The rich salaries and benefits of the current crop of players are subsidized by taxpayer financing for stadiums.
This is on top of all the free advertising given to their product by the media. Every newspaper has a sports section. Every TV news hour has ten minutes set aside for sports. The bulk of the sports coverage is for proefessional teams.
The old time NFL players are stuck in the average guy’s retirement. They’re no worse off than the typical retiree in America.
I have no beef against guys making a living entertaining people via sporting contests. I do have a beef with politicians taxing the average schmos to subsidize wealthy pro-team owners and players.
This inequity arises from the pro-sports empire pitting one community vs. another with threats to take the team elsewhere. What Congress ought to do is levy fees on teams that use publicly financed stadiums in order to retire the public debts incurred in building them and to reimburse taxpayers for the subsidies they’ve been forced to pay. Action at the national level would reduce the leverage teams use against city politicians.