Any conversation about a sports work stoppage includes some form of this exchange:
- Person A: Players already have huge salaries, isn’t that enough?
- Person B: Yes but the career of a pro athlete is extremely short so they have to make their money quickly, and it’s also unpredictable since they can get injured at any time so they need to bank those earnings while they can.
The disconnect in these discussions is that we’re usually thinking about the stars on nine-figure contracts, or other players making 5 or 10 million per season.