The Way We Talk About Sports Money is Weird and Dumb

Many athletes are millionaires. They are being paid by billionaires. It's a cartoon world we cannot understand. The way we talk about athletes and their money is bizarre and silly.

We don’t talk about athletes the way we talk about any other type of rich person. Athletes typically find themselves exempt from the negative sociopolitical rhetoric associated with wealth. On the flip side, people who would, under legitimately any other circumstance, lose their collective minds at the mere passive mention of redistributing wealth will take to Twitter to demand all the players on their favorite team take pay cuts for the betterment of the collective.

Every offseason in every professional sport is mostly made up of fans parsing the financial value of players in numbers that their own bank accounts will likely never see in their collective lifetimes. Sports is unique in its ability to have people making less than 15 bucks an hour say things like “We got him for only $5 million a year!”

Part of that is because the amount of money athletes earn is so cartoonishly large in comparison to the average fan’s own income that it loses all tangibility. Another part is if you’re a fan of a sport, you likely agree on an athlete’s value. A room full of Chiefs fans, pretty much regardless of their political bent, will all think Patrick Mahomes is worth well over $500 million.

It’s a fraction of a fraction of humans who are born with the genetic cocktail of strength, speed, and cognition required to be professionally good at a sport, and it’s a fraction of a fraction of those people who actually do become a paid professional at their sport.

Yet still, every NFL offseason we see on loop the discussion of players being “selfish” for taking too much money in a sport that has a salary cap. On a visceral level, it makes sense. Nearly every fan of any sport has said some version of “Well I’d play for the league minimum,” myself included. Emotionally, it just feels right.

But sports are made up of millionaires getting paid by billionaires. The wealth of those who sign to pay an athlete’s contract is as unfathomable to the athlete as the athlete’s wealth is to us. Trying to understand the amount of money the billionaire has is like trying to imagine a color you’ve never seen.

It’s how we end up with the narrative that the line between Patrick Mahomes and Tom Brady is Mahomes signing a $500 million contract and Brady consistently taking far below his value so his team can afford to keep everyone around. Of course, this narrative doesn’t take into account that Brady already has 20+ years of wealth from football, endorsements, his own brand, and marrying a woman twice as rich as him. Brady has reached a point where the money on his football contract is the least important thing in his professional life.

For the record, the Chiefs promptly started the offseason by restructuring Mahomes’s 2021 money to free up over $17 million in cap space. Much like money isn’t real, neither is the cap. It all means whatever we want it to mean. Brett Veach lives his own truth.

We want our favorite players to love our favorite teams as much as we do. A select few of them do. 99% of them cannot. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't. Their experience and connection with the team is right now, ours is everything before and after as well.

“It’s a business” is the cliche with sports, but that's only half-right. The fraction of a fraction of a fraction of people who become professional athletes becomes microscopic when framing it around only those who manage to acquire generational wealth playing their sport.

In the case of football, many of them end up broke and broken. As far as money goes, pro sports is less a business or an avenue to prosperity than it is a violent lottery. That makes it kinda difficult to blame any athlete for chasing money over team continuity. Then again, I'd totally play for the league minimum if I was Patrick Mahomes.

Read More: Patrick Mahomes' Contract Structure is a Blessing for the Chiefs, Curse for the Rest of the NFL