A professional athlete complaining that he doesn’t get paid enough money is like a cat complaining it didn’t get enough rest. It’s hard to sympathize.
After being selected as the cover athlete for the new NFL Madden 16 game, Odell Beckham Jr. was asked what he would change about the NFL. The 22-year-old told the Huffington Post that he felt players should be paid more money. His explanation is as follows:
I understand that basketball plays 80-something games, baseball plays this many games, soccer plays that many games, but this is a sport that’s most-watched in America. A sport where there’s more injuries. There’s more collisions.
It’s not even a full-contact sport, I would call it a full-collision sport. You have people running who can run 20 miles per hour and they’re running downhill to hit you, and you’re running 18 miles per hour. That’s a car wreck.
It’s just the careers are shorter. There’s injuries that you have after you leave the game, brain injuries, whatever it is, nerve injuries. And it’s just something that I feel as if there’s no way someone who — even if they did their three or four years in the league — should have to worry about money for the rest of their lives.
At first, it’s laughable to hear anyone making over a million dollars in annual salary say they should be paid more. But when you take a closer look, Beckham may not actually be crazy.
The NFL is the most watched sport in America. According to Business Insider, of the top 50 most watched sporting events in 2013, 92 percent were NFL games.
The NFL is the most lucrative sport in America. It brings in the most revenue and has the highest average franchise value of any other sport ($1.43 billion).
The NFL is the most popular sport in America. According to the Harris Poll, 35 percent of sport fans say the NFL is their favorite sport. The MLB trails in second at 14 percent.
However, despite the fact that the NFL is first in popularity and revenue, its players are paid the least. According to Forbes, the average annual NFL salary is $1.9 million. Compare that to the other major sports and the NFL is dead last behind the NHL ($2.4 million), the MLB ($3.2 million) and the NBA ($5.15 million). Beckham is set to make under $1.5 million in 2016.
This isn’t to say all NFL players are underpaid, quite the opposite actually. Matt Ryan is the tenth highest paid athlete in the world. What it does show is that the majority of NFL players don’t receive adequate compensation.
70 percent of NFL athletes are between the ages of 22 and 27 and these players earn far less than the overall average. Mostly because these are either players on the practice squad or on lower round rookie contracts. NFL players don’t start getting paid until they reach the age range 28 to 35 and receive their second contracts when the average salary jumps to $4 million a year.
However, according to the NFL Players Association the average career length is 3.3 years. That means that the majority of players that enter the NFL at the age of 22 or 23 will never make it to that second contract and see a salary that’s comparable to any of the other major sports.
Beckham’s solution was to have players receive more money out of the gate but in the last collective bargaining agreement, it was agreed that draft picks would make less guaranteed money.
In the greater picture, Beckham and many other NFL players like him are making more money than most people could dream about and they’d be hard pressed to find sympathy from the average working American. But there is certainly something to say about the most lucrative sport paying its players the lowest salary.