Baseball Vs Football: Salary Comparison

By Brad Schnirring

Baseball vs football: Salary comparison

Professional Players’ salaries are touted as one of the only reasons (by team owners) in order to make their decision to hike spectator ticket prices. Players’ salaries at the present time are so absurdly large that the American public cannot even begin to make a comparison. Studies have shown that the average salary for a player in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the year 2000 was 2 million dollars and over per annum. Alex Rodriguez topped the charts with $25,200,000/annum. The average player salary in the National Football League (NFL) in the year 2000 was 1.18 million dollars per annum.

Salaries: NFL vs MLB

major league baseball players make more money as compared to their national football league counterparts due to the salary cap structure in the individual leagues. In the NFL, every team must have a roster of 53 individual persons on the football field at all times during the football season, while also keeping their team salary budget within the 2001 salary cap of 67.4 million dollars. However, in major league baseball there is no such salary cap. Thus, players can earn as much as they want. There existed a luxury tax in MLB, but it expired in 2000. So, at this time there are no extra deductions from the salary to professional baseball players. The luxury tax system entailed that the top five baseball teams, with the highest salaries, to pay a tax. It assisted in keeping a sense of equity between large and small market major league baseball teams.

However, with no such salary cap control in major league baseball, each player can earn as much money as the owner is keen to pay. The NFL salary cap has been praised as the only reason why the NFL tends to be so competitive. A new champion seems to rise every year. However, in MLB, the same teams top every year. Hence, it is no surprise that the New York Yankees have won the World Series consistently and thus offer the highest salaries to players. A large market team such as the Yankees can overpay players because they possess huge television revenues as compared to any NFL teams.

TV revenues also play a big role in the salary cap and baseball has a greater coverage and viewership. In NFL, all the revenues are distributed equally and the salary cap keeps all teams competitive. The top five highest NFL salaries in 2011 were Jake Long’s $11 million/annum, Chris Long’s $6 million dollars, with defensive backs like Champ Bailey’s $11.5 million, Nnamdi Asomucha’s $12 million and Darrelle Revis’s $7 million/annum. MLB’s top five salaries were of Alex Rodriguez’s $32,000,000, Vernon Wells’ $26,187,500, CC Sabathia’s $24,285,714, Mark Teixeira’s $23,125,000 and Joe Mauer’s 23,000,000 dollars.

Conclusion

Therefore, it is evident that the professional sports league that has the largest payrolls is not necessarily one that offers the most competitive product. The thing observable here is that if you have an athletic child, then you may want to aim him towards baseball to see him happy on his payday!

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