Athletes’ and Entertainers’ Earnings

Athletes’ and Entertainers’ Earnings
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Athletes’ and Entertainers’ Earnings
Undoubtedly, the money that professional athletes and entertainers rake in is mind-boggling. For instance, Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the richest footballers, earned a whopping $117m before taxes in 2020 (Football Transfers, 2022). However one looks at it, this is a lot of money to make in just one year. The earnings of workers who do essential duties in society pale to nothingness compared to what athletes and entertainers make. This has resulted in a raging debate as to whether the likes of Ronaldo deserve the ridiculous salaries they earn. According to Mint (2022), the national average salary in the U.S. in 2020 was $56,310. People who earn such amounts of money are highly educated and play essential roles in society as opposed to many athletes and entertainers. Considering that, there is no doubt that professional athletes and entertainers are unnecessarily overpaid.
One of the reasons why people feel that professional athletes and entertainers are exceedingly overpaid is their relatively low level of education. There is little to write about regarding the education of most of this fabled category. This is because most of them have little or no education at all. Ronaldo, for instance, mentioned in his documentary that all he wanted as a young boy was to play football. As such, he did not care much about his studies, drastically affecting his academic performance (9SPORTPRO, 2019). In this perspective, many well-educated people feel slighted because a conventional maxim exists that well-educated people should earn more than the less educated. Therefore, the yawning disparity between the salaries of poorly educated athletes and well-educated professionals causes profound concern. For example, the average annual salary of someone with a doctoral degree in the U.S. is $97,916 (Mintlife, 2022). Comparing this with the ridiculous earnings of athletes makes one feel that educated professionals have been handed the short end of the stick. Arguably, this is degrading to some extent if the endless hours put into attaining high-level education are anything to go by. One of the primary reasons that have supposedly contributed to low levels of education among athletes is that most of them become actively engaged in sports at relatively young ages. It is worth mentioning, in this regard, that most of them grow up in social-economic conditions riddled with extreme poverty (Uehara et al., 2021). Therefore, they consider being professional athletes a guaranteed route out of that debilitating poverty. That being the case, they channel all their energies and concentration into excelling in the respective sports they undertake. Ironically, they do not view education as an escape route from their misery which calls for a serious review of the salaries of the highly educated.
People have also argued that the contribution of athletes and entertainers is of little or no consequence to society. Their argument implicitly points to the fact that they are dispensable. As such, they feel that any given community can still flourish without their input, as o...