 Sports play a role in the majority of peoples’ lives today, whether they play them, follow them, or they are a part of their jobs. Whatever the case may be, sports can play a large role in a person’s life. Professional sports, in particular, play a huge role in today’s society as it has become a staple of entertainment and an integral part in the economy. Professional sports not only create thousands of jobs, through concessions, security, or higher positions within the respective positions, but also around 2.9 billion dollars in TV revenue alone. What makes professional sports so popular and successful are the athletes who play them, yet people still question if these athletes are overpaid or not. For most jobs, if not all, an employee is paid based on how much value they bring to their employer and are rewarded based on their performance, so why should it be different for professional athletes. Professional athletes are far from being overpaid, and in some instances, can be seen as underpaid, and it’s clear to see when you look at the facts. If you just look at professional sports as any other job and take away any bias, it is clear to see that everything an athlete goes through during, and after, their careers and just how valuable as an individual they are to their employer, what they are paid should never come into question. Professional athletes face more risks than almost any other job, as they risk their health and future every time they play, the job availability in professional sports and the odds of actually becoming a professional athlete only further justifies what they are payed, and if you look at professional sports from a financial aspect and what athletes are making it’s clear to see the bias the media portrays and how we don’t see the whole picture and from an entertainment aspect. These athletes are here to entertain and create revenue for their employer just like TV and movie stars, so shouldn’t these athletes be paid the same as these TV and movie stars.

There is no success without sacrifice, no one knows this to be true more than professional athletes, as they have sacrificed their time, effort, mind and body to get to where they are and do what they love. Every time a professional athlete trains, practices or plays the sport they love it could be their last time they do for a month, a season, or their lives. Yet they still sacrifice everything they have every time they play, whether it’s in a game or in practice. This fact is shown in an article written by ESPN writer Tim Keown, as he writes about him watching film of the Boston Celtics practice, “there was a segment showing Paul Pierce at practice…knocked the ball loose in a one-on-one drill and flung his body onto the floor to gain possession… It was an example of what…don’t acknowledge enough—just how talented/committed/intense/competitive athletes have to be to reach the top.” This intensity and passion is what people often ignore or forget when talking about athletes and what they get paid, as they only seem to focus on the millions they make without fully understanding what they did to earn it, and I emphasize the word “earn,” as nothing was given to them on their way to get where they are today. Becoming a professional athlete is the dream of every young kid who plays sports, but the reality is that the majority of them will not fulfill those dreams, it is the ones who have the talent to make it in their sport of choice as well as the drive and dedication to improve upon their natural talent in order to separate themselves and put themselves above the thousands of others doing the exact same thing. The chances of fulfilling their dream of being a professional athlete were slim, for example “Data provided by the National Collegiate Athletic Association(NCAA, 2011) indicate that… less than 3% of college and roughly 0.0017% high school athletes will eventually become professional baseball players…the odds are even smaller when professional football is considered…less than 0.0003% and 0.004% high school and college level athletes respectively, will make it to the professional level” (Frankl 2). These athletes faced almost impossible odds to get to the point where they are today and sacrificed everything just to have a chance to make it professionally and be successful, yet they still face scrutiny over what they are paid. It is a basic economic fact that the people who work jobs with a small quantity supplied and a high quantity demanded will get payed more than those jobs of high quantity supplied and low quantity demanded, to explain it simply, Michael Walden, a respected writer for The Charlotte Observer, states, “So why do pro ballplayers get millions? Because, if they're good, they put a lot of people in the seats, they sell a lot of merchandise for the team, and – perhaps most important in today's sports world – they jack up advertising rates…So, big demand and low supply equals major-league salaries for pro players” (Walden). These athletes sacrificed all the time and effort they had to get where they are today with no guarantee of finding success, and continue to do so in order to stay where they are for as long as possible, which in most cases isn’t for very long. 

