TAMPA – Anyone who spent any time around the National Hockey League lockout of 2004-05 could tell by the tone of National Football League commissioner’s Roger Goodell’s voiced Friday morning.

Two seasons before the collective bargaining agreement between the NFL and its players’ union runs out, the war drums are already pounding.

The players are griping that the owners opted out of the current CBA, but haven’t come to them with a new proposal yet. The owners are grousing that the players are earning too big a piece of the pie.

"We’re not immune to what is going on in the economy,” Goodell said Friday. "We have to cut our costs.”

He said the league would "look at all of our season ticket prices,” Goodell said. "I think about three-quarters of the league will hold their season ticket prices flat.”

He "thinks.” Goodell did not "promise.”

Sound familiar, Canada?

When asked about some specific dollar figures thrown out by the NFLPA at a press conference held Thursday of Super Bowl week, Goodell jumped on the union.

"There is a lot of fiction in that,” he said of the union’s representation of the NFL’s financial picture. "Those numbers are not accurate.”

The long and the short of it is, the league has opted to end the current CBA early – after the 2010 season. But, by opting out of the CBA, that triggers a clause that would see the salary cap cease to exist after the 2009 season.

Allowing their union to agree to a salary cap was a decision that NFL players have always rued. The recently departed former NFLPA head Gene Upshaw always promised that, if ever a season was played without a salary cap, the union would never again agree to one.

Does that philosophy remain the same?

"It certainly is,” said acting executive director Richard Berthelsen. "In fact, guys remind us at team meetings about that very thing: ‘Remember what Gene said.’ That if we ever just go to the point where we’ve got the uncapped year, it will be very, very hard [to give the open market up again].”

So the cards, then, are in the hands of NFL owners. The likelihood is that they will play one more season, then lock the players out in 2010 instead of playing a season without the salary cap, set at $149 million in ’09.

Or, they could complete the CBA and lock them out in 2011 in order to get their cap back. The football union is traditionally weak, with many more players concerned about earnings windows that are shorter in football than other pro sports.

NFL owners are crying poor, in part because the trend among NFL cities not to pour public money into stadiums. Goodell said the cost of doing business is higher for owners now, because they have to spend their own money on stadiums.

And now, in a bad economy, he thinks the players should be willing to take less.

"It’s been done all across the country, in all industries,” Goodell said. "Labour unions are coming in and saying, ‘We want to avoid layoffs.’”

Of course, the NFL isn’t exactly the auto industry. A union study found that the average NFL team has increased in value over the past decade from $288 million to over $1 billion.

"The Miami Dolphins, I think, sold for $1.1 billion over that amount, and that was for just 95% of the team,” Berthelsen said.

So, just as fans enjoy labour peace in hockey, and then labour strife in football rears its head. The union admitted to a $210 million war chest, which will grow by $10,000 per player, per season until 2011.

Mark Spector is the lead columnist for Sportsnet.ca