Have you
ever stopped to think about how much money gets put into sports? Whether you’re
talking about attending a minor league sporting, buying sports apparel in
support of your favorite team, or management shelling out massive dough to pick
up the all-star that is going to guarantee a championship; too much money is in
the sports world. As an avid sports fan I understand the argument that the
money is needed but I find some of the figures just ridiculous when it comes to
paying athletes.
First off,
why do we need to pay these athletes millions of dollars to play their hobby? I
know plenty of people that do what they love for countless hours a day and they
aren’t making a dime. Lets take a look at an example. Washington National’s
just signed Max Sherzer to a 7-year contract worth 210 million dollars. The man
is 30 years old and just had a career best season winning the Cy Young award
which goes to the best pitcher of the year. The fact that the Nationals are
willing to pay him 7 figures until he is 37 isn’t what I find most shocking
though. What I find most shocking is that he will be making 35 million dollars
each of his last three seasons with his earnings increasing every year starting
at 10 million. That’s half of his contract when he should be close to retiring!
An additional note for those who don’t follow baseball very closely, most
pitchers only pitch in anywhere from twenty to thirty games. Last year Sherzer
pitched in twenty-three games so you can do the math and figure out how much he
is earning for each game he pitched. The counter argument can be made that he
is being paid for much more than just the game he pitches and works hard seven
months of the year, but when compared to how much the average American makes in
lifetime the large sum isn’t needed. Over an adults working lifetime on average,
people with master’s degrees only earn 2.5 million dollars. This distribution
doesn’t seem right or fair to those that weren’t born with freakish athleticism.
Not only do
these athletes make the ridiculous amounts of money but also they don’t know
what to do with it either. After retiring for two years from the NFL,
seventy-eight percent of players have gone bankrupt or have financial trouble.
In the NBA sixty percent of players go broke within five years of leaving the
game. This is an issue and the leagues are trying to fix it. The National
Football League offers its players a financial education program to teach
players about money management, insurance, tax planning and many other topics
that are essential. The scariest thing about the numbers is many of the
athletes don’t have a back up career as never acquired a degree. What do they
do after all their money is gone and they’re too old to return to football?
There are
many ways to go about fixing this problem but I personally believe we need to
take the pressure away from the athletes and reduce their contracts. They don’t
need the money, the mansions, or the cars, what they need to do is learn
responsibility. Lets stop the multimillion dollar contracts and take a little
of the pressure off. I would bet their lives would be just as joyous and others
quality of life could possibly increase. There may be more to the financials of
the sports industry than I understand I can only see this problem getting
larger as time goes on and I hope it doesn’t take away from the love of the
game.
When we discuss the pay of athletes, it is also important to keep in mind that there are average athletes who make much less than the superstars. Now, of course, they are quite well paid in comparison with the average worker, but then we also have to keep in mind that they have much shorter career spans. They may only be able to work for five years or less, which means that these big salaries actually tend to be much less than they appear.
ReplyDeleteSure, making 1 million a year may sound like a lot, but having a shorter career span can mean that these players only make something like 5 million dollars over the course of their careers. So the average player needs to have much better foresight than most people. They are still in a fortunate situation, having the opportunity to earn a lifetime's worth of wages in a short span, but this money comes when most people are younger and impulsive, not prone to savings. It may feel as if they are making huge amounts of money, too, which discourages savings and encourages people to feel like they have all the time in the world. It's sort of why I never get anything done during spring break--I feel like I have all that time, when really it's not much.
Here's an article that makes some of the points I suggested more concretely: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/salaries/index.htm
ReplyDeleteIf anything these average career incomes are probably not the best figure to use--you'd want to use median career incomes, because the high figures at the top distort the averages.