![Businessman evolution silhouettes](https://images.vexels.com/media/users/3/71111/preview2/75e4603a976b1de35c345bc247e63ded-businessman-evolution-silhouettes.jpg)



Hey everyone,

While executing experiments for my University work I decided to write about a few more personal topics which are quite dear to me.

As a human being, I'm utterly interested in the development of our society, that being said, I want to make clear that the views presented in this row of posts present my personal opinion and do not have to be seen as facts.


Brake Candidate #1 - Professional Sports
---

First of all, a reminder, I don't think that watching Professional Sports is anything offbeat and I also don't want to say that you're wasting your time with it.

More importantly I want to focus on the amount of resources spent which go to a very limited number of individuals.

Let's take the english premier league as an example.
The average salary (per week!) is 50.000 pounds, which is roughly 70.000$.
At the current moment there are 512 players in the premier league.

Which results in an annual salary of 

### 1.863.680.000$. ###

Let's enjoy this number a bit: Only soccer (or football) of only the english league takes a chunk of 1.8 billion dollars per year!

And that's just the English league and that's just soccer (football).

Let's calculate the value for the top 20 leagues in the world, considering that each league in the list spends half than the one preceeding it.
(They gain more but for mathematical purposes this is easier).

### That'd be Sum(1.863.680.000/2^i) ###

At 20, that'd be a total sum of: 

### 7 billion $ (per year) ###

And this is only soccer.

Taking the 5 biggest sports in the US while, their average salaries are quite close to our regression here regarding an article of the forbes magazine in 2016 [here](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2016/12/15/average-player-salaries-in-major-american-sports-leagues/#309cdd9c1050).

That means we can easily double the number we got already.

### 14 billion $ (per year) ###

Which is only the sum of the 5 mayor leagues of professional sports of the US and the 20 mayor football leagues in the world.

What we didn't consider yet:

- Golf (50 Highest paid golfers earn over 400 millions total [here](https://www.golfdigest.com/gallery/golfs-top-earners))
- Tennis (10 Highest paid Tennis players earn over 300 millions total)[here](https://www.statista.com/statistics/201486/wages-of-the-worlds-highest-paid-tennis-players/)
- Racing (10 Highest paid Racers earn over 200 millions total) [here](https://www.forbes.com/pictures/mli45eejlg/top-earning-drivers/#17d3201c68b9)

And we're not even considering the additional money they get from sponsors, or what the trainers or managers earn.


Without excagerating we're talking about easily 30-40 billion dollars which go directly into the pockets of max 20000 athletes.
(Considering that the mayor percentage of the pile will go to around 200 athletes).


Some values to put this number in context:

- That's roughly the GDP of Paraguay, a whole country.

- That's twice as much as the German Government pays per year for research and education.

A researcher in the US receives between $47K and $120K following payscale [here](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Research_Scientist/Salary).
Following that, the average professional athlete receives more than 10 times what the top scientists in the US make. The top athletes receive more than 100 times more than the top scientists!

Therefore, with this money, we could hire 250k scientists at a 120k/year salary.
Or better, we could hire all 20k athlethes at an excellent salary of 120k + 230k scientists and everyone would be happy, that means everyone can watch sports and we can enjoy the progress of the human society.

Therefore, we have to ask ourselves, what can we do?

- We shouldn't pay any price. If the ticket prices are too high we should watch from home, if Sky bills us incredible amounts for the sports channels, let's search alternatives.

It might seem rough, and you might have to stay a year without watching your favorite team, but if not everyone would accept as easily to pay these absurd prices the channels and the teams wouldn't have another choice but would definitely have to decrease the prices.



Counter arguments:
---

Professional sports generate jobs and move the economy:

- Which is correct, but would they generate less jobs if the salaries would be 1/10th of what they are now? If you'd pay the remaining money to 230k highly paid professionals, wouldn't that be 230k additional consumers in your economy?

Professional sports help the exchange of other nations:

- With lower salaries and maybe a bit less rivality resulting from that, wouldn't that help that even more?

Professional sports get kids of the street and give jobs to people who might not be talented with science:

- Still valid with 1/10th of the average salary, and even more fair, why do scientists have to earn 1/10th only because they have "Athletic talent", maybe kids can even discover more clearly their true talents if they have a fair choice.

Professional sports keep the crowd happy
- And there is nothing wrong with that, but, was the crowd less happy 20 years ago when the salaries were modest? From what I am reading, people were even happier.

What else has to be considered:
---

Following the daily mirror (I know, not the best source), the average sports fan spends around 20000 hours on the couch during their live time watching their favorite sport, that's roughly 0.7 hour a day each day of their live at an average age of 80.

That doesn't include pre and post match research time, doesn't include the time people spend when they go to the stadium etc.

While it might be interesting, there might be other things way more engaging.

Have you ever thought about:

- Entering an amateur team to play yourself
- Learning an Instrument
- Learning a Foreign language
- Learning how to code
- Spending the time to write a quality blog?
- Spending time with your children, family, loved ones?

It's not bad to watch sports, movies or play videogames but there should always be a limit so we don't end up spending too much time with those and stop living in the real world losing friends, destroying relationships.


As a final remark, and as it says in many countries on alcoholic beverages:

## Consume moderately ##



> Did you know you can sell your vote to Minnowbooster?  
> You don't even need high voting power to get it sold and you will get out 85% of the profits!
> 
> If you register via my link you will get a tip of 0.5% on each of your sold votes and BuildTeam puts another 1.5% on top of it for me!  
> [https://www.minnowbooster.com/referral/49434](https://www.minnowbooster.com/referral/49434 "This link will take you away from steemit.com")