NFL, NFLPA disagree about 18th regular-season game

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell made a clear statement during Super Bowl week, claiming that the league is hoping to get to an 18th regular-season game with every team in the NFL playing at least one international game every single season. This echoes the comments of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who said similar on a radio show last month.

For the NFL to get the extra 18th game, though, the league will need to get the NFL Players Association to agree. On Tuesday, NFLPA interim executive director David White pushed back on Goodell’s asks from Monday.

“Our members have no appetite for a regular-season 18th game,” NFLPA interim executive director David White said at the union’s annual Super Bowl week news conference, citing player health and safety concerns that come with a longer regular season. “… The 18th game is not casual for us. It’s a very serious issue. It’s something that comes out of negotiations, and nothing will move forward until players have the opportunity to account for all of those factors, take that into consideration and then through negotiations, agree or not to the 18th game.

“But as it stands right now, players have been very clear they don’t have any appetite for it.”

Both White and NFLPA president Jalen Reeves-Maybin, currently a Chicago Bears linebacker, have stated that the NFLPA has not been contacted to discuss an 18th game, per ESPN.

“There’s 31 owners, they all have different agendas and opinions on things,” said Reeves-Maybin when asked if the extra game was inevitable. “… Maybe this is a way of them trying to influence. … We have not opened up any 18-game discussions. It’s not something that the players are excited about or really trying to press for. Then we put in a lot of work, and we put out a good product out there every year and it’s not something we feel the need for.”

White added: “An arbitrary statement carries no weight. It’s a free country. People could say what they like, but … is it increasingly inevitable? … The answer is absolutely not. It’s a point of negotiation.”

For the most part, NFL owners have gotten their way with the NFLPA in the last decade plus. Ownership got the players to end the lockout and union decertification in 2011, which opened the league up for lawsuits, by simply slashing rookie salaries with the rookie wage scale. After an uncapped 2010 season, the league’s salary cap was at or under $123 million from 2011-2013, the same rate as the 2009 cap. The owners didn’t spend any more money on players; they simply decided to take money out of incoming players’ pockets, players who had no seat at the table in the union because they were not yet NFL players, and give it to veterans, who could vote.

That, and changes to the practice schedule, was enough for the NFLPA to sign off on a new 10-year collective bargaining agreement (CBA). After the 2011 agreement, the NFLPA rushed an 11-year CBA, in part because of the uncertainty during the pandemic, with the league unable to play in front of fans in 2020.

After pushing around the players for 20-plus years, it sure seems like NFL owners are making statements, telling the NFLPA what they will eventually be agreeing to in public, rather than holding these negotiations behind closed doors.

The current CBA is set to expire after the 2030 season, but the NFL will want to negotiate labor peace before they enter a new round of broadcast agreements. Their current deals have opt-outs that can be triggered in 2029, so the league will probably want to start negotiating with television and streaming companies around then. So while the CBA, on paper, expires after 2030, it’s more likely that ownership will want to get a deal done with the union around 2028 or 2029.

Generally, the NFLPA’s biggest gains (at least recently) do not come in the form of direct financial benefits to the players. Ownership does not want their share of the pie to get smaller, and instead, they’re actually openly advocating for the opposite. While some owners are willing to spend well above the cap, use future cap space to pay current players and wait for that cap debt to be inflated out by the consistent $25 million per year increases that we’re seeing on the salary cap (this is tied to shared revenue in the league), every ownership group isn’t playing that game. For perspective, the Cleveland Browns have spent around $362 million more on players from 2020 to 2025 than the Los Angeles Rams have. Goodell said last summer that NFL owners are openly questioning the integrity of the league’s salary cap system.

This is all to say: No, the owners will not be giving players a bigger piece of the pie. They never really do. Instead, their goal is to increase the size of the pie. The problem, from an NFLPA angle, is how much bigger this pie can get before an 18-game season and 14-team playoff starts burning its players out of the league quicker due to injury.

On a rookie deal, the jump from a 16-game season and a 12-team playoff, which was standard in 2019, to an 18-game and 14-team playoff could mean an extra 12 games on a player’s body before the end of his rookie contract, the first time he’s actually able to negotiate on the open market. That’s significant.

I’m sure the NFL will be willing to give up some non-financial concessions for these extra games, but there’s not too much left on the docket. Practice time has already been slashed, and padded practices are already limited in a major way. The players already codified the reduced penalties for the marijuana policy. Kraft has floated that an extra game in the regular season will come with an extra bye, too, and will knock off a week of the NFL preseason, but a regular-season game for a veteran player is hardly comparible to a preseason game, when most of them already sit out that action, unless it also means a reduction in the extra week of training camp practices, too. Does this league want even less practice? Does either NFL ownership or the NFLPA care about that? We’re about to find out.

It will be interesting to track what demands the NFLPA makes in exchange for the plans of an 18th game, whether they get them or if ownership is just going to push around the players’ union again. This time, at least, the NFLPA won’t be led by an executive director who is being investigated by the FBI and allegedly did horse trading to bury a collusion grievance with the NFL.

For what it’s worth, the Packers’ union representative is right tackle Zach Tom, with the co-alternates being quarterback Jordan Love, tight end Tucker Kraft and safety Zayne Anderson, who is a free agent in 2026. Kicker Brandon McManus is a vice president in the union.