One of the highest paid professions is professional athletes. Each year the list changes, someone is always getting paid more than the next person. For 2010 the top ten most paid athletes are drum roll please: Tiger woods’ the first athlete to earn one billion dollars during his career. Everyone would do if they were making one hundred and ten million dollars a year. Second on our list is Kobe Bryant earning twenty one million, which is doubled by all his endorsement deals to forty five million dollars? Retired but still being paid higher than most athletes is Michael Jordan making a whopping forty five million dollars along with Kimi Raikkonen. Not far behind him is David Beckham our famous Soccer player from New England, makes forty two million dollars. Gaining his way up on Beckham is Lebron James making forty million who is also tied with Phil Mikleson, and Manny Pacquiao. Racing his way to number nine is Valentino Rossi a competitive motorcyclist earning thirty five million dollars a year. Last but not least is Dale Earnhardt one of the most popular NASCAR drivers making his left turns are earning him thirty four million dollars a year ( Top Paid Athletes For 2010).

Professional athletes are being over paid while hard working Americans are being paid a lot less. Athletes don't offer society anything that will help improve our economy, unlike doctors, the military , firefighters, and other jobs that are needed on an everyday basis. Being a professional athlete is just a waste of time and money. USA Today article published in November 1994 cites a survey conducted on 2000 individuals on how adequately they feel athletes are paid. 87% of those surveyed responded that they feel athletes are overpaid, compared to nurses (10%) teachers (8%), and secretaries (2%) (Why do athletes make so much money, mcamp?). Not much has changed today
Many Americans believe that athletes are not overpaid; they say that” their jobs are harder than ours and we would not be able to survive a day in their shoes” (Pro athletes Not over paid).Then you ask yourself this, would someone who plays a professional sport be able to survive a day in your shoes? No we work just as much as or harder than they do. Sports players don’t spend their day saving people’s lives from burning buildings, or fighting a war across the world .people who believes that athletes are not overpaid there only reason is that they are being paid what they are worth, and how much their contract is worth. If your saying they get paid based on their contract then people whose jobs are more important should have been offered somewhere not offering them a salary close to that of a professional athlete is saying that they are not worth much. If we were to get rid of all the sports related jobs there would not be a big difference in society as if we were to get rid of the jobs that improve everyday life. Professional athletes would not be able to survive in this world and continue doing their job if there was nobody caring for them.

Why is it that some children aspire to be a professional athlete? It might be because you have a fun job, but what about the money? The average professional athlete makes over a million dollars a year. That might be why some children want to be athletes. It’s really unnecessary for someone who plays a game to make that much money (Hoffman, Greenberg, 3). Most parents plan what they want their child to be, so the child grows up liking that not giving any other professional a solitary thought when children are little and they tell you that they want to be a football player or a basketball player. Do you really think that it is for the money, fame or just because it something they like to do. Most children see them playing on television and that is the main thing that interest them. They don’t get a chance to see all the other hard workers, because they are not worried about being on television. They are worried about doing what is important, stretching the little money they have each day to make sure that there family is fed and taken care of. Hard workers are living paycheck to paycheck, while athletes are worried about not making as much money as the next sport is making.

People are not recognized enough for the jobs they do they way pro athletes are. You might here about them in the news for a week about what type of tremendous jobs they did of saving thousands of people’s lives, but you never hear about each person individually like you do when some athlete score an unbelievable touchdown, or a slam dunk. If hard workers were making half as much money as pro athletes were than more people would be willing to work at different places all around the world. We would be able to have more job openings. More people would be interested in starting their own business, making a name for themselves somewhere other than in the sports business. Their name will live on, and not die off when your career is over because; you had an injury that made you unable to play for the rest of your life.

