Why Is It Important To Have Salary Caps In Professional Sports

Salary caps are a very important tool used in professional sports. All 4 major professional sports leagues in the United States have a salary cap installed into their collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players. Those four major sports are, the NFL, the NBA, the MLB and the NHL. A salary cap is defined as s an agreement or rule that places a limit on the amount of money that a team can spend on players' salaries. It can be as a per-player limit or a total limit for the team's roster. It is basically put in place to help the small market teams stay competitive. It is meant so the wealthy teams, also called big market teams, does not always stay dominant by signing the best players to very big contracts. Salary caps are

Young athlete’s main goal to attain is to become a professional athlete. Many want to become a professional athlete due to the money, others for the love of the particular sport that they are interested in. There is a downside in becoming a professional athlete, that many young players are not aware of. This downside is that professional athletes’ go broke faster than they are drafted into the leagues. Many professional athletes such as NBA and NFL players go broke due to career duration, overspending, family issues, and lack of financial knowledge.

He states, "This is not about stupidity, it is about what is fair in baseball, and what is not. It is about the overall appeal of the national pastime. It is about caring, interest, and most of all, competition. Right now, there is very little of any of these components outside of the 212 area code." Most importantly, he explains why baseball needs a salary cap by saying "it is the only way to put constraints on what the Yankees are doing and to return the sport to the interesting and suspenseful form of sporting entertainment it once used to be." The Yankees are at an unfair advantage all across the league, and nobody, not Atlanta, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, or perhaps even Los Angeles, can acquire talent the way they can. The only way to prevent them from doing so is to put a cap on how much they can pay their entire team.

Labor relations did not play a dominant role in professional sports until the early 1970’s. Prior to unions and collective bargaining, professional athletes were treated like “privileged peons.” Today sport is more career and business than avocation and pastime. Today professional players pursue their playing careers as businesses. And agents

From chapter 6-3: Does Baseball Need a Salary Cap? by Neil deMause Perhaps no two words in baseball generate as much controversy and emotion as "salary cap. " Depending on whom you ask, a salary cap would either save the game, destroy the players' union, provide hope for small-market fans, pervert the free market, or create a tangle of red tape that would turn every trade deadline into a battle of wits among dueling "capologists. " Whenever owners and players have to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement -- the next tussle is scheduled for after the 2006 season -- discussion of a cap is sure to follow.

Imagine yourself watching College Football on a Saturday afternoon, but then you realize that most of these players won’t even get to play in the NFL. NFL players get paid millions of dollars a year while college athletes don’t get paid at all. Every college athlete dreams of playing at a professional level at their sport. Less than 2% of college athletes get to play professionally. College athletes train for an average of 45 hours a week, which is 5 hours each day. Some of them are offered a scholarship to college, but they get nothing after that. Sometimes players are supposed to play professionally, therefore, spend all of their time training and get injured. This would most likely lead to professional sports teams not wanting to pick him or her because of the injury. Even those who do play professionally may not have the best financial management skills

In Major League Baseball the general belief is that the more a team spends on their payroll the more games they will win. With the absence of a salary cap baseball may seam unfair to the smaller market teams who can't bare the salary costs that the larger market teams can. In Michael Lewis' Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Lewis depicts just how the Oakland Athletics have been winning in an unfair game for almost a decade. The A's are a small market team that doesn't have nearly the amount of money at their disposal that their competitors in the American League do. However this past season the A's won their fourth American League West championship in the last seven years while having the lowest payroll in their division. In

College sports have got a lot more popularity across the country then when it first started, over the last few decades. Intercollegiate sports such as football, basketball, or hockey have brought in extra money to their Universities, and also made their colleges more popular. Even though those sports are bringing millions in, no college athletes are legally rewarded for their work and performance. According to NCAA rules, “You are not eligible for participation in a sport if you have ever taken money from anyone, or someone promised to pay you, for competing in that sport” (NCAA Regulations 1). Because of this rule, college athletes have a difficult time paying for college, but also many athletes are starting to be paid under the table through

Why are salary caps good? Salary caps are an agreement that puts a limit on how much you can spend on one Athlete and how much they can earn. It’s not about the game it’s about how many people they can get in the stage for that certain Athlete or Team. The more people that go to the game the more money there will be involved. There a limit to how much an athlete pay gets

While some athletes leave college early, others stay in school and finish their degrees before they pursue their dreams of professional sports. They patiently wait until they graduate from college before pursuing the professional level and for most athletes, this is the right path. “Other athletes have put their education first while still reaching the professional level” (Clary). Athletes need to make sure that they have a backup plan if their life’s athletic goal does not come true. If athletes are paid in college, there is a good chance they would stay in college to finish their degrees and make more mature money decisions.

For teams with smaller salary caps, it was difficult to compete with the most prestigious organizations which had more to offer the top caliber player. This made acquiring top players extremely difficult for the smaller teams, however a former player turned executive implement a method that leveled the playing field. The former player introduced a method changing the

Salary Cap will also affect motivation of the players if they do not get what satisfy them. They will be majorly playing towards maximizing their wealth rather than wining and keeping the spirit of the game alive.

In the world of professional sports, teams value youth, searching for the next super star. Whether it is inking the highly coveted free agent, or rebuilding through drafts, General Managers have put a premium on young athletes, hoping that these youngsters will become the face of the franchise.

If I could pay someone $25 million a year to get him/her on my team and generate $30 million, why not hire that player? The salary cap for the NFL is $102.5 million per team, and we currently have 32 teams, so we the public are paying 3.28 billion to those teams. Currently America is in a 11 trillion dollar debt, if athletes could get paid $150,000/year then we could save 1 billion dollars a year. The monetary worth of athletes exceeds the value that any one individual is actually worth. League officials should be using salary caps, negotiations, and legal tactics. Athletes' salaries are in increasing problem for the economy of our modern world. Although the sports have their own equal distributions, the overwhelming salaries of the leagues' highest paid players have made the average of salaries higher and higher each year.

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.