This situation is similar to what the U.S. auto industry was dealing with back in the 1970s and 1980s. Their union workers turned out crap cars but they couldn't be fired. The Big Three lost a lot of business to foreign competitors, and eventually they started building plants in Mexico to get around their union problem.
Don’t think the union chief isn’t motivated in the end by money.
Numbers don’t lie, and the union head is going to fall on the side of making sure his exorbitant salary will be safeguarded at least until the end of his tenure.
This crisis jeopardizes pensions to players long retired. This is a collapse, and this collapse is occurring in an age of sudden collapses to institutions that NOBODY thought would fail, likely starting with the bankruptcy of PanAm.
The union is stupid, and even evil, but they are greedy, and that’s all you need.
“what the U.S. auto industry was dealing with back in the 1970s and 1980s. Their union workers turned out crap cars but they couldn’t be fired.”
Don’t forget that the Japanese government was subsidizing Japanese auto makers so they could dump their cars on the US market below cost.
As crappy as American cars were back then, they’d have been more competitive without the full power of the Japanese government arrayed against them.