do their job, year after year. This is loyalty.
On a pro-level
it’s pure business. Here we have the organisation, the team, the club and there
is the athlete. Both are interested to do some business and negotiate the
conditions. Here is the position of the team and there is the position of the
athlete. In negotiations you never hold on to your starting-point, you never
get a maximum-deal. It’s always some sort of compromise, a compromise both
parties can agree with and in the end is a mutual commitment. We pay you this
and that for a certain time and you play hockey for us as good as possible.
Beyond this nobody owes anything to the other party, it’s as simple as that.
The problem is that a lot of fans – and sometimes the decision-takers in the
clubs are too much fans – expect to pay money to a legendary player for
something he did do in the past for the club and too easily forget that he got
paid for this already. In the case of Plüss he definitely did get some
extra-bonus for becoming champion last season and he will get the same if the
SCB wins again. So, the focus of the club in terms of a new contract shall
never be on the past but on the anticipated future. A classical case of such a
mistake was when Mark Messier in the late autumn of his career captained the
New York Rangers to the Stanley Cup and after that he negotiated a typical
contract for what he did do in the past (although he had a pretty good contract
in the past) and not for what should be anticipated for the future. The Rangers
paid a big price for this contract, even the basically rich Rangers suffered
some years. I guess everybody knows what Messier meant for the Rangers and what
he did bring to the table in the Stanley Cup season but still – he had a
contract for this and did get good money, from an economical point of view the
Rangers didn’t owe him anything and he didn’t owe anything to the Rangers. They
had a good time and some success together but they were even. The same
situation with Reto Von Arx in Davos and now with Martin Plüss and Mathias
Seger. The pure business point of view is that they still offer something for
their teams but not as much as they did in their prime. So it would be stupid
for the SCB or the ZSC Lions not to offer something and would have been stupid
for the HCD not to offer anything to Reto Von Arx. But the big question is:
What kind of contract for how much money should they offer?
That’s why I
guess it’s absolutely useless to judge the cases of Plüss and Seger because
just a couple of people know exactly what is or what was on the table. It’s
clear that with older age the level of playing hockey is regressing and the
risk of injuries is increasing. Some players are aging faster than others but cases
like Jaromir Jagr are really exceptions. So, what to offer to players like
Plüss and Seger? Definitely a short-term contract for lesser money compared to
the old contracts, also Jagr plays for significantly less than he did get in
his prime. Of course the player and his agent are watching this from a
different perspective. They of course try to carry the past into the
contract-negotiations and – not only in our league – they become quite often
successful with this rhetoric. A compromise could be a strictly bonus-ladden
contract: Small basic-salary with huge bonuses if the player reaches the level
he did in the past and he still believes he will be able to deliver also in
future. In times with advanced stats and analytics it’s more easy to fairly
judge a players level and I guess this should be the way to deal with older
players.
I don’t see any
reason starting to discuss about thankfulness, loyality or bring even morality
and ethic points into the mix. This has absolutely nothing to do with this.
Contract negotiations should be always a strict business-decision – by the way
it is the same from the players point of view – there is no room for
sentimentalities unless you have more or less equal contract-offers. I do know
that a fan looks at it with completely different eyes and forgets sometimes that
if he, as an employee, gets a better offer from another company he also
seriously thinks about a change, the same do the companies and do the hockey-clubs
– the SCB now has Gaetan Haas and maybe even Nico Hischier for next season and
this definitely didn’t raise the value of Martin Plüss from the SCB point of
view. The Lions have a couple of promising young defensemen in the pipeline and
this also doesn’t raise the value of Mathias Seger in the eyes of the Lions
decision-takers.
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| "Cult-Picture" ZSC captain Seger carries home the championship-trophy by tram :-) |
Horgen,
19th February 2017 / Thomas Roost RoostBlog190217Loyalty.docx
