Yup, these are negotiations. They are entitled to ask the owners to make the planet spin backward too. Of course, I'm not sure I'd really use the word "entitled" like you do as that gives the wrong connotation.
This is indeed a question first for the players (who made it a non-negotiable item) and then the owners (who decided that it was). So why did the players do this? They've never yet had this information and have made deals in the past with the NFL. Outside of football in other sports, it is customary to make deals without this type of detailed information. In the business world, it is a rare exception where employees get shown the business financials when they are agreeing to a contract.
So what advantage will the players reap from this knowledge? Well, go back to my original post and the (my) answer is there. So we're back to where we started. Both sides want money and haven't yet agreed on how to split it up. It really is (pretty much) that simple when all is said and done.
The financial disclosure could hardly be called non-negotiable considering that the NFLPA had standing offers of a continuation of the present CBA, or a flat 50-50 split of unadjusted Total Revenue, neither of which were acceptable to ownership. The union's request for financial disclosure was only insisted upon if the league wanted to increase the off-the-top deduction from Total Revenue, or put a cap on the amount of revenue the players would get a share of, as in the owners' 11th hour counter-proposal.
The NFL has never requested the owners' financial records before because they have never been asked to accept a smaller share before. The CBA extensions in 96 and 98 only cosmetically changed the structure of the landmark 93 settlement. In 2003, with new, non-shared revenue streams comprising an annually growing portion of the league's total revenues, Upshaw went into negotiations with the crucial lone goal of tying the players' compensation to a share of all revenues, not just the shared TV deals, gate, and league-wide sponsorships. Whatever agreement is ultimately come to, this CBA extension will almost certainly end up being the players' first "loss," and the NFLPA feels they need to be able to sell its necessity to the players to get them to accept that they're not getting a raw deal.
I think what the owners don't get is that the mistrust the players feel toward them is no stunt or negotiating tactic. I think the owners need to consider compromising on the financial disclosure, because I think that De Maurice Smith knows he'll lost his constituency if tries to make any deal that's not a clear-cut W for the players without it. They might actually be surprised at how ready to deal the union is after winning that one non-monetary concession, which would allow them to save face and get the players back with their teams, like everybody wants.
(Of course, that's assuming that there's nothing genuinely inflammatory that would be revealed in the owners' financial dealings.)
As for the other sports -- none of them have a hard salary cap, and I don't believe their compensation is as closely tied to league revenue. If the NFL didn't have a salary cap artificially reducing the players' market value, they wouldn't need to worry about a guaranteed share of the league's revenues.
And as for elsewhere in the business world -- considering that the combination of employees of publicly traded companies and public-sector workers easily makes up more than half of the workforce, and that public-sector workers are fare more likely to be in trade unions, I would imagine that most collective bargaining agreements are negotiated with the unions privy to far more of the employers' financial records than in the NFL. Of course, this is entirely besides the point, because I can't think of any other situation in which the employees total annual compensation is a percentage of their employers' revenue, with expenses deducted.
