This is not a defense of a rich people. The leagues as a whole are sustainable financially except maybe the WNBA but I think that may have changed recently. Physical injury that may affect the rest of their lives is a possibility. Not to mention having to be in better shape than majority of the population most of the time.
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How about roofers and construction workers or people working ships or steelworks? They all have a much higher risk of much bigger injuries and get paid far less
Terrible and unpopular, have an upvote… Begrudgingly
are you familiar with the absolutely pounding martial artists have been receiving by any chance?
This shouldn’t be unpopular. Professional teams and leagues make billions of dollars. The alternative to the athletes getting paid millions is the owners and executives, who no one pays to see, getting all that money instead.
It’s not up to you whether they’re paid too much. The person paying them clearly doesn’t think so, and that’s the only person whose opinion matters.
If you think a painting costs too much and someone else is willing to pay for it, then your opinion is irrelevant. The painting gets sold to whoever doesn’t think it costs too much.
If it doesn’t sell at all, only then can you objectively say it’s too expensive.
Oh no someone can slip and get a booboo! Give them millions of dollars
Yeah. The NFL generates over ten billion in revenue per season and then people creating value get a tiny percentage.
Yeah I always laughed at when people talk about them getting paid equal.. why would your payroll be higher than your revenue? If a business isn’t making money, giving your employees a raise is kinda silly.
I think the most obvious way that you can show they aren’t paid too much is not just that the leagues are sustainable, but the teams are sustainable too. The players (and all the other employees) of teams combine to make more money for the owner than it costs the owner to employ those people.
You could easily claim that the money should be better distributed, or that if cities didn’t use taxpayer money to fund stadiums that players would end up making less, etc.
But I don’t think there’s much room for argument on this point: If, in the current system, the owner of any company (in this case, the team) is making millions of dollars just for owning the thing, the people who work for them are in no way getting paid too much.
It’s okay to be wrong, yknow.
They are paid according to their market value. There’s a reason why I know one pays money to see a doctor give someone a flu shot
I mean the reason they aren’t overpaid is they can do stuff that very people can do at an elite level and it provides entertainment for millions.
Why do we always waste our time on this conversation?
It’s a massive business with relatively very few people who make it happen. The players (WNBA being the exception) get paid roughly 50% of their league’s revenue.
The money made has to go somewhere. If it’s not to the players, it’s to the billionaire owners.
I agree, especially because people on Reddit today are making correlations that sports leagues should be defunded in the same way that NEA organizations are currently undergoing.
Pro sports leagues don’t rely on government funding and have plenty of endorsement deals with major brands.
So, to the people saying youth sports should be defunded because your kid can’t get free violin lessons anymore, maybe it’s time they work on their on their free throws.
Teachers? Literally the people preparing our kids for the future
The thing is, they are ‘creating’ this wealth because people have huge stadium built and fill them with people ready to pay tickets and overpriced food to see them play.
They don’t ‘earn too much’, people are just willing to spend way too much to see them play, so they reap that.
This is a dichotomy to the term U.S. pro athlete.
Olympic pro-athletes are often self-funded, paying for their own trainers, working a real job
Professional athletes like seen in major sports – paid very well.
Tennis is the weirdest of the major sports.
People should be paid based off the amount of money the demand for their skillset generates. Most professional athletes are paid correctly because they generate more than they make.
The WNBA is the one exception. The league lost around $40M last year, and it wouldn’t exist without being subsidized by the NBA.
Like any job you might try and justify it with how hard they work or how exceptional they are. And while both of those are true, it’s not why they get paid a lot.
A lot of people want to see them play so they get paid a lot to play. A lot of people want to see their home team win so teams are willing to pay a lot of money for the best players. If you don’t like how much they’re paid, don’t buy tickets.
You’re right but for the wrong reasons. It has nothing to do with injury risk. Pro athletes (NBA, NHL, NBA, MLB) get paid out a percentage, about 50 percent, of the leagues revenue. If you’re getting paid proportionally out of the revenue you are generating, you’re not overpaid.
This is a completely fair and well-reasoned take
OP is correct but I’d say for the wrong reason
Lol, how on earth is someone defending athletes, actors, musicians high paying salaries for God sake. All those industries are heavily subsidized by the citizens for crying out loud. Especially sports that the poor people even pay for their venues. As soon as government stop paying them, salaries will come back to normal. Let alone, ticket prices.
The most you can make washing dishes is $20 an hour, even if your the best in the world. If you can get. 75,000 people to pay to watch you wash dishes then you will make money.
Pros do just that. They do their job and we pay to watch.
Counterpoint: Pay should start out at minimum wage and scale with game performance. Most of these players cannot even grasp how fortunate they are, because most of them would be unable to function with a normal job. Therefore, with no better legal options, many would choose to play the game instead. The massive savings could be passed along in ticket sales, ensuring that the fans could always enjoy going to the game.
Something that is always ignored by Reddit especially in this conversation is how many professional athletes are barely being paid at all. The players in the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB are the outliers. The vast majority of professional athletes are only making a couple thousand dollars a month with housing included into their contract.
The guys you’re watching on TV are the 1% of the 1% who make it to the professional level. There’s obviously a big enough demand to watch them play to support their huge salaries. Would you guys really rather have the owners, investors and sponsors just pocket all the money over a large portion going to the actual players? The hate against the top tier pro athlete’s salary just doesn’t make much sense when you break it down.
Professional sports (and entertainers in general) make for one of the more “pure” markets around. It’s not about how hard their job is, or even the risk of injury, but how much the consumer believe they’re worth. It’s why the best soccer players in the world get paid a ridiculous amount while the be Lacrosse players in the world don’t. Fewer people want to pay to see them play.
You can’t say they are financially sustainable when they rely on taxpayer money to build the stadiums they play in.
Agreed. I don’t know why this is an unpopular opinion. I posted the same argument here a few months ago and I was downvoted to oblivion.
No one is saying teachers, social workers, etc shouldn’t be paid well. Athletes have a unique talent that people pay in the BILLIONS to see, why wouldn’t they be compensated well?
People put their personal judgements above logic when it comes to this take. If you want teachers to get paid well reach out to your state’s representatives instead of complaining on the internet.
Edit: people don’t bat an eye at actors or musicians but all of a sudden when it comes to athletes people get a weird hate b*ner for some reason
They generate the revenue and have unions with collective bargaining to secure favorable terms. From that perspective, it all makes perfect sense. It’s the nature of “why does someone get so rich for dribbling a ball” or I guess “why do we pay so much collectively for professional sporting leagues to generate the sort of revenue to allow them to pay so much” that I think is the crux of what people really get at. Ultimately it just comes down to entertainment. Actors, athletes, musicians, social media content creators. People collectively pouring their excess income into means of entertainment.
“Physical injury that may effect them for life” like we don’t have people working minimum wage getting their bodies destroyed daily just to make ends meet lol
I don’t think its really that unpopular? Athletes generate multiples that much money for the owners and brands. I think the criticism is more in terms of a broad “society is kinda fucked when an athlete that adds very little social value gets paid more than a teacher”
For football at the very least, you are a freak athlete that puts your body on the line for the game. You’re making generational wealth with an almost guarantee to face some form of CTE at some point down the line.
This is one of those that’s unpopular because of the wide variety of income disparity and some people not believing that entertainers should be paid lol
No one thinks they are overpaid….Well no one with a basic understanding of economics.