Join up and Let's Stop Overpaying Athletes Once and For All

By Travis Ristig

If you're like the rest of us, then surely you've had to sit back and scream at some point, stop overpaying athletes once and for all! Just how is it that these athletes can make so much money, more than most of us can truly even imagine, all because they are physically gifted to play a sport at the highest level?

It certainly doesn't seem fair that athletes like Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods can make so many millions of dollars each year. There have been years where Tiger Woods has made over $100 million including his endorsements. A-Rod signed a contract with $250 million, that's a quarter of a billion dollars!

In comparison, doctors, lawyers and other top professionals don't make much at all. Top professionals in these fields may pull in several hundred thousand dollars per year, and that fluctuates greatly. When the top CEOs on Wall Street were found out to be making, ten, twenty or fifty million dollars, there was outrage. So where is the outrage to stop overpaying athletes once and for all?

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.

One of the craziest aspects of the whole thing is that the base salary or the minimum salary for many major sports leagues is more than top professionals in respected business, science, law and medicine fields can make. Even a mediocre player in the first year of his athletic career will make a minimum of $200,000-$500,000 in the NFL or the NBA.

What's worse is that these athletes didn't have to pay for a full education. For the small percentage of them that did go to college, they got full rides on scholarships. They didn't have to take out student loans or scrape by on several jobs at a time to get their degree and try to make a living.

I've certainly had my full share of hearing about Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods and everyone else and their hundreds of millions of dollars. I say that we stop overpaying athletes once and for all, and the hardworking Americans, spending long weeks in marketing, sales and all other departments reap the dividends.

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