The sacrifices these athletes make can take a heavy toll on the body and will more often than not lead to injuries. Football for example, there have been more and more findings on just how dangerous football has become and how much of a risk these players face, regarding concussions, as “these athletes are at a far elevated risk of concussions, which may correlate with depression and dementia Is it really a kid's game if, down the road, chance of dementia as a result of your occupation? And, is it really surprising that professional athletes demand higher salaries to offset these later-in-life risks” (Edelman 134). The risk of injury these athletes face is incredibly high, and more often than not lead to short careers, lasting no more than a few years, and when these injuries occur they tend to be a problem for the rest of these athletes lives. After an athlete’s career when there are no more paychecks coming in and there are no more team doctors and team medical facilities they can use to recover from an injury, it becomes very expensive to take care of themselves, as “Health insurance companies will either deny these men and women outright, or give them coverage which will not actually help the cost of knee or hip-replacement surgery, for example… the average knee-replacement surgery for someone without insurance is between $35,000 and $40,000” (Mueller). All these expenses come out of pocket for the athletes, so it is only right that they get paid enough money while they play a game for our entertainment, in order to take care of their bodies after they play and maintain a normal lifestyle. Maintaining what most call a normal lifestyle, a life where they can live comfortably and make sure their families are provided for and taken care of, can be very difficult for athletes after and even during their careers, but most people don’t know that because all they see on TV and in magazines is how much the top players are getting payed and never truly look at what the rest of them are getting payed.

When discussing athletes’ salaries, there is a strong media bias that does not fully portray how much athletes’ get payed, as they only show the ones that are getting the multi-million dollar deals rather than the ones getting payed the league minimum, causing people to believe that every athlete is getting payed the same, and tend to make these contracts athletes sign look bigger than they actually are. When discussing professional athletes, it includes not only the all-stars and MVPs, but the minor league and developmental players as well, and that’s what people forget as they tend to focus on only those who are having the most success in the top tier and forget about those still trying to reach it. There are thousands of professional athletes out there that you have probably seen walking around and didn’t even realize it, as most aren’t bathing in money and success like the media portrays they are, as there are “minor league baseball players who are travelling from city to city on buses, or fringe basketball players debating whether to play for a salary of only $30,000 a year in a U.S. developmental league. Professional athletes…who are working regular jobs in the off-season to pay the rent…They may even include students sitting next to you in class, who recognize that even after their athletic career is done, they will need a way to make a livelihood” (Edelman 134). Most don’t realize how much the athletes, who are successful now, gave up before to be where they are and the salaries that they make now are just payment for all they gave up before they became successful, and most of the time there are those who never receive such payment and receive no reward for all the sacrifices they made. The media doesn’t always tell the full story behind the contracts athletes get whether it’s the low weekly salaries of developmental league players or the big contracts the star players sign, as the media never fully explains them and in a lot of cases dramatizes them. The NFL is a prime example of this, as many criticize the NFL for these big contracts the franchises give their players after hearing about it in the news or on ESPN, yet they fail to understand that a lot of that money is not guaranteed for the player, as “a player can be released without pay beyond the current year. A five-year, $100 million contract may be signed when both the player and the team know that a significant number of the years will never be played and the compensation for those years will never be paid” (Faust). These unguaranteed contracts and salary caps leave a lot of money on the table for these athletes and doesn’t allow them to bargain to their best ability to get the best contract for themselves. Yet the media makes it appear as though these athletes are getting everything they want and more, but for the NFL it is certainly not the case, “The NFL average is the lowest of the four main sports leagues, and is much less than baseball and basketball…But it is striking that NFL has the largest total revenue yet the lowest average player salary. This is at least partly a result of the hard salary cap in NFL. This comparison is indicative of under- payment in the NFL for many players” (Simmons 464). One of the world’s biggest sports organizations yet the players that make it so big are some of the lowest payed athletes of the main sports leagues, and somehow people still scrutinize the NFL for overpaying their athletes because they see these star players signing huge deals, and seeing the millions of dollars of revenue the league and the teams are making from these athletes and infer that all the players in the league are making this much money too. Not all athletes get paid these super contracts that the media shows these select athletes receive, but it doesn’t mean that the athletes who do receive these contracts shouldn’t. Just like any job there are employees who do the same thing as other employees who make more, and that’s because they do their job better and deserve to be rewarded. However, those athletes that don’t receive these big contracts, like the superstars the media shows, display the fact that professional sports aren’t always as glamorous as most people think and that the image we all have in our head of the life of professional athletes and just how much they are paid is greatly exaggerated and misconstrued. The value of these athletes however is greatly undervalued, as the amount of money that is brought in by these athletes for their respective franchises is absurd, as billions of dollars in revenue is created from TV, merchandise, ticket sales and concessions, and it’s all thanks to the athletes on the team.

