Stop Overpaying Athletes Once and For All

By Travis Ristig

How exactly is it possible that a single person can make hundreds of millions of dollars for playing a sport? It doesn't seem fair to me that our most educated citizens, the ones who truly work the hardest, not only don't get any recognition for doing their job and their service but they don't make nearly enough money in comparison to top athletes. The answer is to stop overpaying athletes once and for all.

It's actually ridiculous how much money some of these athletes make, not just over the course of their careers but in the course of a single year. In a good year, Tiger Woods has been known to rake in over $100 million when you include his tournament winnings with his endorsements. That's more than the revenues for many entire large businesses.

What about the rest of us? Doctors, lawyers, CEOs, we can all end up making some good money. If we graduate in the top of our class and dedicate 60 or 80 hour weeks to our job, we can make a few hundred thousand dollars per year. Of course, we'll also be paying off our student loans in the process. While Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods and other professional athletes just get to sit back and rake in the millions.

It's time to stop overpaying athletes once and for all. While all of the banks and Wall Street companies got federal bailouts, in a sense we have been bailing out our sports teams and allowing this to happen without knowing it. When we buy those overpriced tickets, park in those overpriced lots and buy every new jersey or hat that is released, we are the ones enabling those salaries to exist.

Is it the athletes' fault that they are making so much money? No of course it's not, if it's anybody's fault it's actually our own. If we were in their position of course we would accept our huge contracts and enormous salaries. The problem lies when we pay for crazy overpriced tickets, parking, concessions, jerseys, hats, TV packages and more. By doing so, we make these extravagant salaries possible, even as the rest of us are in fear of losing our jobs and our homes and are just trying to provide ends meet for our families.

The thing is that it's not even just the top athletes like Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods that pull in all of the money. Even the worst players in the biggest sports leagues make more than most businessmen, lawyers and doctors. Consider that the minimum salary in the NFL depending on your experience in the league ranges from about $250,000 all the way up to $1 million. That's literally the least that a player could make!

Athletes like this earn all of this money without ever having to really work for it. Sure, they honed their athletic and physical gifts into a career. But they didn't have to pay for college, if they went to college at all. They didn't have to take out student loans or work hard to finish at the top of their class so they could find a job.

If you're like me then you've had enough of this, let's join up and stop overpaying athletes once and for all. We might not realize it, but a lot of the power to do that truly lies in our own hands. We can take control of the situation and stop spending so much, and then maybe the rest of us who toil away in respected professions can start making more money instead.

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