Opinion Story

The average teacher makes about $57,000 each year. Doctors usually make about $189,000 per year. The salary of professional athletes, however, can be anywhere from $0.16 million to $5.15 million. Many people feel that these athletes are highly overpaid, and teachers and doctors, for example, are severely underpaid. This has been a debate for many years and will be one for much longer.

In my opinion, I agree with those who believe that professional athletes are overpaid. The main purpose of any sport is to entertain people, whereas the main purpose of public service workers is to provide people with all of the education needed and ways of life to help guide you. So overall, yes, I think professional athletes are extremely overpaid.

While these sports are very interesting to watch, they are not a necessity for living a healthy, good life. Whereas the purpose of teachers, doctors, police officers, and many other public service workers is to help people grow up with all of the necessary education of health, safety, and just general information. Athletes should not get paid more than teachers just for playing a game for a living.

With having such a profession as a professional athlete, there also comes fame. Almost everyone thinks fame is the best thing in the world, but until you are famous, you’d never understand how hard it would be to be famous. Being in the eye of the people means that there will always be fans coming up to you and paparazzi in your face, you would hardly ever get to spend time outside by yourself or with your family. Also, that much money could easily go to your head, especially as a younger person. You could end up blowing all of your money because of the lack of wisdom.

Another reason that supports they are overpaid is how long they actually play for. Teachers work for nine months straight getting only weekends and a few holidays off. Yes they have two and a half months off for summer vacation but even then they still have trainings they are required to go to and they have to start earlier than the students. Football players, however, only work for a 17 week time period, football season. Moreover, they only play 24 games out of the 256 games there are during the season. They may have to do training during off season, but it is still way less work than teachers.

While these athletes are believed by many to be paid too much, there are some people who disagree and would argue that the athletes get paid just right because of the physical aspect of each sport. Most of these people are talking about contact sports because of the amount of hits, falls, etc. they have each game. In this case, I could understand how someone would think that athletes get paid right for what they go through. While these athletes do risk their safety during games, there are many other people who risk their safety and lives everyday for their country and they still get paid less than most of these sports players. The average professional football player gets almost $2 million per year, while the average active duty soldier gets paid about $100,000 per year. That just doesn't seem right to me.

The solution to this problem would be fairly simple. Athletes just need to get paid less. I’m not saying that their salary should be $36,000 or something, just a lot less than millions of dollars. They get paid more than the president who makes $400,000 yearly. That’s just ridiculous.

Based on all of these facts, I very strongly believe that professional athletes are well overpaid. If anyone should be paid with that salary it would be doctors or the president of the United States.