They say there is nothing better than getting paid for what you love to do. This is the reality for professional sports players all around the world. Although this is a dream come true for the players, it is a nightmare for team owners and managers. Over the course of sports history, wages have grown tremendously, and will continue to grow as long as they exist. Nowadays, we see single players signing 100 million dollar contracts for only a couple of years. That being said, it can easily be seen how hard it is to build a strong, lasting team.
As we know, Americans love watching sports. From the NFL, NBA, to the MLB, sports revolve around many lives. Although we love watching sports and athletes love playing for us, owners struggle to pay for this pleasure. In general, salaries for professional athletes has skyrocketed in the past 50 years. A great way to analyze this is through looking at NBA salaries from the past to now. In 1970, the average starting NBA player made around $35,000 a year. Now in 2018, starters make around $6.5 million a year! In half a century, the average salary of NBA players has increased an extraordinary amount. As one can infer, this is extremely hard for teams to manage.
With the hundreds of millions of dollars circulating NBA players, teams must find a way to manage money. Now, teams apply salary caps. As we talked about in class, salary caps are the maximum amount of money a team can spend per year on salaries while staying afloat. With how expensive players are now, it makes in incredibly hard to build a great team. This is why the better teams continue to get better, while the bad teams get worse. A good example of this is the Golden State Warriors. Having one the NBA Finals multiple times recently, the team is making mass amounts of money. This allows them to pay for the five all-stars on their team. In addition to this, some players may choose to decrease their wages to play for the best team. By Kevin Durant adjusting his salary in 2017, the teams salary cap was met. This can be argued as being unfair, because other teams do not have a fair chance of obtaining better players.
Overall, it is extremely hard for teams to manage salaries in all professional sports. The better players get and the more sought after they are, the higher wages will increase. I would not be surprised if we begin to see contracts in the 200 millions soon.
https://www.businessinsider.com/nfl-mlb-nba-nhl-average-sports-salaries-2016-11
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I agree with this post in that NBA salaries are a lot higher than what you may imagine. In fact, Stephen Curry recently did sign a 5 year supermax worth 201 million dollars, so 200 million dollar contracts are already coming. NBA contracts are worth a lot more and a lot safer than even NFL contracts. NBA contracts tend to be longer as well. The stars can get up to a guaranteed 4-5 years of 20-40 million dollars. The NFL contracts are a non guaranteed 2-3 years of 10-20 million dollars. The NFL roster is 4 times as big as an NBA roster, so that could be why.
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