Would major league sports players play if their salary had an upper limit of 100k?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Discussions have ensued regarding the enormous salaries of major league sports stars. Hundred of Millions of dollars have been spent on these players, some live in huge thousands of square foot mansions, drive tricked out cars etc…etc…

Athlete’s of the highest calibre they deserve to be where they are. But the question is, would they play if they did not get paid millions and millions of dollars?

I understand the media hype, endorsemensts all add to an individuals performance, but are they really worth that much money…?

2

Yes they would. Rugby League and AFL in Australia are enormously popular sports with vast media coverage, huge following and regular TV coverage. The top players earn up to more than $1,000,000 a year with salaries and endorsements but many earn much less. For the effort they put in many professional footballers would be better off pursuing a career elsewhere but they don’t …they want to play professional sports.

3

Of course they would. This whole millions of dollars thing is really quite recent. Most professional athletes didn’t make all that much until the '80s. In Ball Four, Bouton recalls that he had to fight to make $15,000 with the Yankees in the 1960s.

As for the question of whether they are worth all that money, I would say yes. They generate a huge amount of revenue for the owners. They are the product that people pay money to see and so I think they deserve to get a very large cut of that.

4

Yes. After all, while it may seem like peanuts to them now, 100 grand is still a pretty good salary in America, and i’ll bet that plenty of them would have a hard time finding another job that would pay them that much.

Also, are you allowing endorsements? Because many pros make as much money advertising cars and running shoes and deodorant and Viagra as they do playing sport.

5

For those who say of course the players would play for less…I not 100% convinced. I’m not sure Derek Jeter would play for 90K. Just something about it that doesn’t seem to fit.

6

What are you saying. . .if typical major league salaries had only progressed to the point of 100K through they years, or if the owners got together tomorrow and said, “all right. . .we’re only going to pay you all 100k.”

Let’s say its the first one. . .in todays society: of course they would play. What else would they do? Would Derek Jeter who grew up as a great athlete decide to go to college to become a doctor if he could make 100K a year playing baseball?

Maybe we would have lost a couple guys through the years who didn’t think the rewards of MLB were enough but I bet almost all of them would play.

There’s thousands of players making up the minor league system right now. . .professional ballplayers who make a lot less than 100K.

Now, I think you’d have to scale things. You wouldn’t be able to let the owners get away with the same profits, or charge the same ticket prices, and there would probably have to be a better pension system built in, but guys would still play baseball for ANY living wage.

And if they made 100K, people would still say, “how can you justify that when a teacher makes 40k?”

7

Excellent point. Cricketers in India, for example, get paid peanuts by their domestic teams and by the national side. With endorsements, some of them (OK, Tendulkar) are multi-millionaires.

Still, I’m not 100% sure the same talent level would be there in, say, the NFL, if the maximum salary was $100,000. NFL careers are notoriously short, and being a football player doesn’t exactly give you the skill set you need for a career in something else.* If you presented the breakdown to your average player out of college: “$100K for an average of 5 years, with a little chance of advancement later on, and a decent chance of being permanently disfigured, or a career as an average college graduate”…well, I still think most football players would take the NFL career, but some wouldn’t. The smarter players wouldn’t, surely. The NFL might become the League of Mediocre Intelligence and Worse.

*Not counting Terry Tate, Office Linebacker

8

There are probably some people who wouldn’t play for less, but Jeter is not one of them. I honestly think he would play for free. You must be thinking of A-Rod.

9

What don’t_ask said, but my example is the CFL.

10

A-Rod - LOL :smiley:

11

Well, given the number who aspire to play pro sports, for every top athlete who didn’t, hundreds of others would.

While I’m not too wild about the cult of sport in this country, I personally have no problem at all with athlete’s salaries. Supply and demand, and all that. The athletes have every right to charge what the market will bear for their skills. If people want to pay to watch them perform, let them pay.

12

I’m sure the prestige and perqs (good seats in restaurants, models for girlfriends) would still be sufficient for some players. However, you’d lose some players simply because the travel schedule is so daunting. From everyone who has ever traveled on business, it pretty much sucks. I’m sure some players, esp. family men, would think that $100k is not enough money to compensate for the amount of time they’d have to be on the road and away from their families. So I could see men doing it for a few years and then retiring much sooner to pursue careers that are just as lucrative but don’t involve so much travel.

As others have said, football is another story. For many reasons, it’s harder for football players to earn endorsement deals. So while I think there are a lot of football players who would go on to play for $100k a year, I don’t think that it’s necessarily fair to the athletes, esp. since a lot of them are great football players but couldn’t make near that amount of money doing anything else.

