Winona Reif
Whether you follow sports or not, you probably see the headlines every few months: NFL athletes signing record breaking contracts for colossal sums of money. However, these tremendous amounts of cash leave many people wondering: should we be awarding these substantial salaries to people who play football for a living? While many see them as a waste of money, NFL salaries are deserved by the players who receive them.
The Dallas Cowboys’ Dak Prescott will take home $40 million this year as the signee of a four-year, $240 million contract that tops the NFL history books as the largest deal by annual value since the league was founded.
While the annual amounts of NFL contracts dwarf the yearly salaries of the average U.S. worker, the number of paydays a player sees is much lower. The average NFL career is a short 3.3-years-long, according to the NFL Players’ Association. The minimum rookie contract for a player is $885,000, which increases to $1.075 million in the player’s second year if they are re-signed. According to Over The Cap, only around 56% of NFL players return for a second year, and only 35% are around for three.
Additionally, 60% of NFL players were on minimum-paying contracts in 2020 according to ESPN, which means the majority of players weren’t making nearly as much as the top-paid athletes.
“What do you want to pay them, $50,000 a year?” said senior Lev Peretz. “You have to set them up one way or another. Even … the [usual] career length of notable players is only seven or eight years. That’s … a rookie contract, maybe their big extension, and then they’re out of the league.”
In addition, high salaries can often mean high taxes.
“There’s factors that people don’t realize,” said Jabari Issa, Aragon strength and conditioning coach and former NFL player. “[For example] taxes, depending on what state you’re in. If you played in California … for three years, about 40 to 50% … is taken away from [your] salary … And then you also have to take account for their agents, who take another 3%, and then just cost of living.”
With players entering the league through the draft, they have no way to control where they want to work unless they reach free agency and receive offers from multiple teams. A player drafted to one of three California teams would face the highest income tax in the U.S., according to Intuit TurboTax, as well as the second highest cost of living in the U.S., per the World Population Review. Conversely, a player drafted to the Indianapolis Colts would face the third-lowest income tax and eleventh-lowest cost of living in the country. For players forced to spend their whole careers in expensive states such as California or New York, each of which has three teams, paydays can seem much larger than they truly are.
In addition, an NFL career comes with risks, which justifies the high salaries due to the included possibility of lifetime medical costs. In a study by Boston University of 376 former NFL players in 2023, 91.7% were found to have Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. According to the Mayo Clinic, CTE is a degenerative brain disease, meaning it causes the death of nerve cells in the brain, resulting from recurring head injuries. It can cause aggression, mood changes, cognitive impairment and memory loss. CTE is found often in former athletes who played contact sports such as boxing or football.
“The [former] quarterback for the Bears, [Jim McMahon], he won all these championships, but now he can’t even really function as an adult without his wife’s supervision,” Issa said. “He can’t drive, he can’t do anything.”
McMahon was diagnosed with early-onset dementia in 2012 at 66.
However, outside of whether players are deserving of their salaries, many find the biggest issue with paying NFL players so much money to be that their salaries could be better spent in ways more beneficial to the world.
“What they’re doing for society is not that significant in making a positive impact,” said freshman Henry Hermansson. “We could be paying our firefighters more, we could be paying our teachers more, we could be paying our police officers more when they’re the ones who are actually contributing to society.”
However, while the contributions of NFL players in that aspect may be small compared to other professions, their salaries do come from profits.
“Could that money be going towards something else? Absolutely,” Issa said. “But it’s not like it’s a government job … [It’s] a result [of] fans paying that kind of money. Sponsors, TV [channels] and businesses are [also] paying that kind of money to have [streaming rights and] ads.”
No matter how fair or logical anyone thinks the contracts given to NFL players are, they are the ones who bring the money into the league. The NFL made $23 billion in the 2024 to 2025 fiscal year, 48.8% of which goes to the players per the current Collective Bargaining Agreement. None of that money would have been generated without players putting their bodies on the line to create the league’s product. The players should take their fair share of the league’s revenue, and their contracts rightfully reflect that.
