SIDELINES : NFL, Union Meet on Salary Cap

The NFL Management Council has had preliminary talks with the dormant players’ union about instituting a salary cap as the two sides try to solve a 2 1/2-year impasse.

Jack Donlan, the management council’s executive director, said today that the talks had taken the form of “settlement discussions” of the antitrust suit filed by the union at the end of its 24-day strike in 1987. He also said there are too many variables to specify the form the system would take.

But he said the incentive to get to the bargaining table with the union, which says it’s decertified, should be the NFL’s new television contract, for $3.64 billion over four years. It will nearly double each team’s annual television income--from $17 million last season to an average of $32 million.