it sucks but it’s often true. the pay of many of these players is supported by merch, ticket sales, and sponsors, who are drawn by the profitably of the team in merch and ticket sales.
There is truth to this. But having some truth and being true aren’t necessarily the same.
Women weren’t allowed to play profesional sports for much of modern western history. Even when technically allowed culture didn’t support it, as much discourse concerning women in sports or other fields shows, it still is questionably accepted.
So let’s remove gender for a second. We have established leagues that have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and comprise assets in billions that have existing and often binding and exclusive deals for merchandising and advertising and venues.
Then we have relatively new brands in sports with much smaller budgets that lack ore existing audiences and legacy fans and all the other advantages if being the premier or often only major league of a sport in an entire country or in some cases the world.
So it is a bit of a forgone conclusion. It would be very difficult for a company to come along and start from scratch on making films and animation and usurp or match Disney. People have been raised on Disney and passed it as a tradition or custom through their families for generations like many current sports leagues and teams.
So even if we remove women from the equation- of course Vince McMahons XFL didn’t have the resources or fan base or pay scale of the NFL, but a major difference is that the XFL wasn’t comprised of people who had traditional been banned from playing the sport professionally and in some cases are still segregated to not be able to play in the leagues offering the exposure and money.
Ultimately it is true that in a “free market” people decide what they want and that makes money and usually what makes money pays money to those who do it- but that does ignore the numerous factors that influence what people want and the two way relationship between supply and demand, and how producers can influence or create demand as well as consumers can drive production through their demands. So I think it is less a case where we should arbitrarily increase salaries necessarily than it is that we could attempt to mitigate factors that drive disproportionate demand for male sports to create a more even condition where women’s sports would have less disadvantages in entering a field that is male dominated and traditionally could only be male dominated as women were largely denied the opportunity to establish those advantages on fair ground.
Of course- there are other options too. One might for example be some more well thought out version of a coop system. If for example mens and women’s sports were within the same corporate structure or we created divisions based not on gender but upon which players were competitive against each other and allowed the gender issue to sort itself on capabilities- profits could be shared across the organizations and athletes could receive an even base salary with individual teams given discretionary bonus abilities within some set of rules to allow incentives and performance rewards.
Women weren’t allowed to play profesional sports for much of modern western history. Even when technically allowed culture didn’t support it, as much discourse concerning women in sports or other fields shows, it still is questionably accepted.
So let’s remove gender for a second. We have established leagues that have budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and comprise assets in billions that have existing and often binding and exclusive deals for merchandising and advertising and venues.
Then we have relatively new brands in sports with much smaller budgets that lack ore existing audiences and legacy fans and all the other advantages if being the premier or often only major league of a sport in an entire country or in some cases the world.
So even if we remove women from the equation- of course Vince McMahons XFL didn’t have the resources or fan base or pay scale of the NFL, but a major difference is that the XFL wasn’t comprised of people who had traditional been banned from playing the sport professionally and in some cases are still segregated to not be able to play in the leagues offering the exposure and money.