Team Annual Pension Payment = 1 Active Player's Avg. Salary

Dear Alumni:

The Summary Annual Report for the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Player Retirement Plan and the Summary Annual Report for NFL Player Supplemental Player Disability Plan for the period 4/1/2005 to 3/31/2006 was recently sent out to all retired players.

Here are some highlights and lowlights of the reports.

The Pension Plan:

Federal law now requires an annual funding notice to be sent out by all multiemployer defined benefit pension plans. The notice indicates the Plan is not insolvent, nor is it expected to become insolvent.

The value of the Plan assets was $961,895,197. That's an increase of $120,134,070 over the beginning balance of $841,761,127. More than half of the increase ($67,938,458) was from employer (Team Owners) contributions. The rest of the increase was from the sale of assets ($6,915,659) and earnings from investments of ($108,983,026).

Administrative expenses of the Plan were $10,511,698.00. Maybe I'm just a little too conservative, but 10.5 Million dollars for administering the Plan! Almost 20% of the expenses of the Plan were paid to administrators, lawyers and brokers. Has the NFLPA ever put the administration of our Pension Plan out for competetive bid? I could be wrong, but I'll bet there are some groups out there that could do this for a lot less.

$53,332,226 in Pension benefits were paid out to approximately 3,000 retired (vested) players. The NFLPA is always talking about how much they are giving to retired players, but if you divide this pot of money up, it averages out to $17,777 annually per player. Obviously some retirees are getting more and some are getting a lot less, but the average still needs to be raised. To be fair, this figure will now increase with the passing of the new CBA, but the overall average will still be quite low.

Here's another way to look at this: The pension payment (at the time of this report) by each NFL team to vested players currently receiving benefits was $1,666,632. That's about the average salary of one active player!
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The Summary Annual Report for NFL Player Supplemental Player Disability Plan for the period 4/1/2005 to 3/31/2006 paid out $9,182,303 in benefits to retired players. I'm not sure why, but the report does not indicate how many players are currently receiving disability payments. It seems to me that the number of recipients should have been included in the report.