I’m not a huge fan of sports. I enjoy them… to a point. I won’t go out of my way to watch them, though.
I have a couple of issues with sports. The first is that in many places (Texas for example), high school and college football are more important than actual school. A few years back, a local (big city) school district cut 1100 teachers from it’s payroll and dropped the athletics budget from $12 million to $11.5 million… such sacrifice.
I understand that football is important to people, but it is EXTRACURRICULAR… literally outside of the school. I’d ask “what’s more important an education or football?”, but I know what the answer would be to the majority of the US.
But I found a larger bone to pick today.
This image was posted by some friends and I liked it.
The “My income is higher than most countries.” line got to me. I laughed, then I started seeing the trending topics about how some player was being offered $25 million dollars or some such. Then I wondered… how true is that last line?
Well, for individual players, it’s not. But for teams and groups of players…
So my data is coming from the ESPN salary list for various sports and the GDP from the CIA (Yes, THAT CIA).
The top 80 players (by salary) in the NBA have contracts for a combined total of $1,036,613,345. Yes, that’s better than 1 billion US dollars. Country wise, that’s small potatoes. There are still 23 countries in the world have a GDP less than a billion dollars and that includes the Faukland Islands, Samoa, Dominica, The Gambia, the Marshall Islands. These are places that the vast majority of US citizens could not identify on a map.
But still we’re talking about 80 people who make a combined total more than 9 countries! All for chasing a little brown ball and trying to put it in a net. Yes, there is skill involved, but a billion dollars worth?
Of course, those 80 players make up about half the total NBA salary of $2,322,291,744. More money than 40 countries’ GDP.
The next up is Major League Baseball. I took a slightly different route here. Instead of individual players, I looked at the teams. There are 30 MLB teams. These team salaries (paid per year) range from a low of 44 million to a high 238 million. With the total coming to $3,339,401,071.
Three and one third billion dollars… no wonder ticket prices are shooting up. Compared to GDP of countries, we add another 23 countries to the list. Including LIberia, Belize, British Virgin Islands, etc.
Think about how much advertisers and ticket sales (and I’m curious as to how much of each ticket goes to the teams) have to pay to match the GDP of 46 countries, that’s about 20% of the countries in the world.
Of course, despite baseball being “America’s Game” and apple pie and all that, the NFL tops them. The total, NFL-wide, salary cap is $4,075,142,373.
That only adds three more countries to the list. The NFL doesn’t quite match the GDP of the Isle of Man.
Sadly, I can’t seem to find soccer team salaries anywhere.
However, the top ten players in soccer have contracts totaling $885,000,000. That’s more than the top 61 NBA players. I bet Kobe Bryant is kicking himself for choosing basketball now!
As a comparison, the salaries of all players in the NBA, the NFL, and MLB total is higher than the yearly budget for the US Department of Commerce. And the National Science Foundation. And the US Army Corps of Engineers.
It is half of the yearly budget of NASA.
I don’t mind sports. What I don’t like is the idolization of players and teams to the point where we’re spending significant fractions of the US budget to watch (admittedly, highly skilled) people throw, kick, or bat balls to no purpose. At least F-1 racing technology gets incorporated into road going cars… eventually.
