American Football Athletes Are Underpaid

A good portion of the U.S. population loves to spend a Sunday afternoon watching sports with friends and family. Thanks to the television, people don’t even have to go to the actual fields anymore in order to enjoy a good game. Nowadays, they can do the same thing from the comfort of their couches without even having to lift a finger. American football, in specific, has become something of a tradition in the United States. Watching the games on Sunday afternoons has become something close to a sacred ritual. In fact, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll, 49 percent of all Americans watch football. These people watch the games and then go on with their lives once its over. What they may not realize, however, is that some of the players

For instance, teachers are vital to society because they are in charge of educating the future generations, yet, most of them are underpaid and earn only a fraction of what they deserve. This paradoxical inequality is even clearer when it comes to the amount of money athletes are paid compared to other careers. It has come to the point where many athletes are now making more than triple the amount of money that the people with the best paid jobs in America earn. Now, it is important to remember that athletes weren’t always paid so much money. In fact, back in the 1920’s, football players were paid from $100 to $300 per game. Even the baseball legend Babe Ruth was merely paid about $80,000 per year (Stephenson). When adjusting for inflation this would still amount to nearly a million dollars annually. Nevertheless, this was still a low salary for such a ground-breaking legend at the time. For the average players the salary was even lower, most football players only made about $5,000 per year, this meant that they actually had to take on other jobs when they were off-season. During this time players got by with what they had and they weren’t seen complaining about

“The introduction of television in the 1950’s, along with lucrative broadcasting deals, had begun to make many professional athletes significantly wealthier. Audience inflation suddenly went from thousands inside a stadium to millions via the television- and it didn’t take long for players to capitalize on this change” (Stephenson). This in turn had a direct influence on players’ salaries which would continue to increase throughout the years. The world has sadly evolved into a place where it is perfectly acceptable for some players to make more than $35 million per year. There are many people that would argue that athletes deserve to be paid this much because their careers are short and because they are the most physically fit people in the country, however, there is a vast amount of evidence that they are overpaid, especially for a career that doesn’t play a vital role in