Earlier this month it was reported that Juan Soto, the 26-year-old professional baseball outfielder, has signed a staggering $765 million 15-year contract with the New York Mets, the largest deal in Major League Baseball (MLB) history. In so doing, he surpassed baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani, who signed a 10-year $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers last December.
Too much? Not enough to make the top ten of the world’s highest paid athletes. According to a report from Sportico, the 100 highest-paid athletes earned an estimated $5.4 billion in total income in 2023, with soccer star Cristian Ronaldo leading the way with a $275 million loot, followed by professional golfer Jon Rahm, who earned $203 million, and soccer legend Lionel Messi, who raked in $130 million.
We caught up with Simon Darnell, a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education (KPE), for his take on the gargantuan deals offered to star athletes and the financial ecosystem of professional sports. Darnell, whose research interests include the sociology of sport, sport celebrity and consumer culture, is director of KPE’s Centre for Sport Policy Studies.
What is the justification for (top) professional athletes’ getting such fat pay cheques?
The justification for paying top professional athletes such large salaries is this: if there is such money being made in the professional sports sector overall, then a ‘fair’ portion of it should go to the athletes, since they are the ones whose labour is being consumed and who are putting their health and safety on the line most directly. Similarly, fans tune in to see the players, not the owners or media corporations, so therefore the athletes are the ones who deserve to get paid.
Of course, ‘fair’ is a contestable term in this case, given that a lot of people in our society work hard at jobs that are arguably much more important than professional sports and that pay a fraction of these salaries. So overall it isn’t exactly a question of fairness. But within the cultural bubble that is elite, professional sport, the players deserve to be paid.
Major leagues earn billions in revenue. Where is all this money coming from?
In North American professional sports, the money still comes primarily from media driven revenue, and the fact that – in a world of streaming services – live sports remain a very valuable media property. Still, things like ticket sales still matter, which is why COVID-19 posed such a challenge. So now we see leagues like the NHL and the NBA getting more creative with strategies like advertisements on player uniforms.
It’s also worth noting that contracts like the one handed out to Soto and Ohtani are very much about securing a broadly marketable personality at a predictable cost, and so the corporations that own these teams are sometimes willing to ‘overspend’ in purely sports terms in order to accrue such an asset as part of a larger strategy.
If more money for owners means more money for top players, where does that leave the fans, many of whom can’t afford the ballooning costs of major league live games?
It often leaves fans watching on TV or on their devices more than in the stands with a ticket they bought themselves. However, we were already trending in that direction, arguably before or without large salaries for athletes or higher ticket prices. Corporate control of tickets that exclude the average fan has been an issue for years, as have changing patterns of consumption such as highlight culture becoming more appealing to young fans than sitting and watching a whole game.
What these salaries also do, though, is push these athletes even more firmly into the realm of celebrities, and arguably further beyond the world of sports. That is to say, athletes become known for how much money they make, more than how well they play. Take Ohtani, for instance. Baseball fans know what he can do on the mound and at the plate, but I would think that even more people now know how big his salary is, regardless of whether they watch him play baseball or not.
Earlier this month Premier League fans in England protested rising ticket prices, chastising the club owners for exploiting their loyalty. Could this happen in North America – and would it make a difference?
There’s always the possibility that sports fans could organize in response (or resistance) to high ticket prices in North America. It is reasonable to assume that there is at least some disaffection amongst fans with how expensive tickets are (in sports and other cultural industries), especially as leagues like the National Hockey League are reporting healthy revenues. Honestly, though, I don’t think significant fan response in North America is likely. One reason is that there is much more of a culture and history of fan-led protests in the UK and Europe. We don’t have a legacy of that kind of fan activism in North America from which to draw. The other reason is that I don’t think it would make much of a change, unfortunately. One of the barriers to fans flexing any real agency as it relates to tickets is that the ‘average’ fan is not a major buyer of tickets compared to the corporate interests that sustain and underpin ticket sales. What I mean is that if fans stopped buying single-game tickets, this probably wouldn’t move the needle all of that much.
That said, I do think pro sports clubs would be wise to pay attention to disaffection, especially because fan loyalty isn’t measured just by ticket sales. It also has to do with broadcast audiences, merchandise sales and brand identification. It is possible that all of those can be tested as player salaries continue to escalate beyond what any fan can reasonably relate to.