Are Celebrities Overpaid? : The Entertainment Industry

Professional athletes in the United States are given extremely substantial contracts and lucrative endorsement deals and it has been argued that their salaries should be reduced to smaller wages but others say they are paid accordingly. The argument that athletes are overpaid not only exists in the United States but also all over the world. Most countries however do not have the variety of major sports that the U.S. has. When athletes are being paid millions of dollars each year, it raises an important discussion. This discussion is about how we value and compensate athletes and whether or not their salary is too much. This also leads to an argument asking if American priorities are altered by the significant difference of athletes

Many professional athletes and entertainers make very high salaries. I was asked to write about my opinion on this, and I disagree. My two reasons on disagreeing are: I think they don’t risk as much as police offers, nurses, soldiers, etc. My second reason is because most, but not all, usually spend what they make on material objects.

In thirteen years of golf, Tiger Woods has made over a billion dollars making him the highest paid athlete ever. He has been the highest paid athlete now for five years in a row. We all know that many people in the world watch him play every weekend and admire him, but is the amount of entertainment he provides really worth 128 million dollars a year? Tiger is only one of many professional athletes who are extremely overpaid. “People forget that sports is entertainment,” says Leonard Armato, a sports agent. Although professional athletes provide entertainment for millions of viewers around the world, they are overpaid because the millions of dollars that they make could be distributed more evenly throughout society and go to things of a

Athletes should not earn much more than professionals who save lives, educate the population, and professionals who put their lives in risk for others. These athletes become idols and heroes in the society for being seen every week on the TV and be constantly on the news. When the real idols and heroes are the ones

He gets paid $7 million dollars, not the highest on the team. Eric Gordon, who is nowhere near as good as Anthony Davis gets paid $15 million dollars. (Smith, Steven A. "No Matter How Much They Make, The Best Players In The NBA Are Vastly Underpaid." FiveThirtyEight. 2015. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.)I think the best player on every team should be paid the most. Not the third or fourth best on every team should be paid the most. Tom Brady, Super Bowl 49 MVP. Got paid less than his Tight end who hasn't won an award in his career yet when Tom Brady has won 5 awards. 3 Super bowl MVP and 2 League MVP. (Smith, Steven A. "No Matter How Much They Make, The Best Players In The NBA Are Vastly Underpaid." FiveThirtyEight. 2015. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.) If you have won your team 3 super bowls, you should be paid the most. The person who has won 1 award. Aaron Rodgers the MVP of the National Football league in 2014 was getting paid $11 million dollars. Randall Cobb a 2nd string wide receiver got paid $20 million dollars. (Smith, Steven A. "No Matter How Much They Make, The Best Players In The NBA Are Vastly Underpaid." FiveThirtyEight. 2015. Web. 21 Jan. 2016.) If you are a second string wide receiver is getting paid more than your MVP quarterback. Than that is bad for your

In this website article written by “The Doctor Chris Mueller”, a featured columnist from Bleacher Report, he explores both sides when it comes to the question “Are athletes overpaid?” and talks about the

“Touchdown Patriots! 3, 2, 1! And the Patriots win the Superbowl!” Millions of pieces of confetti were falling on them, as if it were the money that they make every year. But wouldn’t you think that people, like doctors, would earn 5.15 million dollars for saving people’s lives every single day, and professional football players would make $189,000 - $258,000? It is actually the other way around. Professional athletes started to get paid for playing sports in the 1920’s, which is when people started to actually notice them, and they were paid, on average, 5,000 dollars a year. Now don’t get me wrong, getting paid to entertain people in fine. But today, they get paid 5.15 million dollars a year, just by playing sports. I think that might be going a little bit overboard. In my opinion, professional athletes get paid too much.

