The average professional athlete makes in a year what some may not make in an entire lifetime. Owners of a major professional sports team are billionaires who make millions of more dollars per year thanks to their franchises. However, it is important to question whether wealth really equates to success in the world of sports.
Do Athletes Always Earn Their Money?
In leagues like the NBA or NHL, contracts are guaranteed from the moment that they are signed. This means that if someone is owed $10 million a year for the next five years, he will get it no matter if he is on the roster, on another team or sitting at home watching with the rest of the fan base. There have been cases in the past when an athlete has gotten paid and then slacked off or otherwise failed to perform because there was no motivation to do so.
Women’s Soccer Players Should Be Millionaires Too
When you go online, you can read all sorts of content from 5Dimes Reviews to crazy conspiracy theories to stories about athletes not getting paid their true worth. Take the American women’s soccer team for instance. They have won multiple World Cup titles and are generally regarded as the best in the world at the sport.
However, most of them make little more than what they would make to manage a Burger King or work at a doctor’s office. They may be the biggest example to point to when arguing that wealth and success are not necessarily related in sports.
Executives Don’t Necessarily Earn Their Money Either
In many cases, head coaches, general managers or other executives within a professional sports league are hired based on perception as opposed to results. For example, Rex Ryan is getting paid an average of $5 million a year from the Buffalo Bills to coach them to a 10-10 record in his first 20 games. He continues to get hired because of his father Buddy Ryan and getting the Jets into two AFC Championship games in 2009 and 2010.
Jeff Fisher of the Los Angeles Rams has had so many mediocre seasons that July 9th is deemed Jeff Fisher Day by sports writers and pundits. This is because he is known for going 7-9 every season and has more losing seasons than winning ones in his more than 20 seasons of being a head coach in the NFL.
Owners Generally Make Their Money Outside of Sports
The era of a new major professional sports league starting from scratch and making their owners millions or billions of dollars is long gone. Today, teams in the four major leagues are bought and sold for as much as $2 billion or more. Therefore, the only people who can afford those prices are those who have billions of dollars already.
Once a franchise has been purchased, the owners essentially own a mint because fan support rarely wanes during good seasons or bad. Even if fans aren’t buying tickets, teams generally share proceeds from television deals that can be worth billions of dollars per year. Money paid by fans for hats, t-shirts or other goods further add to the coffers of these billionaire owners. In the sports world, being rich isn’t necessarily the same as being good.
As collective bargaining agreements set salary floors for players, those who may be bad at their jobs are still rewarded handsomely for simply taking up a roster spot. Coaches and general managers may also make a lot of money simply because owners are trying to show how much they care about the team by sparing no expense to lure top talent. Therefore, it can be argued that athletes make money based on market factors more than they do on skill alone.
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