13

Well said. If the market will bear such ludicrously high salaries, then that’s what the athletes should be paid. However, I find it somewhat disturbing that the market will bear it. The demand for what these guys do seems to be entirely out of scale for what they’re actually doing.

14

Of course they wouldn’t. If the owners tried something like this, there would be an immediate strike.

Joe DiMaggio, IIRC, was the first player to make $100,000, back in the 1940s. Once you factor in 60 years of inflation, $100,000 becomes a ludicriously tiny salary for a top ballplayer.

And, of course, the ones who would benefit from this would be the owners, not the fans. They make enough money to pay million-dollar salaries, so the extra money would just be gravy for them.

If they weren’t worth that money to the team, then why is the team paying them that much, anyway?

15

This is a different take than I first had - I assumed that salaries hadn’t escalated to the levels they had.

Of course if the owners got together tomorrow and said that the top salaries would be $100,000 then there’s no way there wouldn’t be a strike. But if salaries had never escalated in the first place, then of course they would still play.

16

$100,000 a year, minus endorsements, is still good money (especially considering that baseball players don’t work the whole year round) and it’s a fun job.

I don’t see why A-Rod would be an exception. He seems less greedy and selfish than some other ballplayers I can think of. He was/is young, the best player in the game, a free agent at the peak of the mega-bucks period, and his salary reflects that.

17

I don’t think you’re approaching the question correctly.

It’s true that CFL players and such don’t make a lot of money, but when they began to play football seriously, e.g. at the elite high school or college level, they were to some extent motivated by the prospect of huge dollars. If major league ballplayers never made more than $100,000 much of the cachet would be gone. (I am assuming no endorsements.)

A man who choose to enter pro ball is taking a significant risk that he will spend years toiling at it without ever seeing the inside of a major league stadium. MOST pro ballplayers retire between the ages of 23 and 27, either through injury or a lack of ability, with no skills or education, and the vast majority make essentially zero money. (A few high draft picks will draw big signing bonuses and then fail to make it, but most players drafted get peanuts.) If you can never make more than $100,000 a year, it’s a crazy career move. It’s ludicrously dumb. You’re taking a 1 in 100 shot at an expected gross salary of maybe three hundred thousand G’s for five to ten years of effort.

But when the minimum salary is $300,000, the average $2 million and the ceiling $20 million, and just being a high draft pick can be worth millions, that’s not a bad risk to take. Even a few years as a benchwarmer will get you decent coin. But if the ceiling is $100,000 it’s a very poor risk.

It’s drawing players into the development system where the industry is making its sales pitch to the prospective talent. Derek Jeter today really has nothing else he could do besides play ball. He has no education or experience. He may as well play for $100K because he has no skills to do anything else. But if he’d known 10 years ago that there wasn’t much money in it, it’s less likely he would have taken the enormous risk of entering pro ball (since most players never even make the majors) and might have turned his talent elsewhere.

I’ll tell you; if I suddenly could play at that level and you offered the job to me for $100,000 a year, I don’t think I’d want it. It’s a pay raise… but because I went to school and got job experience, it’s not THAT much of a raise. I could expect to do it for no more than a few years, since most players are washed up at 32 and only very rarely get past 40, and then I’d be out of a job and short on experience. And it’s a sucky job if you look past the money; you travel incessantly, it’s physically damaging, and you’re under constant pressure. IF I had no other decent options, sure… but I do have other options.

18

I agree 100% with Miller. As insulting as it is that they get that much money (relative to really important people), it is more insulting that we as a society put such insane value on entertainment. Not just sports, but movies, music, the cast of Friends, whatever. To me, it is another long term symptom of human nature perverting capitalism, to the detriment of society as a whole. To clarify that before it gets torn apart … I think a world where teachers, firemen, and other seriously critical people in society are valued higher than athletes and rappers, would be a better world to live in.

Now a gladiator fighting a lion in an arena … THAT I’d pay some money for!! :rolleyes:

19

Sure, but you aren’t someone just out of high school or college who won’t make anywhere near $100,000 for a while. You’re also not someone who thinks the best job in the world is to get paid enough to live on for doing what you love most in the world- playing a game you would play for free ( or even pay to play). Look at these leagues http://www.angelfire.com/ak/indybaseball/ .The pay is much less than $100,000/year.

20

I say that of course the vast majority of the players would still play if their salaries were capped at $100,000 because at the heart of it they all love to play the game. I also think that the vast majority of the egotistical team owners would still buy teams if their incomes (including capital gains from the sale of teams) were similary capped at an arbitrary low figure, because being an egotistical team owner gets their name in the newspaper and on TV everyday. I also think that movie and TV stars (Tom Cruise, Jim Carrey, the cast of “Friends”, etc.) would still act in movies and TV shows if their outrageously high incomes were similarly capped.