The buzzer sounds.

It went in.

Your name is Lebron James, and your team just paid you the equivalent of a teacher’s yearly salary for that one successful shot.

In the world we live in today, your wage and how much you are paid is determined by the quality and difficulty of your work. Professional athletes are an exception. This is shown in multiple ways, the first being that a newly drafted rookie in the NFL earns the same as Obama did in his first year as president! This fact shocks me, as to me it seems that Obama did a lot more for the US and its economy than Travon Walker, the first overall pick in the 2022 NFL draft. This is just one of the many examples that I can use to support my statement that sports players get paid too much. A second example is that someone in the NHS works around 60 hours a week and is paid £37,500 a year, while a professional footballer in the Premier League earns £3.1 million and trains or plays for about 35 hours a week. So, in a society where we are valued on the quality and difficulty of our work, tell me how someone who plays football and works half the hours earns 83x that of someone who saves lives for a living.

My second point to make is that professional athletes are put under so much pressure by the money they are making from their sponsors and teams that they turn to illegal substances such as steroids. This is important to my argument, as a player who is cheating in their sport creates an incredibly bad role model for the young kids and players that look up to them. An example of this is Lance Armstrong. A cyclist who dominated the cycling scene from 1999 until his retirement I chose him out of the 2,000+ examples who have openly admitted to doping because he was a role model for my dad. My dad aspired to be like Lance Armstrong and took up cycling as soon as he came onto the scene, but when he admitted to doping after he retired, it left him devastated. Imagine the man you had aspired to be for years had been a cheat his whole life. A fraud. This is what is happening now increasingly more solely because of the ludicrous amounts of money on the line from sponsors and teams.

My third and last point is that sports players get paid too much money for the number of games that they participate in. This is clear for a number of sports, in particular F1. Formula 1 (F1) runs for 8 months of the year and has 23 races running from early March to late November. This means that drivers earn money for doing nothing for four months of the year. Now, some might argue that they are still working (testing cars, doing interviews, etc.), but ultimately, these people are paid to drive cars around racetracks to crowds of people and millions watching on TV; that is the only way that their absurd wages can be justified. But if they are not driving and bringing in money, then how are their wages justified?

Some might argue that professional athletes do not earn enough for the length of their careers. For example, the average NFL career ends after 3 years, and the player will only play for a handful of months a year, while a doctor’s career lasts for up to 36 years. This may be a surprising fact, but in those 3 years, the NFL player will earn the same, if not more, than the doctor will in his 36 years of work.

In conclusion, professional sports players are paid too much, but this is an over-generalization because if you took a sport such as rugby, where the average salary is £138,000, I do not agree that their salary is too low. There is an incredibly varied range of reasons why sports players are paid too much, but the most important thing to remember is that they are still people, and if leagues and teams decide that is what they should be paid, why does my opinion matter?