Data on the Surface: Sports Salaries by League

I don’t want to spend hours and hours gathering data, investigating, and analyzing almost every detour that I find, so here’s just something quick.

Watching SportsCenter was a daily thing for me in high school—both in the morning and after school/sports practice—and I distinctly remember watching one day when they reported Drew Brees’s contract in 2012. A five-year, $100 million contract. This absolutely blew my mind at the time (and frankly, it still does). That’s an average of $20 million each year. If you make a considerable $200,000 a year, it would take you 100 years to match that $20 million mark.

I can’t remember why this popped into my head now, but I just wanted to recontextualize the salaries that professional athletes in the top U.S. leagues make. I don’t want to do a deep dive into positions, career length/earnings, or inflation; I just want to take a simple, on-the-surface look at the data simply out of curiosity.

I found the 2019 salaries (or averages over the contract period) for players in the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA, then I divided these values by the median U.S. income in order to find how many years it would take to match the athlete’s 2019 salary, then I plotted the medians of these values for each league.

I was particularly surprised by the NHL’s position on the graph, but it might not be as surprising when we realize/remember that the NHL’s active player roster size is 23 players (although only 20 can dress for any given game), compared to the NFL’s 53-man active roster. So, looking at the number of players in each league (according to the databases from which I got the salary data), there’s likely a relationship between roster size and how much players are payed, making the NHL’s position on the graph a bit less surprising:

While the NHL does have the second highest median salary out of the four major U.S. sports leagues, it is the least spread out, with its highest average yearly salary in 2019 taking only 261.6 years to match with a median income (please note my sarcastic use of “only” here…) while the other three leagues have salaries that take over twice as long to match. The MLB and NBA both have salaries that would take longer than eight centuries to match, with Steph Curry, Stephen Strasburg, and Chris Paul all topping that mark.

I don’t have much of a conclusion here or any commentary on athlete salaries—I just want to experiment with some data out of curiosity, and hopefully the few minutes spent reading this made your day just a tiny bit more interesting.

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Sources

• NFL: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/players/salary.htm
• MLB: https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/rankings/2019/
• NHL: https://www.spotrac.com/nhl/contracts/
• NBA: https://www.basketball-reference.com/contracts/players.html
• Median Weekly Salary (multiplied by 52 to get a yearly value): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

• Data on the Surface