As explained in Playmakers, NFL fans tend to align with the teams (and the owners of those teams) over the players. For the vast majority of fans, there’s no real difference between millionaire players and billionaire owners.
As a practical matter, there’s a gigantic difference. For starters, many players aren’t millionaires, not after taxes and living expenses and everything else that turns a million bucks into something far less than that.
And players have a limited time to make NFL money; most are out of the game before they even approach their thirtieth birthdays. They have no equity. Owners own the team as long as they want, until they sell. Or until their heirs sell. When they do (after years of making many millions over and over again), they realize the astronomical return on the original investment, whatever it may have been.
Myles Simmons and I discussed the dynamic of millionaires vs. billionaires during Friday’s PFT Live. For most people, however, it’s still difficult to appreciate the distinction. All that matters is that both millionaires and billionaires have more.
A reader suggested earlier today a great way to understand the difference between millionaire and billionaire. I double-checked the math, because the numbers were stunning.
If you receive one dollar for every second of every hour of every day, you’d have $100,000 in 27.78 hours. In 11.57 days, you’d have a million.
So when does the meter hit a billion? That would take 31.71 YEARS.
Keep that in mind when resenting the men who take the short- and long-term physical risks and who usually don’t have a million bucks in the bank when the game spits them out, and when softly applauding those who have more money than they could ever spend — even if they spent one dollar for every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year.