Should professional athletes earn millions of dollars for playing a game? Athletes should not be making millions and millions of dollars while more important jobs earn significantly less. There are doctors who save lives daily and they do not even make a tenth of what some athletes make. It is crazy to believe that someone is really worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and all they have to do is play a sport; a sport that millions of people would play for free if given the chance. Where does all of this money come from to pay these superstar athletes? It comes from the fans. The same fans that cry when their team loses, celebrates when they win and pay six dollars for a beer and seven dollars for a deluxe hot dog at their team’s game. Ticket prices continue to go up every year. How fair is it for the fans to pay at least $100 to go see a game and watch their favorite player jog out a ground ball or not play their hardest, or a player misses a game because they are “sick or injured.” If a hard working person missed a couple days a month because they were sick or hurt, they would be fired without a doubt. In the case of athletes, they go on a two week paid vacation, otherwise known as the 15-day disabled list. How much money does someone really need to be able to eat daily, have a house, and provide for their family? All of this can be accomplished with an income between $40,000 and $50,000. The average American household generates roughly $51,000 (Noss). A person has to roughly work thirty years before they can retire, which nets them a career earnings of $1.53 million. Some people might not think that is terrible, but they have not looked at the income of a professional athlete. The average NBA player makes roughly $5.15 milli... ... middle of paper ... ... perfect and commit crimes and things of that nature? Works Cited Noss, Amanda. "Household Income: 2012." American Community Survey Briefs. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Apr 2014. Doyle, Frank. "Visualizing the Yearly Salary of Professional Athletes." How to Make Money in Pro Sports. Huffington Post. Web. 9 Apr 2014. Lefebrve, Matt. Professional athletes are overpaid and selfish. Quinnipiac Chronicle, 1 Apr 2006. Web. 9 Apr 2014. "Physician: Salary." Salary Outlook. U.S. News. Web. 9 Apr 2014. Staff, ed. "Pro Basketball." LeBron James hits jackpot with endorsement deals. USA Today, 22 May 2003. Web. 9 Apr 2014. Badenhausen, Kurt. "LeBron James' Endorsements Breakdown: By The Numbers." . Forbes, 01 Jan 2014. Web. 9 Apr 2014. "2011-2012 Average Starting Teacher Salaries by State." National Education Association . National Education Association , n.d. Web. 9 Apr 2014.
Players do not deserve the money they receive. There are people who do much more than the players do. Why do teachers not get paid millions of dollars to teach kids? Some of those kids end up going on to become professional athletes. Police officers and firemen risk their lives to keep people safe and most of them do not even make any more than 95 thousand dollars a year (Megerian). These athletes get fined more money than that and hand it over like someone just asked them for one dollar. Players have all of this money and do not even do anything worth earning it. Why do they get this money? It is because fans value athletes more than the important things in life like education and family.
"Paying College Athletes." Issues & Controversies. Facts on File News Services, 21 June 2010. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.
Hartnett, Tyson. "Sports." WhyCould Athletes Should Be Paid . Huffington Post, 21 Oct 2013. Web. 8 Apr 2014.
4.7 million dollars. This represents about 84 times more than an average person makes in their life. Yet, this can also mean something else. One person can make this and could do it in a year. That’s how much one rookie from the NBA makes in a single season! They just shoot balls into hoops, and game after game, they defend it from the opponents net. They don’t save people on a daily basis, they don’t work their whole life for the minimum, and instead, they don’t use their money wisely. This is not right. Athletes are overpaid and people have had enough.
Dosh, Kristi. “The Problems with Paying College Athletes.” Forbes: SportsMoney (2011). Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
How much does a person have to make to be able to afford the essentials in life, food, water and shelter? According to the Department of Labor, the minimum wage for Colorado is $7.78 an hour. With 40 hour weeks you can earn a whopping annual salary of $16,182. Most people will indeed argue there’s no way to live off that but that’s a completely different argument than mine. Should a professional athlete be paid millions of dollars a year, when there are people out there barely scraping change to afford their monthly bills.
Quirk, James and Rodney D. Fort. Pay Dirt: The Business of Pro Team Sports. Princeton Press: Princeton, 1992.
College athletes should be paid because of how publicized their lives are. The reason college athletes should be paid is because colleges and the NCAA make billions of dollars annually off of their name name but none of the money goes back to the players who actually make the money. Eitzen, D. Stanley said in his article about college athletes being paid, “Obviously, big-time athletic programs are commercial enterprises. The irony is that, while sports events generate millions for each school, the workers are not paid” (Eitzen, D. Stanley). Pretty much any university or college makes millions and millions of dollars in revenue each year from their personal athletic programs. If colleges were like most business, the workers or this case the athletes, should get paid
Emmert, Mark. "Paying College Athletes is a Terrible Idea." Wall Street Journal Jan 11 2012. ProQuest. Web. 26 Nov. 2013 .
Waldron, Travis. "What Was Missing From The Meet The Press Panel On Paying College Athletes." ThinkProgress RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 May 2014.
Keown, Tim. "Athletes work hard for their money." ESPN commnetary. ESPN, 08 march 2011. Web. 1 Dec 2013. .
Torre, Pablo S. "How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke." Sports Illustrated. Time Warner Company, 23 Mar. 2009. Web. 10 Nov. 2013.
Keown, Tim. “Athletes Work Hard for their Money.” Sports.ESPN.Go.com. 8 Mar. 2011. Web. 30 Mar,
Professional athletes shouldn’t be paid as much as they do because most of them are financially irresponsible. For example, athletes will spend money on things that they don’t need such as drones or dirt bikes. In addition, professional athletes almost always buy really big houses to live in. Also professional athletes usually buy all the name brand clothes and shoes. In my opinion professional athletes shouldn’t be paid as much because they are financially unstable.
Michael Wilbon. "College Athletes Deserve to Be paid." ESPN. ESPN Internet Ventures, n.d. Web. 26 May 2014