Ridiculous pay for star athletes and celebrities is at least fair: they’re directly bringing in tons of money/profit, so why shouldn’t they be rewarded?
However they’re more a symptom than the actual problem. The real problem is the manipulative nature of sky high ticket prices, merchandising, ads, etc. how can these firms of entertainment command prices people can no longer afford, exploiting captive audiences, etc, to generate so much profit? The stars should get rewarded with a share of the profits they generate, but it’s ridiculous how much those activities generate.
In a sane world, I could afford to take my family to a game/concert/theme park, we can decide to bring in our own water, food and t-shirts only cost a little more than in the outside world, there are no ad timeouts, no region locking, no public funding, and the owners should be taxed at a higher rate than I am. But at every step, we’ve adopted anti-consumer policy, increased inequality, and it just adds up - society rewards exploitation, removes consumer protections and fairness. We’re no longer people, just products
puts the movie, ‘Gifted Hands’ infront of you
The top comments seem to have a lot of people from the US seem to be ignoring the rest of the world exists and screaming Reagan (the US president from 1981-1989). I honestly don’t know how accurate that is but it is obviously not nuanced and probably biased by anti-Trump sentiment
I’m not sure how accurate this article is either but it mentions the salary cap for soccer in England being removed in 1960 and that leading to a rapid increase in wages there.
https://www.salaryleaks.com/blogs/average-salary-premier-league-history
A quick scan of the internet led me to this chart that compares top soccer players to median income in (for some reason) the US
From: https://www.expensivity.com/soccer-salary-inflation/
Here’s another chart from the same article for how many times a US families income a top international player makes (and like the England article the 60s look to be exponential growth, then noise in the 70s then pretty clear from the 80s):
A lot of that analysis has space for biases but I’m pretty sure that modern large sports wages predate Reagan but also that the people mentioning rich athletes in Roman times are a bit off too
I have to admit that, without wanting to defend absurd wages for anyone, there’s a pretty decent explanation in the case of athletes. If you’re one of the top ten boxers in the world, there are tens (hundreds?) of millions of people that want to see your matches. It’s not unreasonable to ask for some compensation for providing entertainment, so let’s say each viewer is paying 1 USD / match. After paying the costs of setting up the match, you’re still left with millions of dollars per match.
Specially in the case of top-level athletes, we’re in a situation where very may people want to see very few people provide entertainment. Even if they take a very low price, they’re still going to be making buckets of money. I don’t really think that would be unfair, provided they actually charged some small amount. What irritates me is that the sports associations have decided to charge absurd amounts to squeeze people fore mine to make even more. That should definitely be illegal.
Why athletes? People attack athletes all the time and ignore that the team owners make $ with a B instead of an M. CEOs do far less for their organization than athletes and make far more money.
Was thinking about this in the context of a joke I heard in the late 90s:
What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start.
We didn’t we have jokes like that about the billionaires; at the time people were glazing Bill Gates. It’s wild because billionaires are the ones writing the laws, lawyers just act it out.
How about both?
Look up Ronald Reagan’s administration.
lol
Was gonna say “IDK, but I am willing to bet it was during Reagan’s presidency” and this is the first comment I see.
It pre-dated Reagan. I’d say it started in the early 1960s, right about the time Boomers started becoming adults.
I don’t know about athletes, but for us normies, it was the 1980’s with Reaganomics, early recession, rising inequality, “greed is good” culture, heightened Cold War tensions, the emergence of the AIDS crisis, and societal shifts towards consumerism. The 80’s was also a time of technological boom with computers, MTV, and cultural dynamism, with critiques often focusing on increased individualism, materialism, and social challenges.
I think the seeds may have been planted with the radio. Once athletes became celebrities it was only a matter of time. I know little about baseball, but even I know who Babe Ruth was, who played into the 1930s. TV blowing up in the 40s added an additional layer of connecting the names to the faces. This eventually gave way for MTV to come into the mix creating the beginnings of modern pop culture.
I’m not sure why OP or other comments are so hung up on the Athlete part? One of the most famous and wealthiest athletes of all time was a Roman charioteer. Gaius Appuleius Diocles was a celebrity across empires and predated doctors, Jesus and the radio. The only people that got paid more than Gaius were landowners/lords, which is still true to this day.
