Athletes make too much money. 

Higher salaries are the cause for my higher ticket prices.

Why do NBA players make so much more than NFL players when the NFL is the most financially secure league of all?

These are common comments and questions that casual sports fans raise all the time.  You want answers, or do you want the truth?  Can you handle the truth?

Athlete Salaries compared to the Average Worker

Fans bitch and moan about athlete salaries all the time.

And true, there is definitely a little jealousy in all of us as we watch our weekend heroes make millions of dollars by playing games while many of us scrape and claw just to get by.

But the reality is that sports is entertainment, we as a society crave that entertainment, and there are only a select few individuals qualified to provide that entertainment.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics as of 2005, the median US income is $33,176.

According to CNNMoney.com as of April 2007:

- the median salary for a registered nurse in the US is $59,061;

- the median salary for an elementary school teacher in the US is $47,897.

In pro sports, according to salary data available at USA Today:

- the median salary in the NBA is approximately $2.7 million;

- the median salary in baseball is approximately $1,012 million;

- the median salary in the NHL is approximately $980,000;

- the median salary in the NFL is approximately $718,000.

So many of you lament and exclaim that pro athletes merely play a game, whereas teachers educate our children and nurses provide care and medical expertise.  How can we as a society place a greater value on what athletes do? 

They aren't saving lives, and they aren't educating our youth.  On the contrary, they often times destroy lives (can you hear me Pacman Jones) and send the wrong messages to kids (can you hear me Mike Vick).

But they are entertainers, and we as a society crave entertainment. 

No one puts a gun to my head when I sit on my ass for 6 hours at a sports bar to watch the opening day of the NFL season.

No one is twisting my arm to shell out marked-up prices for sporting events on Stubhub.

Free will...it's a bitch sometimes isn't it.

Pro athletes, no different from highly paid movie stars and music icons, entertain the masses, and possess the rare attributes to do so...like it or not.

If I had a body like Matthew McConaughey and taught my econ courses shirtless and simulcast to an audience of millions worldwide that expected to gain Alan Greenspan-like wisdom from merely watching me speak, I'd be a millionaire too.

The Biggest Misnomer in Sports

Higher ticket prices are not caused by higher salaries.

Yet many fans still lament that the reverse is true.  Owners have often used the argument that for their teams to be competitive they must increase payroll, but to do so and maintain profitability would require an increase in ticket prices.

But this is just the owners trying to shift blame onto the more publicly harassable players.

Truth is, teams raise prices either because they feel they can or they feel they must.  If a team believes that demand for their product is sufficiently high and that raising prices will not cost the team lost attendance, then prices will increase...irrespective of team payroll.

And if one were to spend some time looking at each major sports league's ticket pricing trends at the Team Marketing Report website, one would note that the largest ticket price increases are usually the result of building a new stadium or a post-championship boost.

Practically speaking, many teams have set their ticket prices for the upcoming season before knowing what their payroll for that season will be.  So again, this fact partially debunks the myth.

NFL Players are Relative Vagrants

OK...so this grossly overstates the matter.

But many people might be puzzled to learn that NFL players earn the lowest median salaries compared to the other pro sports.  Puzzled because the NFL is the most profitable of all sports leagues, and puzzled because - arguably - football is the most dangerous of team sports, and as such, one would expect higher compensation to account for higher risk of injury.

Compared to other sports, however, football has more players per team.  So even though the salary cap in football - approximately $110 million this season - is larger than the caps in hockey and basketball, that money is spread out over a larger group of players, thereby lowering median salaries.

On the flip side, the NBA has only 12 men per team.  Furthermore, since most teams have 3-4 key players, one could argue that NBA players deserve more compensation because one player's marginal contributions to production (i.e. wins) is more significant.  We've all seen Kobe and LeBron single handedly win games for their teams, but if Peyton Manning has a career game, that may not be enough if his defense plays like the Sisters of the Poor.

Also, the NBA salary cap is 'soft', meaning that several exceptions exist that allow teams to exceed their caps without penalty.  This further enables the median NBA salary to exceed that of the NFL.

Lastly, the NBA has minimum salaries for every year of experience.  This became a part of the NBA's CBA when 10 year veterans were forced to except the league-wide minimums because star players were eating up such a huge percentage of a team's cap (subsequently, there are maximum salaries associated with each year of experience in the NBA as well).  Though football has something similar, it is not as lucrative, and as such this acts to deflate their median salaries relative to that of the NBA.