Imagine a world in which you make about $15,000 to $20,000 dollars less than your favorite athletes, like Lebron James or Kobe Bryant. When you put it into perspective, it could be a pretty small gap when you see how much athletes in the U.S make today. The issue of extreme salaries for professional athletes is staggering and outrageous has been going for many years and continues to come up with arguments about how money should be spent not only by the public but by the government as well. On average the normal American citizen makes above $46,000 a year as of 2014 while in 2012 the average salary of all the national sports associations athletes was $2.6 million dollars a year and has most steadily risen in the past three years. This really brings to the forefront certain question like, what are our country’s values and what do we really stand for when teachers, doctors and civil service jobs are the lowest paid jobs when you compare them to

Do athletes make too much money? Most people today think so because the amount of money they make for entertaining the public. Kobe Bryant makes more than a yearly teacher salary by making a single basket. Doctors and surgeons make life saving decisions every day and make significantly less than a rookie in a professional sport. An average professional athlete makes two million six hundred thousand dollars more than the president of the United States who makes critical decisions for our country. We have millions of people in poverty, while these athletes are making so much money, majority of the time they don’t know what to do with it. While these professional athletes bring so much entertainment into the world,

There are people in our society that help shape the future for the whole country but are only paid a fraction of what athletes are paid for playing a sport. For example, there are people like teachers that might help push those athletes in the right direction towards what fame they eventually achieve, but compared to those athletes they are paid a large amount of money less than those people. Also, there are jobs out there which are considered the highest paying jobs in our society, like medicine and law, but even those high paying jobs are not paid the amount that athletes are paid (Figueroa). The president, for example, has what is considered one of the most stressful job in the country but only receives five-hundred seventy thousand dollars total yearly. That includes their yearly salary of four hundred thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollar travel account, a fifty thousand dollar annual expense account, and about twenty thousand dollars for entertainment. In comparison to the president, the average tight end in the National Football League makes about double that amount of money in one year (Lesko). In Floyd Mayweather’s fight against Alvarez, he had earned 41.5 million dollars just for that one fight (Arciniega). In the year 1989, Rickey Henderson had signed a twelve million dollar deal that was for four years, making him get three million dollars a year. Making $3 million a year

It is easy to argue that professional athletes are paid too much and should have a change in their pay rate. Athletes get paid more than a doctor who is potentially trying to save somebody else’s life. Besides the salary athletes are already paid they have millions of dollars they receive from sponsors and commercials they are in. These athletes are getting paid a ridiculous amount of money just to go out and just be entertainment. Most athletes are paid too much to go out and get hurt in a few years or not make it.

It is often said that professional athletes are paid too much money for what they do, but some of them live up to all of the fame and fortune that comes with it. Many professional athletes get paid on average about 5.15 million a year, and some even more than that. Depending on their performance and skill level determines how much they are paid. I think that it is great that they are putting on a good show for us and people all around the world, but they are earning an excessive amount of money. As I see it only a handful of athletes should actually earn what they do but the people who don’t even play should

In today’s society many will argue whether or not professional athletes are overpaid. In the present time athletes are being paid phenomenally large amounts of money for their entertainment. It is my claim that all professional athletes are overpaid because they do not offer society an essential function that improves or enhances our world in comparison to other professionals such as medical doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Society does not value entertainment enough to warrant such high salaries such as those of many professional athletes. There is no reason that these athletes should demand these tremendous amounts of money. This is why you have to put into question their reasoning for demanding

Do athletes really deserve to get paid all this money versus doctors? Many professional athletes get paid millions of dollars. Some people think that these athletes should or shouldn’t get paid all this money. Compare that with the average income for a family, 54,000. Americans who work a full-time job until they’re about 70 years old and still not make that much in a lifetime as athletes. It’s very interesting to study, why should athletes get paid more than firefighters or doctors. There are much more, including the president of the United States.

The passages present a discussion about arguments concerning whether or not professional athletes are overpaid. This is an important debate since professional sports represents a multi-billion-dollar-per-year industry. The two positions argue whether or not professional athletes should be paid the large yearly salaries they are paid. Both viewpoints have valid claims warranting consideration. For example, evidence suggests that people with far more important jobs are paid much less than professional athletes; in contrast, opposing evidence suggests that since professional athletes generally have short careers and must train very hard to build and maintain their skills, the higher salary is justified. While both sides of the issue have valid points, the viewpoint that professional athletes are not overpaid is the best-supported position, the position supported by the preponderance of the evidence cited in the passages. The strongest and best reasons supporting this position are that professional athletes must endure grueling and intensive training, they generally have short careers that often end in injury, and the amount that they are thought to be paid is often inflated. Accordingly, these reasons and opposing viewpoints will be discussed next.