If I had to guess, “athletes” was the first thing that popped into their head. But I have to assume they mean people who don’t “arguably” contribute to furthering of humanity. So Actors, musicians, athletes vs doctors, teachers, scientists, etc.
A lot of jackass answers in here but this is the answer to the spirit of the question.
Reaganomics or it’s other name “trickle down” economics is what you want to start looking into.
Is there a point you can find in history where we paid doctors, teachers, and nurses close to what they’re worth and more than professional athletes?
It sounds like you’re nostalgic for a time that never existed.
OP is also only comparing top earners. For every athlete who earns millions, there’s probably hundreds of athletes who make around median income or less - it’s the kind of career where people will keep doing it even if it pays barely enough to pay the bills. There are a lot of doctors who make more than the poorer professional athletes, and doctors don’t age out.
Is pretty meaningless to look at top earners.
Some specialist doctors are making a million dollars a year, but the average is closer to $375,000.
Much like musicians, there are huge numbers of “professional” athletes that are not making a living wage. The low end for medical doctors is plenty to survive.
I think it’s distasteful when people complain about people earning six figures not getting as much as others, while we have people dying in the streets from capitalistic poverty.
There was definitely a time when professional athlete was hardly a career, and certainly not well paid. So for a time teachers and healthcare workers got paid more than athletes.
You really have to split it up. Teachers and nurses have always been paid pretty poorly. They were traditionally female only professions, and expected only to work until married or what not. Or they were nuns, and didn’t get paid directly. Doctors of course, being traditionally male only got paid a lot better. But I agree that for most of human history, professional athletes were just rich peoples kids. They weren’t even getting paid most likely. It would be interesting to try and figure out who the first true professional athlete was. Someone who wasn’t born into money, and actually got paid a living wage.
In the CFL (Canadian Football League) the players don’t make more than $100,000/yr generally, and the good ones get scooped up to the NFL.
Athletes that have spent thousands of hours training their whole lives to be the some of best in the world at their craft, generate billions of dollars doing their job. Why shouldn’t they get paid well from that pool of billions?
Teachers, nurses, etc should get paid more, but their professions don’t generate the same kind of revenue as the entertainment industry, so that money has to come from some other source, like the government.
Revenue is not the same as value, teachers enable much more economic activity than athletes. The fact we equate “profit generated” to the value of the profession is part of the problem.
I agree, but the money has to come from somewhere. Athletes generate the money they are paid, and they generate a lot so they get paid accordingly.
I don’t think that we are equating profit generated as value. It’s just a fact that athletes make lots of money because they generate it.
I think that what should happen is that the organizations/teams that are making billions should be taxed higher or something equivalent and those funds should go to under paid professionals like teachers. But, I don’t think that athletes should make less because there’s enough extra profits that both can exist.
profit generated by teachers is too indirect, too long term. Most people can’t even seem to conceptualize it, much less quantify it, plus who’s going to stay at a job 20+ years before they get a payoff
I don’t think doctors fit in that group. They are paid well, and respected, far more than nurses on both accounts.
Going back in history, a doctor/surgeon/dentist and barber were the same. At some point a doctor became elevated to something more than meat technician. Probably the English during the Enlightenment with their different scientific clubs that helped distinguish doctors.
Yea, but that doesn’t fit OP’s childlike view of the world so shut up, nerd!
What “childlike view”? Do you remember which jobs were considered “essential” during COVID-19 or were you too young?
I sure do. Of course doctors and nurses were essential because it was a health crisis. But it was grocery store workers, Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse workers because people are idiots and think stuff like that mattered. I remember sports teams and reality TV contestants being put in quarantine so they could safely compete. I remember it wasn’t teachers, as classes were canceled before going online only for about a year and a half.
So what’s your point?
Where I live, we’ve been treating…
- Nurses very poorly. Underpaying and overworking them, while not training enough new ones.
- Family Doctors (aka. GPs) very poorly by removing the kinds of services they’re allowed to provide, increasing expenses without increasing compensation, and again, not training enough new ones.
