"Do Athletes Make Too Much?" - KIN 140

hEy, guys! It's been a while since I posted anything. I've been either procrastinating or feeling like there just wasn't much to post. Besides, too much was going on with course assignments before Thanksgiving break....and who wants to post anything during break? 

Anyways, today something really interesting came up in my Social Science of Human Movement class. The topic today was "Sport And Economy". There were many interesting facts brought up about how owners and sports teams affect the nation's economy/city economies, but I'm not going to get into that because I'll just end up summing up the entire lecture... and I wouldn't even know where to begin with that. Honestly, I fell asleep (in the front row again T_T), but I was awake for something really interesting at the end of lecture.

For the final fifteen minutes, the class had a discussion about "Do professional sport athletes make too much?"

There were a lot of interesting ideas brought up and it was a great discussion. One of the arguments was that although athletes have really high salaries (many making millions), their careers are often very brief...which lead to an activity our lecturer, Mr. Drollet, ended the class with.

Mr. Drollet created a hypothetical situation to access how well an athlete can live for the rest of his/her life solely off of the salary amount from a few years of professional sports.

The subject is an NFL football player, who usually have short pro sport careers averaging about 3 years. There's always a lot of competition against new players in the league every year and there's also a high prevalence of injury in the NFL. Anyways, we'll say that this individual has a yearly salary of $770,000, which is the median amount. There are many that make much more, but we'll just give this guy the average amount. We'll pretend he's not the best athlete, but he's still pretty damn good to be in the NFL, so he doesn't make the most. What else about him...uh....the average football player's age is like 21, so we'll say our guy is 21 years old too. He played for 3 years and he was out by the time he was 24 years old. When does he die? We can give him the best chances ever and he lives until he's 68. That's pretty darn good considering he probably had a few years knocked out of him from being in the NFL.

Okay, let's throw this all together. So, we have a football player....let's call him Arnold. 

So, Arnold started playing in the NFL since he was 21.

He stayed in the NFL until he was 24.

Arnold's salary was $770,000 per year for a total of three years.

In three years, this guy made a total of $2,310,000. 

Is this enough to last him until he dies at age 68?

He still has...68 minus 24...44 years to live, solely off $2.31 mill.

$2,310,000 / 44 yrs = $52,500!!!!

Arnold, a mediocre pro-athlete, has $52,500 per year to live off of until he's dead. Given, in this calculation, I assumed he didn't spend a dime during the three years he was earning money. Even so, if I assumed he spent $20K every year he was in the NFL, he'll still have $51,136 for every year after his career. 

I'm not saying they make too much money ( though that IS a lot of money), but I'm bringing this up because it was amazing seeing my lecturer work all this out in class and realizing "I am squat diddly poor". I knew they made a lot but when it's put into numbers this way, it's like "DDDAAAAAAMNNN!"

Anyways, it seems like I'm insinuating they DO make too much money, but I haven't brought up and of the pressures athletes face and issues with athletes being objectified by team owners and etc etc. 

Well...this be all, folks! I don't know even know who the heck will read this, but it was fun typing it. 

Enjoi!