Where is all the money coming from? The answer is sports fans like you. We pay for the tickets, T-shirts, and apparel of these teams. They can afford to sign new players when they're charging anywhere from $45 to $55 dollars a seat for football and anywhere from $25 to $12 for a basket ball game (direct essay). By paying this amount of money you are saying that there is nothing wrong with the amount of money they are paying the athletes even though you aren’t making nearly as much. Sport fans are contributing to the athletes pay check without even knowing it. They might as well be flushing all of their money down the drain. The bad part about it is that is if pro sports players get a reduction in pay then they will raise all kinds of nonsense saying that they will quit if they don’t get their money. One other thing is that most athletes only do charitable work because it looks good on their half. Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of athletes that do good deeds because they have been through just as much as those people who are going through it now, so they are trying to reach out and help them, but that doesn’t give them a reason to get paid more. Plenty of people who do charity work daily are never recognized for the good they do just like fire fighters, and police officers as mentioned before. The money that is made at basket ball games and football and any other pro sports should be given to the people who are in need not who are in want. They won’t be making entirely as much money as they would normally get, but they will still being making more than enough to live on. Giving the money away that is made at a professional sports game will make the athlete look good, and give them plenty of publicity while, giving money to people who need it more than them.
Before offering athlete their contract, do they ever think that the athlete they’re signing is making more than they are? If it wasn’t for them then this athlete would have never been signed. The people that athletes must go through to get to where they are very important, so what if those people quit because they believe they are not getting paid enough. Then how the athletes are suppose to get their dream job. It is not that easy to find someone with the ability to interest a person into joining a pro team if there is another team wanting them also.

People spend many hours wasting their time watching sports when they can be doing something more useful with their time. They could be helping their child with their homework, or the kids that are watching could be studying for a test that is coming up, or go outside and play and not spend all that time staring at television all day. By them doing so they are just adding more and more money to the sports player’s pocket.

During the great depression in the 1930’s professional base ball player babe Ruth was making more money than president Hoover. He defended his seventy five thousand dollar annual salary by saying “why not? I had a better year than president Hoover did (Pro athletes and their salary, Dr. Al Lee). So he is saying that just because Hoover had an off year that he should not earn the amount of money he should. If that was the case when athletes don’t do well during their season then their salaries deserve to drop because they weren’t having a good year. Also the president deserves to be paid more than an athlete do because, they have to make harder decision than and athletes in the world. The president’s choices that he makes effects everyone in the United States so if the presidents do something that would affect the athletic world then shouldn’t the athletes know about it? It is not surprising that athletes are making twice as much as the president.

The president’s salary has grown over the year but not by much in 1789 the president only made twenty-five thousand dollars, buy 1873 it doubled and seventy-five thousand. From the years 1949 to 2001 it went from one-hundred thousand, two-hundred thousand to, four-hundred thousand dollars (president’s salaries). As you can see over the years the president salaries has not increased by far as much as athletes have and they’re the ones making the hard decisions. They are just not getting paid as they should be for someone who is in charge of so much.

Along with the top ten highest paying athletes that I mentioned before there is also a list of the highest paying sports team. Who would of known other than the team and whoever is in charge of them that they are spending millions of dollars during their season. You would have never guessed who came on top but it is the New York Yankees. They are not the only American team in the top ten but six other. The other top nine teams are Real Madrid spending $6,333,591. Next is Barcelona earning $6,082,940? Still taking charge is another soccer player Chelsea spending $5,361,957. Our second American team is the Dallas Mavericks who have qualified for the playoffs ten straight times in a row, under the owner of mike Cuban. Coming right behind them is the Los Angeles Lakers with $5,098,920. The Lakers are one of three team in this list who won a title in 2009. Next are the Detroit Pistons who had the third highest payroll in the MBA last season, no they are spending $4,995,573. After them is the Boston Celtics spending $4,885,055. They won the title in 2008 but haven’t won anything since then. Last but not least is the New York Knicks earning $4,881,952? Their highest paid player is known for nothing other than sitting on the bench in street clothes and saying stuff about his team on the internet (Top Ten Highest Paid Sports Team in the World). “Come on now, this is ridiculous; these players do not need to be paid this much money. This is one reason why so many professional sports players get themselves in trouble. But who am I to talk, right?” Was the exact quote from the unknown author of the Top Ten Highest Paid Sports Team in the World, and there is right. Why should a team be able to spend such a large amount of money on something they probably don’t need just something they want? It is never told on exactly what the money that is given to the sports team is spent on, but why would they need them extra money if they are making more money than half the people in the United Sates. There are plenty of things that they money could be spent on instead of being given to a group of people who don’t really need it. Also if you realize that most teams that are playing the exact same sport as them aren’t making or spend nowhere near as much money as them. Each Professional sports team should be given a certain amount of money that counts as they players salaries and the amount of money the team is give as a whole. That way everyone is making the same amount of money and no one in the sports industry is trying to make more than the next.

