Professional Football Players: Are They Paid Too Much?

Chris Romero
December 13, 2016
English III
Mrs. Maggert
The Debate over Professional Football Player’s Wages
Many people have different opinions on the salaries that professional soccer players receive. Cristiano Ronaldo, who is currently the highest paid footballer in the world, gets paid $82 million per year. There are some that would argue that he does not deserve that much money for being a athlete. Professional football players do not get paid too much because the teams are private businesses so they can pay their players what they want, the players put in tons of hard work, and they bring in revenue for the team.
With football clubs being like a private business, they can choose to pay their “employees” whatever they want. Football clubs
Professional Football players have been pouring everything they have into the sport since a very young age. The article titled “Professional Soccer Players: Are They Paid Too Much?” by Jason Lampkin states “To become a successful businessman, you need to spend countless hours studying the ins and outs of the business world...the same is true for professional soccer players, the only difference is that their “study” is done on the training field and in the gym.” World class players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have been giving everything they have into the game since ages 3 or 4. Not all players that you see on TV were born with talent. Some had to work as hard as they possibly could ever since a very young age to get themselves to where they are now. With all the dedication and sacrifices they’ve made, they deserve what they receive. Good enough players attract fans from all over the world that will pay to go see their favorite player, which in turn brings in more money
There are people with way more important jobs like doctors, police and firefighters who we could not do without that get paid over 100 times less than a professional Football player. The article “Viewpoints: Is a salary of 300,000 a week too much?” posted by BBC News states “Gareth Bale’s new employers Real Madrid will - if reports are to be believed - be paying him more than 250,000 a week.” Gareth Bale earns over 13 million a year which is over a few hundred times that a cop would get paid per year. It is unfair that a person running up a field gets paid millions while a person protecting the public gets paid less than 100,000 a year.
In other words, football players well deserve their pay they receive since the clubs they play for are profit business and not public, they give other people the chance to sit back and enjoy themselves, and because they help others bring in money. Football players indirectly help millions of people in different ways, and can make other people’s lives better by giving them something to be passionate about. Whether these athletes should receive the high amounts of money they do is still a highly debated topic between the people that admire the players and others who think they do nothing to deserve