Doctors are paid well, but they also have incredibly high expenses (and often high student debt, too).
This is just capitalism, isn’t it?
Athletes and entertainers that make millions do so because people pay for it in large numbers. This is what capitalism wants and does.
I agree with your sentiment but I think you’re just critiquing capitalism. If I had my way these people would be taxed up the wazoo. No baseball player or Hollywood actor should ever be worth 10s of millions, let alone hundreds, or billions.
I think some of this is related to radio, tv and internet too. Before radio few people could follow a game live so the audience, or at least live emotional audience, is a lot smaller and that’s pretty aligned to profit. Or put another way, if every Messi or Taylor Swift fan gave 50c every year they’d be filthy rich but that was harder to acheive before radio with things being more local.
A friend shared this a month or so ago and I haven’t been able to check how accurate it is but apparently its soccer player wages in 1999:
That was a lot of money at the time, but even adjusting for inflation it really doesn’t seem to be the fuckoff money they get now
Edit: I read these as annual but leaving this here to showcase my folly
I mean, that’s per week, and after tax… Seems like a shitload of money to me.
🤦♂️ I missed it was per week. I’ll go hide somewhere now
Yeah, so that’s probably about 5-10 million pounds annually today? So they’re earning 10 or so times that amount now but its still very much fuckoff money
Complaining about athletes just makes it sound petty. Athletes are just employees, if you’re going to complain, complain about the athletes’ and nurses’ employers. Rich people never gave a flying fuck about their employees, and underfunded schools are a feature for them, too.
And the overwhelming majority of athletes do not earn well. It’s only the top 1% that gets rich, and only those in sports with a lot of public appeal.
I always hate when this argument is used when were talking about celebrities here. As if a famous athlete or a famous musicians relation to labour and the benefits of that labour is at all comparable to say a coal miner’s relationship with capital.
Professions that have a high pay cealing do have a different relationship to capital than miners, nurses etc., but most athletes and musicians still aren’t millionaires - a lot of professional athletes and musicians actually earn less than median wage. It just feels like a waste of effort to complain about a celebrity who owns tens of millions, when the core issue is the people who own hundreds and thousands of millions.
Baseball players went on strike in 1972. They’d had a ‘union’ since the 1800s, but always bowed to the owners.
Complaining about athletes just makes it sound petty.
And your opening statement makes your entire post sound completely out of touch.
You mean the social sector being chronically underpaid with no improvement in sight? I blame less and less regulated lobbyism, a.k.a. legal corruption. Because the social sector doesn’t have one, usually. It would often amount to the government bribing itself. What, politicians making good decisions without looking out for a payday, you say?
And when the social sector lobbies it is called “special interests” by the press. When capital owners do it they are called “job creators” by the press. Edit: or so it goes in the states.
Are you talking from the pov of one specific country?
False dichotomy. First not all athletes are paid « astronomically ». That’s only a particular subset and in very particular exposures. The reason they makes millions is because they makes billions for the team’s owner. Now this owners use their billions to ensure that the world continues that way.
Second athletes have normally a really really short career vs. Doctor. They mortgage their bodies (and their mental sanity) in a 10 years period and are unable to work very well after that if your salary don’t represent that their no point in doing it and the owner will not make money.
All in all. Athletes are workers (with some benefit) like us and should be seen as such. The real grinch are the owners
I understand the skepticism on society’s priorities.
Athletes are literally 1-in-a-million individuals. They bring in crazy amounts of money from people who want to watch them play.
The real problem is that there are so many people who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to watch a sports game, but not willing to see teachers properly compensates (in my opinion). Because athletes getting a big share of the pie that they’re bringing in sounds fair to me. The question is why people have that much pie to give them, and not as much pie to give to schools.
I think the real problem is a government structure that lends itself to being captured by monied interests. The problem of capitalism chasing the money is only a problem because we have a government unable to properly tax the wealthy to ensure no one can amass the kind of wealth that makes it possible to capture the government.
This. Everyone wants qualified, well paid teachers for their kids, just like how most people want universal healthcare. But our government and media structure actively disempowers any such movements in that direction. Ie “we can agree we all want these things but we can’t agree on how”
