speech on world of sports

For many people around the world these are difficult times, many have lost their jobs, and others are fretting about losing them. Every day we see more companies go bankrupt and the whole world seems to be waiting for the crisis to end. Everyone in the world, except the sports industry, who are still wasting vast amounts of money on salaries, TV deals, agents, and advertisements. The world of sports is too influenced by money, and by means of reducing or even removing advertisements, decreasing the salaries of professional players, and lowering the price of tickets we can improve the spirit of competition, make sports more available to everyone, with the money saved improve the lives of people who are not as well off as the people in the western world.

Sportsmen and women are people with talent that stretches far above a normal human's ability, and for this they should naturally be rewarded. However, as much as the world's economy sways the salaries of professionals only seem to be increasing. In 2008 the highest paid athlete David Beckham earned more than 48 million (Freedman) in the 1970s when TV was not as influential to sport as it now is Pete Rose was able to negotiate a million per year contract (Gilis) This clearly shows that the salaries have boomed incredibly over a short period. The average gross income for a citizen of the USA in 2005 was forty two thousand US dollars(United States Average Salaries and Income). Do athletes need forty million to survive? The amounts of money that go into the player's salary are not motivating them to strive for perfection. It only seems that more and more are doing it for the money in it, and this, ruins the healthy spirit of competition that makes sport so interesting to watch, and most importantly to play. Above all the most ridiculous amounts of money are wasted on player transfers; can anyone really be worth over a hundred million? This trend is not confined to only the players and the teams, the agents for those players have also gotten major salary changes, Mills estimates there were 50 or fewer agents when he started in 1967. He made $3,900 on his deal for Owens. Today there are about 1,000 agents certified by the NFL Players Association. Agents now are allowed to charge 3 percent. A player gets a $10 million bonus, there's $300,000 for the agent, he says. (Looney) This is definitely a good indicator of where a countries interests lie; in most countries professional athletes earn more than triple the amount of a high ranking police officer, doctor, or teacher. Suppose instead of this high average pay people started paying athletes a much lower salary per year, let's say 200,000 $, and then reward them for good performances. This would really separate a good athlete from a bad athlete and on top of that would make more athletes really put in that extra effort knowing they will be rewarded.