Sports teams should not be paying professional athletes millions of dollars a year to throw, kick, hit, and/or catch a ball. As a society, we need to be more conscious of where we put our money and call out those who benefit from others’ losses in the broken entertainment system. Don’t get me wrong, I love watching sports. It’s something that my dad and I enjoy and bond over. As a Bay Area native, I have grown up cheering on the 49ers during Sunday Night Football and watching weekly San Francisco Giants baseball games.
Something that has never made sense to me, however, is the justification for the enormous amount of money the top players in each sport earn. To clarify, I am referring to and discussing athletes who play what I consider to be the big three: football, baseball, and basketball.
I have the utmost respect for these athletes. As an athlete myself, I understand, while it may be just a fraction, the effort and thousands of hours that go into trying to be the best of the best. But do I think that a football player works as hard as a single mom working three minimum wage jobs? No, I do not.
Brock Purdy signed a contract with the 49ers to play with them for five years in exchange for 265 million dollars. Shohei Ohtani signed a ten-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers in which they agreed to pay him just shy of 700 million dollars. While these are some of the best of the best players in the country, it is truly shocking just how much teams pay their players. I can’t imagine any plausible situation where anyone in the world would need that much money. The average yearly salary of an MLB player is five million dollars, excluding endorsements. For the NBA, it is 11.9 million dollars a year, and an NFL player, on average, makes 3.2 million dollars a year. The average salary of a single person in the United States is 40,000 dollars a year.
Teams should fairly compensate professional athletes, but I do not consider 700 million dollars to be “fair” compensation. Even if sports teams reduced player salaries, the extra money wouldn’t suddenly support teachers, nurses, or single parents working multiple jobs; it would just remain in the hands of the team’s billionaire owners.
To me, the money society uses to support sports is indicative of how warped our priorities have become when, as a society, we value entertainment more than the work that keeps our country running. The issue isn’t just “athletes make too much.” It’s that our economic and cultural systems funnel wealth into entertainment over the professions that actually hold society together, like educators, health workers, and first responders.
Professional athletes didn’t break the system, but they do benefit from its fractures. If we want to close the wealth gap and start valuing the people who hold our communities together, then we need to rethink how we, as fans, consumers, and United States citizens, distribute our attention and our money. That doesn’t mean giving up sports, but it does mean demanding a system where “fair compensation” accurately reflects contribution to society.
(Sources: ESPN, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, US Census Bureau)
Categories: Opinion