Athletes

The amount of money that athletes receive in sports is ludicrous. Millions of millions of dollars go into paying players to let them play a game, and the money keeps going up. The baseball example that Jack gave was a very good one, with people earning over thirty million dollars a year to pitch less than thirty games. These numbers are insane, and they are not exclusive to baseball either. In soccer, things are probably much worse. Based off of pure salary, the best baseball players make on average more than the best soccer players. For example, the world's best soccer player, Lionel Messi, makes 20 million euros per year, whereas the best baseball player makes 50% more than that per year. However, most of the money in soccer does not go players' salaries like in baseball. Unlike American sports, most soccer players do not get traded for someone else or go into free agency. Instead, they are transferred for cash. In other words, if one team wanted Messi, they would not trade a bunch of their own players for him, but would instead offer money to Messi's club, Barcelona. Every player in the world has a price tag, and these tags can be incredibly high numbers. The world record transfer happened last year, with Gareth Bale going to Real Madrid for, at the time, roughly $150 million dollars. That was only the money required to get his former club to sell him and does not include his $15 million salary. While this amount seems crazy, some players have even higher "buy-out clauses," or the amount of money required to terminate the player's contract to allow him to join another team. Cristiano Ronaldo has a rumored buy-out clause of $1 billion dollars. This number is incredibly high, but that is for a reason. It is an amount above that that any club would pay for him. This brings me to my point. Although the money that is thrown into sports is absolutely insane, this is really not an issue. The reason that there is so much money in sports is because people are willing to pay that much. It may seem unfair to people that were not born with these athletes' talent, but it isn't like these people are being forced to pay their own money to support these sports. They can either choose not to patronize them, or spend their own money supporting something that they like. Yes the amount of money is crazy, but it is simply a response to the demand from the fans and the supply of money that they have.