Wages of Professional Athletes

Dixon Kalhar

Professional athletes almost always have a high salary, even if they don’t play in games or matches.  The minimum NFL salary relies on how many years a player has played, so if a player starts their rookie season in 2021, they will make a minimum of $660,000. Once a player has played four years in the league, their minimum salary becomes $900,000.  For just playing a sport they love to play, it seems like a lot of money.  An average pro athlete trains around 5-6 hours a day, 6 days a week. This might not seem like a lot of average work hours, but the intensity of training is very extreme and detail oriented and almost always shows on the court/field.

 

Since around the 1960 and 70s, pro-athletes have been some of the highest paid individuals in the world.  They started to make a lot of money with interest in professional sports rising, and tv/radio broadcasting brought an easy way for many viewers to access games all around the world.  

 

When NBA star Stephen Curry signed a contract with the Golden State Warriors in 2017, for a whopping $201 million for over five years, (which is about 40 million dollars per year) many people thought it was too much money.  With doctors who save lives almost every day making about $160,000 per year, professional athletes are overcompensated for just tossing a ball around.  But, the money they get is money that owners and sponsorships give, from everyone who watches sports on tv, goes to games, or even buys merchandise that pays these athletes.

 

Cristiano Ronaldo makes $56 million a year, Kobe Bryant made $250 million per year, while Barack Obama made 400,000 as the president of the US.  Making more than the president while just playing a game that is considered by almost everyone as fun could be considered too much money.  If you consider how much we pay just to watch them it could be called our fault,  because if we pay them so much money for one spot in a stadium they will bring in a mass amount of money.  With a mass amount of money, you would pay the ones who bring all the attention. 

 

When fans look at professional athletes’ salaries, it’s easy to say they make far too much money for playing a game. After all, athletes earn more money than teachers, first responders, and members of the military. More than half the people in the United States make less than $62,000 a year.  

 

Though you should keep in mind they apart of some of the biggest companies in the world.  Making a couple million wouldnt seem as crazy when you work for a company that makes up to 4 billion dollars.  

 

Overall they may get to much money for what they do but they work as hard as other people and make the money they bring in.  So they dont make too much money, we pay too much for there stuff.