Labor contract renewal talks between the National Football League and its players union "have exhausted themselves and are at a dead end," NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said on Monday.
Two seasons remain under the current deal between the league and the NFL Players Association, but if the deal is not extended by the end of next year there will be no salary cap in 2007, something the league does not want.
A special negotiating session will be conducted on April 19, Tagliabue announced at the NFL owners meeting in Haiwaii.
"We have to agree upon some new and different approaches to resolve the financial issues that confront all member clubs," Tagliabue said.
Tagliabue hopes the NFL can avoid the labor woes of the National Hockey League, which lost its 2004-2005 season to a labor dispute, and Major League Baseball, which wiped out the 1994 World Series in a labor fight.
The National Basketball Association, which endured a half-season in 1999 thanks to a labor fight, faces the upcoming expiration of its labor deal.
The union wants a greater percentage of all league revenues rather than 65 percent of designated gross revenues, which excludes luxury box, parking and local television income that the union wants included in the revenue figures.
Owners are divided as well. Those on high-income clubs lose only about 40 percent of revenues to salaries while some like Indianapolis and Arizona spent nearly 70 percent on salaries and want more money-sharing from well-off clubs.
"We've got a complicated set of new economic issues that we're trying to figure out," Tagliabue said.
"It's obviously the total focus and the top priority," he said.
"No one will like everything that eventually is necessary to produce an extension. Many will have a price to pay on both sides of the table, and there will be unpredictable and unintended consequences," Tagliabue told owners.
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