Something else that is not easy to understand is why is someone that is retired making more money athletic wise than someone who is playing the sport. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing that much wrong with it other than the fact that retired or no they should not be making that much money for example Michael Jordan. Just his brand is worth one billion dollars, but it is only thanks to Nike that he is one of the highest paid athletes. What about the money he was making as a basketball player or any other sports he was playing. Would he have been on the highest paid list if wasn’t for them. It is ridiculous how much money these athletes are earning and all they do is play sports all day, while hard working Americans spend their day doing jobs that would affect the athlete’s job if the hard worker hadn’t been offered that job. They barely can just to support their families living from one pay check to another always wondering if they will be the next person getting laid off. It just isn’t fair the way people are treated, and also it’s not fair that for whoever decided that athletes were going to get one of the highest paying jobs, but the people who work harder are getting clothes to nothing. We are always worried about us running out of jobs or not finding anybody that is qualified enough to get the job. All we need to do is raise e the salaries of low paying jobs and more people will go out to make it possible for them to get those jobs.

If professional sports players are able to help decide on how much they are paid because someone want s them for them job then so do every other American. They deserve to have a saying of how much they think their jobs should be worth. Most athletes would have their jobs if it wasn’t for the right people with the right jobs along the way. Most jobs have had a reduction in pay over the years while nothing has happen to the athletes’ paycheck one bit. You never hear anything about them lose any money because of a depression or anything, just someone new getting signed and how much money they are making. If even just half of the amount of money that they top ten athletes make all together was just put away then we wouldn’t be in that much of a debt to any of the other countries. We would be worrying about going into a depression every time we turn around.

There are cartoon represents how much money people get paid for being in the Olympics. The message that they are giving is that that the amount of circles are on the flag are the amount of zeros that finish off the person who is competing pay check. For most of their history, the Olympic Games welcomed only those who competed for pleasure to earn rewards. It wasn’t until the 1980’s the international Olympic committees realized that all sports players were getting paid in some way (New Zealand history.com).

It has been said that Olympic athletes don’t really get paid anything. The Olympic team provides money for travel expenses, but unlike everyone else paycheck this money does not come from the government it come from a pool of private and corporate donors. The U.S. athletes that compete can earn a medal bonus for each metal they win. You get paid according to the color medal you win for gold its twenty-five thousand, for silver it’s fifteen hundred, and for bronze it’s only ten thousand. They never really have a steady income, because if they don’t earn any medals then they don’t get paid anything. There so called pay check earn them somewhere around the middle of what a normal persons paycheck. The only main income they get is from their corporate sponsorships (David weliver).

So why can’t non Olympic sport’s pay check be based the same as the people in the Olympics? Both of them are athletes they are always competing in sports so what makes one better than the other that one should be paid so much more. If professional foot ball players or basketball players were only paid on the games they one or just on the championships, cups, titles or anything else you get when you win. That way if the athlete gets hurt on the job they would have been working two jobs so that they would have enough money, they would just be jobless, and have nothing to fall back on. Athletes then would also know what it feels like to work hard and see how people struggle to make ends meet. They will know what it is like to live two kind of live as an adult, and not the little they had to deal with as a child.

There are plenty of other professional sports that people don’t believe should be even called sports. They might not make as much money as athletes like Tiger Woods or Kobe Bryant, but it still enough to live well. One of these sports that are not really paid that much attention to is professional bowling. It was said that this sport was just a pass time for old men to sit around smoke cigars and drink beers while rolling a sixteen pound ball down a lane. Who would have ever thought that is if you were able to roll it just right it could earn you a good amount of cash. Walter Ray Williams Jr is the PBA’s all time earnings leader. During his career he has made more than 3.4 million dollars. He has won 40 PBA titles and for each one of them has earned him one hundred thousand dollars. In the 2001-2002 season, the median earnings for the top 25 PBA players was about $117,000, with the lowest-ranked person on the list taking home about $70,000( Big pay days In obscure sport) . By finding this information it has proven me wrong about sports salaries, but in much ways I am still right about what I have been saying. Football, soccer, baseball and basketball players are not the only sports teams that get paid a ridiculous amount of money. Sports that don’t really get much attention are making if not the same amount as them they are making close enough. Still sports players do get paid way too much money. While Americans today don’t get paid enough athletes are living large. This is a problem that needs to be fixed in today’s society.