• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 8, 2011

TV revenue doesn't seem to help sports leagues in their more desperate times -- during lockouts, strikes, and work stoppages. But increasingly, television is a factor in viewer perception when sports leagues get back to normal times.

Despite big TV rights fees, the NBA now says 22 of 30 teams are losing money. (The NBA Players Association believes far fewer teams are losing money.) This follows similar complaints of financial duress from NFL club owners during the last three and a half months.

Both leagues are now in "locked-out" mode, basically shutting down operations until new agreements with their players associations can be made. Key ingredient here: Professional athletes make too much money.

The NFL pulls around $8 billion in overall revenue per year; Major League Baseball, around $7 billion; and the NBA, $4 billion. Television revenues are a hefty piece of that action. For example, the NFL pulls in 60% of its revenue from TV, around $4.5 billion.

Television deals with the leagues aren't the problem. Rights fees have been rising pretty steadily -- but even then that doesn't seem to be enough to cause money loss. In recent years, major sports leagues have started up their own cable TV networks.

Ticket prices and multimillion marketing deals aren't the reason for losses, either.

According to the NBA, the average per year salary for an NBA player was thought to be $5 million a year. But NBA Commissioner David Stern says it's more like $7 million -- and that's the factor that has caused those 22 or 30 teams to lose money.

Without the NFL and NBA on TV, networks like Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN, ABC, and Turner will be severely affected in the fourth quarter and the first quarter of 2011-2012. Sports has been a big component of TV, with slower rating erosion than other TV content.

It's a balancing act for networks, currently. Journalistically, they have to cover the story of these business snafus in a fair and responsible way. For the most part, viewers only want to know that they'll have football and basketball to watch -- even though virtually all sports consumers are aware athletes and owners are multmillionaires.

Sports leagues have seen this problem before -- damaged viewer perceptions in the years immediately after operations resume -- after a canceled NHL season some years ago, and a Major League Baseball season before that in the 1990s.

Leagues hope the marketing theme of "millionaires fighting with one another" isn't the only long lasting message to remain when sports leagues get back to the action. But TV networks might have no choice than to back that message.