As the NHL and the IOC continue to bicker over the logistics of having hockey involved in the Olympics, the NHL may have just lost some leverage when the financial numbers for the World Cup of Hockey came out today.
Over at The Hockey News, they were told that the profits made during the tournament could be as much as “50% less than they were expecting.” That puts the profit at around $40 million and each player who participated in the tournament around $80,000.
It doesn’t stop there, multiple players also thought they were seeing larger slices of the World Cup of Hockey pie.
“Multiple sources have told thn.com that the players who played in the World Cup of Hockey have agreed to be paid 70 percent of their share of the profits from the tournament, while the other 30 percent will go to the players in the NHL who didn’t play.”
The exact details weren’t hammered out before the tournament and has made for a murky situation. Different teams thought that the revenue sharing should be used in different ways. Team Russia for example believed that all of the proceeds should go to the players and Team Czech Republic thought that the split was going to be more 80/20.
It isn’t a good look for the NHL to come out with this now, especially after they have decided to strong arm the players union over Olympic participation. If the league wants the World Cup of Hockey to become a bigger part of the player’s lives, they may need to throw in extra incentives for them to participate. The World Cup of Hockey isn’t going to replace the Winter Olympics and if the league thought that this might be a death knell to that idea, they couldn’t be more wrong.
