Leonel Messi: Why Soccer Professionals Get Paid

Improved Essays
How much money do Leonel Messi from Football Club Barcelona and Cristiano
Ronaldo from club Real Madrid make? According to the article, "The World's 100
Highest-Paid Athletes 2014," in Forbes magazine, Messi makes about fifty million dollars every season. Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the world’s most popular athletes, slightly surpasses Messi’s salary by a few million. European teams like Real Madrid and
Football club Barcelona recruit some of the worlds most valuable and highest paid players. Nathan Mercer from BBC referred to experts at Deloitte and reported that the average Premier League players earn more in seven days than the average employee in the United Kingdom in an entire year. Why in the world are they paid so much? Experts don’t realize
…show more content…
One reason why highly paid soccer professionals should have lower wages is team performance is damaged if some athletes have higher pay than others. Allesandro
Bucciol et al. studied two teams in Italy to discover if pay dispersion had an affect on the performance of a consistent, eleven-man roster. He found that unequal pay distribution can decrease the chances of winning by twenty percent each match. In other words, the team will be more likely to fail after contracting this one very highly paid player.
Proponents of paying high salaries argue that such high salaries are intended to compensate for certain expertise skill levels, and that these players are worth such a high salary. However, soccer is a team sport. Even though there is one extremely talented player, all team members must work together cooperatively by passing the ball and following through with a play in order to score a goal. Having a highly paid talented player is in fact hurting their chances of winning instead of helping.
In addition to winning fewer games, another reason why highly paid athletes should receive less money is high wages lead to expensive games and loss of

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