Mendalla
Happy headbanging ape!!
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This was discussed a bit in the thread on the Raptors run to the NBA championship but a story came up on Twitter that seems like a good starting point to discuss the issue. Jamal Murray, who hails from my birthplace of Kitchener, just signed the largest NBA contract ever for a player from Canada: 5 years with a total value of $170 million dollars. That's well over $30M a year.
And the NBA, while it tends to pay the highest of any of the North American leagues, still falls short of some of the European soccer leagues. Real Madrid in particular are notorious for the amount of money in their payroll.
The NHL has curtailed it a bit with their salary cap, designed to keep the wealthy, big market teams from dominating through the sheer size of their bank accounts, though that has created problems of its own.
Are pro athletes really worth this kind of money? From a purely economic point of view, they have to be. If they weren't, the teams wouldn't be willing to pay it. The argument has also been made that they have a fairly short working life since physically demanding sports are very much a young person's game, so need to make all they can in those few years. But still, even if you average some of these contracts over a normal working life, they make as much money as some business and political leaders who arguably do more, for better or worse, for society in the long haul.
And then there's the pay gap. These huge contracts are almost all going to men. Even a great female athlete like Hayley Wickenheiser or Christine Sinclair makes a fraction of their male counterparts. Only a few women in individual sports, like Serena Williams, have equalled, or come close to equalling, the men in pay. Are men really that much better than women? Or just more marketable?
Jamal Murray makes history with biggest-ever NBA deal for a Canadian | Globalnews.ca
The 22-year-old from Kitchener, Ont., agreed to a five-year, US$170 million contract extension with the Denver Nuggets.
globalnews.ca
And the NBA, while it tends to pay the highest of any of the North American leagues, still falls short of some of the European soccer leagues. Real Madrid in particular are notorious for the amount of money in their payroll.
The NHL has curtailed it a bit with their salary cap, designed to keep the wealthy, big market teams from dominating through the sheer size of their bank accounts, though that has created problems of its own.
Are pro athletes really worth this kind of money? From a purely economic point of view, they have to be. If they weren't, the teams wouldn't be willing to pay it. The argument has also been made that they have a fairly short working life since physically demanding sports are very much a young person's game, so need to make all they can in those few years. But still, even if you average some of these contracts over a normal working life, they make as much money as some business and political leaders who arguably do more, for better or worse, for society in the long haul.
And then there's the pay gap. These huge contracts are almost all going to men. Even a great female athlete like Hayley Wickenheiser or Christine Sinclair makes a fraction of their male counterparts. Only a few women in individual sports, like Serena Williams, have equalled, or come close to equalling, the men in pay. Are men really that much better than women? Or just more marketable?