Overpaid Athletes

Overpaid Athletes

Floyd Mayweather, a professional boxer, recently topped the Forbes list of highest paid athletes for 2014. He has become only the second professional athlete to ever make over $100 million dollars in a single year. (Badenhausen) Situations such as this give reason to the debate that professional athletes are paid far more than they should be. Professional athletes do not deserve the amount of money they are paid because they are not good role models, many other professions deserve a similar salary, and some of them are not very good at their sport to begin with.

When we think of bad role models a few names come to mind, Lance Armstrong being one of them. Armstrong is perhaps most famous for his doping, a discovery that lost him all seven of his Tour de France championships. (“Lance Armstrong Verdict”) This used to be a man that parents wanted their kids to look up to because of his perseverance, determination, and courage through his fight with cancer, but this is no longer the case. Lance Armstrong, along with many other athletes, may have once been somebody to look up to, but have since lowered their standards and become anything but a role model. With this in mind, the reason why athletes are paid millions of dollars is lost.

Perhaps the most prominent reason for athletes being paid too much is the fact that there are many professions that deserve to be paid more than they are paid. For example a high school teacher in the US makes, on average, $57,770 each year. (“High School Teacher”) Many of these teachers have at least a Bachelor’s degree and perform one of the most important jobs in the whole country. On the other hand, less than half of all NFL players have any kind of college degree and don’t do anything that contributes to the well-being and success of future generations. Teachers educate and greatly contribute to the success of future American leaders. With this point of view, one might think that it would be right for them to swap salaries.

Floyd Mayweather, as mentioned before, is the highest paid athlete, but how long is he actually in the ring? In 2014, Mayweather was only in the ring for a total of seventy-two minutes! (Badenhausen) This means that he makes roughly one and one half million dollars every minute he spends in the ring. Compare that to the average teacher making approximately $30 per hour, which doesn’t even include the time the spend after class making lesson plans and grading papers, and it is evident that there is no reason for this huge difference. (Lepi) Yes, Mayweather is undefeated, and yes over half of his wins are by knock out, but does that really make him worth $1.5 million a minute?

Generally when we thing of professional athletes we think of them as the best but that may not always be the case. For example, in the graph above you can see that one name really pops out at you for being far overpaid for his lack of performance,

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