Giants receiver Odell Beckham thinks the $10.4 million he’s guaranteed over the first four years of his rookie contract is not enough.
“I think that we should make more money, personally,” Beckham told The Huffington Post when asked what he’d change about the NFL.
Beckham says NFL players should get paid more than baseball or basketball players because football is a more dangerous game.
“I understand that basketball plays 80-something games, baseball plays this many games, soccer plays that many games, but this is a sport where there’s more injuries. There’s more collisions. It’s not even a full-contact sport, I would call it a full-collision sport. You have people running who can run 20 miles per hour and they’re running downhill to hit you, and you’re running 18 miles per hour. That’s a car wreck. It’s just the career is shorter. There’s injuries that you have after you leave the game, brain injuries, whatever it is, nerve injuries.”
The truth, however, is that the danger inherent to a profession has little to do with the pay within that profession. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, logging is America’s most dangerous profession. If people were paid according to the risks associated with their jobs, lumberjacks would make more than NFL players. But that’s not how it works.
In reality, NFL players make less money than baseball and basketball players primarily because baseball and basketball have smaller rosters. The players’ percentage of the league’s revenue is similar in all three sports, but in the NFL that money is divided among a much larger pool of players -- more than twice as many players as in Major League Baseball and more than four times as many players as in the National Basketball Association.
As a result, it’s unlikely that NFL players will ever make as much, on average, as MLB or NBA players. No matter how much Beckham thinks they should.