 Professional athletes are here to entertain and create revenue for their employer just like TV and movie stars, so shouldn’t these athletes be paid the same way actors do at the very least, because the more you look into how much worth each individual player brings to the team it becomes easier to understand why they get paid like they do, and in some cases question why they aren’t getting payed more. The business of sports is one of the most profitable businesses in the world, bringing in billions of dollars in revenue, yet the athletes who are the reason for all this profit are only making a small portion of this profit, “NBA teams have only 14-16 players under contract throughout a given season…In 2006-2007, the average salary for a player from the Milwaukee Bucks was $2,537,880 dollars. Although the revenue of the Milwaukee Bucks that same season is not publicly available, it is widely believed that most NBA teams bring in between 200 and $300 million annually” (Stein), meaning those Milwaukee Bucks players on average got around 1% of the total money earned from the franchise. Of course, a lot of that money goes to paying for expenses, salaries of the workers and other things, yet you would think the people responsible for all that money being made would make a little more. An athlete’s one job is to compete in the sport they play and try to win, and in doing so bring entertainment to people across the nation, and even around the world. When you look at it in that sense an athlete starts to sound a lot like a movie or TV star, and in a way, they are, “Professional sports revenues are rapidly increasing because of the seemingly insatiable appetites for unique TV programs. Pro athletes are the stars of those shows, and TV stars get paid a lot. Judge Judy makes about $45 million per year. The voice actors for The Simpsons earn about $60,000 for each hour they actually work” (Faust). Comparing the salaries between the two jobs you can see numerous similarities as more often than not they are paid around the same, sometimes athletes are paid less, yet people criticize these athletes for making all this money to “just play a game,” but have nothing to say about actors making the same, if not more, “just for pretending to be someone else.” There will always be critics of how much an athlete makes, yet the fans are the ones responsible for making their salaries so high, as “We are the ones who are willing to keep giving more of our hard-earned money to attend games in person, buy over-priced beer and food and wear the jerseys of our favorite athletes…When we make the decision that it is worth it to pay a day's wages to attend a three-hour game and cheer till we lose our voices, then we are telling these athletes that they are worth every penny they make” (Mueller). We, the fans of the sports world, are the ones who make it possible for these athletes to make so much, as we willingly spend our money to enjoy and be a part of the entertainment, driving up the profits of these industries and allowing the players to be paid more for what they do, so long as they keep bringing in the profits. An employee, no matter what field of work they’re in, gets paid on how valuable they are to their employers, and the more money they bring to their employer the more money they get paid by their employer and no one can disagree with that, so the same should go for professional athletes. 

There are two clear sides when it comes to professional athletes and what they are paid, they are overpaid or they are not, and for those who believe they are overpaid their argument comes down to the claim that no one should be payed that much to play a game. The question that most pose is, “Are athletes, whose main importance to society is entertainment, really worthy of being paid more than doctors, surgeons, police officers, military personnel, teachers and others who, at times, deal with situations of life and death,” (Delone) and first off, I’d like to say I agree that those professions, like teachers, military personnel, and police officers, are severely undervalued and underpaid, but that does not mean that athletes are overpaid. It is widely accepted and understood that a heart of brain surgeon should make more than a teacher because a surgeon has spent more time and effort to become the best at what he does, so shouldn’t the same go for a professional athlete who has done the exact same thing, and in most cases put even more time, effort and risked more to get where they are. Using the same example, a heart or brain surgeon is payed more than a pediatrician because there is less heart and brain surgeons available but demanded just as much, same can be said for athletes, as there is a high demand for them in society as a source for entertainment but the quantity supplied is even less than that of a brain or heart surgeon. So, shouldn’t these men and women, who have gone above and beyond the rest, be rewarded for the rarity of becoming a professional athlete?

Professional sports in today’s world are something that society can unite around and use as an escape from their everyday problems, and nothing is more valuable than that, so shouldn’t the people who make that possible and give the world a role model to look up to and follow be rewarded. Everything a professional athlete has done and will continue to do all for the sake of our entertainment is truly amazing and invaluable, so it is only right that those who employ them put a value on it that truly represents what they mean to the team and make sure they get it, so that they can continue to do what they do for the rest of their careers and be able to relax after it is all over. 
