This is a typical response, but it sort of misses the point.
I’ll throw this into the discussion; we value teachers more than we value athletes. I can prove it, because we spend more money on teachers than we do on athletes. Don’t believe me?
Well, last year, professional baseball players in North America made about two billion dollars. Maybe a bit less. By comparison, the province of Ontario, where I live, paid out about five billion dollars to pay teachers. The salaries of all the teachers in Canada roughly equal the total salaries paid to every professional athlete in the Big Four pro sports in all of North America. The salaries paid to all American teachers vastly exceeds the amount paid to all pro athletes in all sports on this continent - it’s not even very close.
Professional sports is an industry that’s in your face all the time, but it’s not really THAT big an industry - maybe $25 billion in revenues per year. and I’m being generous. That’s about what General Motors does in a good eight weeks. If every single professional sporting franchise, business, etc was all one company, it wouldn’t even be one of the fifty biggest companies in America. Major League Baseball would have trouble cracking the top 500. No sports franchise by itself is a company of any significance. The richest franchise in North America, the New York Yankees, wouldn’t even be a business of any particular note if they were a manufacturing facility or a retail chain. They’d be dwarfed by B-list companies.
The real size and influence of pro sports in economic terms is thus somewhat overstated. It’s overstated because people invest a lot of emotional currency into it as well as the financial kind, and because some people take it very, very seriously. But on the whole we just don’t spend anywhere near the dollars on sports as we do on health care or education or a thousand other things.
So why do athletes make a fortune? Easy; because while the demand for their services isn’t as high as you think, the supply is uniquely small. You just don’t need very many people to perform the service, but you need very specific, irreplaceable people. It’s not a demand issue, it’s a supply issue.
As has already been hinted at, it would depend on why this $100K limit existed. If ownership simply decided tomorrow to cap out salaries as such and distribute the savings amongst themselves, there would be an immediate (and surely successful) players’ strike. (Not that the owners, contractually, would be able to impose such a limit.)
OTOH, if the government started taxing the profits of professional sports leagues at a confiscatory level, and a 100K limit was an appropriate chunk of the industry’s net profits then, yes, the large majority would keep playing.
That said, I think there would be a considerable thinning of the ranks among a certain class of players. The average, everyday, unremarkable players (the Ty Wiggingtons of the world) would keep playing, because the paychecks would still be important to them, and in the hopes of getting better and earning endorsement money.
The recognizable superstars would keep playing in order to stay in the spotlight and keep their endorsement money up.
Finally, however, there’s a whole swath of players like, say, Norman Hand, currently of the New York football Giants. These are competent veterans and career starters who have been receiving an average of millions of dollars a year, but who are still unknown by the vast majority of fans (this class of players would be largest in football, in which teams have 22 starters whose faces are covered by helmets). In most cases, their savings would be such that 100K a year isn’t needed to live on, and (because they are unknown) their prospects for significant endorsement money are slim.
A player like Mr. Hand, then, might reasonably decide that, at the age of 31, it’s not worth 100K to him to spend 10 months a year pushing 310 pounds of Norman up and down a football field every day. I think we’d lose a lot of these players.
Years ago, on a phone-in show, a caller asked George Will if there were any players today who’d play for free, just for love of the game. And he gave the correct answer: “Sure there are. But they don’t HAVE to play for free, so why SHOULD they?”
There’s no point begrudging athletes the money they make, because it would be a very simple matter to persuade millions of people that ordinary folks like you and I are overpaid slackers. Don’t believe me? Suppose someone went down to a tiny village in Bolivia or Tanzania, and said “There’s a guy named Astorian up in Texas. He works just 40 hours a week in an air conditioned office. He has a house and two cars. ANd get this- he thinks he should get paid MORE! What do you think of that?”
I imagine the peasant would be outraged, and would scream that I’m a despicable greedhead who should be happy with what I’m getting. “Tell that greedy bastard Astorian to switch places with me. Let him work in the hot sun seven days a week, and try to support a family on $500 a year! Who the hell does he think he is?”