Ridiculous Sports Salaries

Have you ever thought about how much money professional athletes get paid? The average salary of an NBA basketball player is 5.15 million dollars a year. The average salary of an elementary school teacher on the other hand, is only 56,000 dollars a year. That is nearly 92 times less than the average NBA salary. In other words, the money used to pay one average NBA player for just one year, would pay nearly 92 teachers. With all this money you would think the athletes would be able to use that money in ways that benefit others and put it to good use. Athletes don’t know how to manage their money. The average athlete goes bankrupt 7 years after retiring.

There are almost 450 players in the NBA. When we take the average salary of 5.15 million dollars and multiply that by 450 it equals 2.3 billion dollars. If we were to put all that money toward our school teachers, police men, and fire men, we would have a lot stronger society. We would have better students coming out of the classrooms; we would be able to help educate kids that need more attention than normal. Teachers usually need the money to support a family. With higher salaries for teachers there would be more teachers and they would be able to support their families a lot easier.

Kobe Bryant, the highest paid player in the NBA, gets paid 27 million dollars every year. He spent 18.8 million dollars on a home in California. He has a helicopter that he flies to his home games at the staples center. He owns a 330,000 dollar Ferrari Italia. He also has a Lamborghini, Bentley, and Range Rover.  He bought his wife a four million dollar ring. He has earned nearly 450 million dollars in his career.

The average police officer on the other hand only makes 50,000 a year. For a police officer to buy the Ferrari that Kobe owns it would take nearly seven years of saving every penny and that is not counting takes and other expenses. With the money used to pay all the NBA players you could pay 100,000 times the amount of police. You could pay 460,000 police men. The NFL is the most popular of the professional leagues in the United States. The NFL has 32 teams with 53 players each. There average salary is 1.9 million dollars. That adds up to be 3.2 billion dollars. The NFL claims that they are a non-profit organization so they have to pay no taxes on what it makes.

So you may be asking yourself, why all this money goes to sports entertainment when our country is falling behind in schooling. There could be great opportunities for growth in our education system if they had more money. We need to make our country a better place and fund our education system. We need to cap the salaries in athletic sports and add to the salaries of teachers, policemen, and firemen. They are the ones saving lives, providing opportunities for us, and setting the future.