Pay in Sports is crazy. This past week the 49ers signed Jimmy Garoppolo to the most lucrative contract ever signed in the NFL Not sure that it is the most lucrative. Guess it would depend on several different factors to say that. It is how ever the richest contract ever signed in the NFL. How long will it be the richest contract ever signed? Depends on how long before Kirk Cousins signs his new contract. Come on you were thinking it as well.
Of course not even that will matter. Who ever is the next quarterback up will end up being the highest paid player in the NFL. It is just the way that it is in today’s market.
Talking heads complain a lot – so do I
I heard a lot of sports reporters complaining about how could a player that has only started 7 games be the highest paid player in the NFL. I can tell you why. Right place right time. That is what it really comes down to. These are the same guys that were complaining when Matt Stafford signed the contract that made him the highest paid player in the NFL. Also the same guys that were saying crazy stuff like Aaron Rodgers should hold out till the Packers chuck out the huge contract. Never mind that when Rodgers signed his contract a few years ago he was the highest paid player in the NFL.
So time goes on and the contracts get larger. The next time Rodgers signs a contract he will be the highest paid player. Till of course the next Quarterback in line will be the highest paid. I don’t know where Rodgers is on the list last year but I do know he made $22 million. Not bad even if you are not the highest paid player. I am sure he was not too broke up over it.
So to say it is unfair is nuts. What is crazy is that we pay sports stars and entertainers the amount of money that we do. I don’t have anything against them for making that money. If they don’t make that kind of money it goes to the owners. Owners that already from their day job make more than all of their players combined. So in that sense it is all relative.
Fans are the key to the pay
The other reason they make so much money is because of us. If we were not so willing to carve out huge amounts of time and money for sports there would not be that kind of money to pay them.
So how does the pay in sports really work? Each sport handles it a little different. All of them have some sort of a Salary Cap. The MLB cap is not really a true cap so much as a limit before the owner has to start to pay a tax on how much they are paying for their team. The idea being that they would keep the salary in check and then the tax is spread to the other teams that are under that cap so they have more money to spend on players. Not really sure how that works out. The NBA has something similar but caps the percent of the cap that can be used on a certain player as well. So they have the MAX contract. The NFL has the hard cap but no cap on how much can be expended on an individual player.
Confusion Rules the pay
It is all very confusing and maybe we will go into all of them further another time. The point here is that the Owners could not control themselves and needed something to help them control how much they will pay out. The other reason was that the small market teams would not be competitive if the large market teams were able to spend what ever they wanted to spend. So this leads to The pay in sports being an extremely intricate beast.
Ok that was the long road to go. What this comes back to for me is that people getting upset about the pay in sports and what a certain player gets compared to the other players is just complete crazy talk. They get what they get and each of them should try to get as much as they can. Their careers are short. The work is difficult. Very few people are able to make it there.
The minimum Wage in each sport
| NFL | 2015 | $435,000 |
| NBA | 2017 | $583,180 |
| NHL | 2017 | $650,000 |
| MLB | 2018 | $545,000 |
These number are the minimum wage for a full time first year player in these sports. This means that they made the team are not on a practice squad or something like that. These are the minimum. Now they do have to pay an agent. Most agents take between 3 – 10 percent. The NFL and NBA cap the amount an agent can make at 3 percent. MLB and the NHL do not have a cap but most numbers show it falls between the 4 and 10 percent amount. Even accounting for this that still leaves a nice number before taxes.
The point of this is that even the lowest paid professional athletes are paid very well. Granted it is a lot of work but the pay off is fantastic. So what does all this mean. Well it means that Athletes get paid very well for what they do. We are more than willing to put up the money for them to get paid that well.
Life is unfair. There are people that work very hard for their money and will come no where near the lowest paid athlete. I do not begrudge them for getting what they can. Complaining about the contract one player gets compared to what another player is already getting is just crazy talk. The next player up will get what is due to them. The lowest paid players can make pretty good money. If they are smart with it, even at the lowest pay it is life changing money.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments what you think about athlete pay.
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