Penn State will have no fans at fall sports. Plans for 20k+ for football games were not approved by the Commonwealth of PA.
A player would have to decide between going to a college that admits him, or earning $2.7 million (or maybe just $200,000). I don’t see the problem here.
Article assumes that if you divorce college football and basketball from colleges (and that is what would happen), the revenues would be the same. Not sure that would be the case given the amount of revenue/support that comes from alums. MLB baseball has a minor league system. What are their revenues and salaries?
The mlb minor league system is also a form of exploitation, similar to college football and basketball. None are part of a union as cardinalfang pointed out, so there’s no one to represent those three to get the fair wages they deserve.
College football basically serves as a minor league for the NFL. No high school senior is ready to go straight into the NFL. Therefore, it is unfair to look at NFL pay when determining what might be “fair”. Rookie league minor league baseball players earn $290/week for their 5 month season, which was cancelled this year. Those players need to get other jobs during the off-season, plus stay in shape and hope to move up the ranks. It looks like MLB just voted to raise minor league pay, but still none of those players are getting rich. https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/28702734/mlb-raising-minimum-salary-minor-leaguers-2021
Is everyone not represented by a union exploited or just if they play sports?
Minor League Baseball pays very low wages for single A & double AA teams. Triple AAA pay is better, but still far less than what Major League Players are paid.
The NBER paper that I referenced upthread didn’t look at the NFL for pay comparisons for college football and men’s basketball players. Instead, it said that in professional sports where players are represented by a players’ union, typically the union negotiates that 50% of the sports’ revenue goes to the athlete.
College football and men’s college basketball are enormously profitable, but the profit doesn’t go to the athletes. If it did, if 50% of the revenues went to the athletes as it should, then the salaries would be similar to what I quoted upthread.
What are the wages for these sports as a percentage of the revenue?
This article says it was 54.2% and that was second lowest since 2010.
I’m sorry, I meant what are the wages in minor league baseball as a percentage of the revenue for minor league baseball?
Haven’t seen those numbers. But the percentages can’t be very high. 2021 plan is to increase rookie and short season wages to $400/week. Single A would be up to $500/week, double A up to $600/week and triple A up to $700/week. For a 5 month season. About $15k/season for AAA.
There are something like 260 minor league teams in US. Seems crazy high but that was I understand. Full rosters of 30 at the AAA rate would be about $120 million/season. MLB revenues were $10.7 billion in 2019. Minor league salaries were lower then but even at the 2021 rates, its about 1% of league revenues.
We seem to be talking at cross purposes here. I asked what minor league salaries are as a percentage of minor league revenue. Minor league salaries are small, but minor league revenues are also small. I assume most minor league revenue is from the gate and from local sponsors, and it just can’t be that much: tickets to see minor league baseball are cheap, and advertisers are local small businesses who can’t be paying very much because they don’t have very much.
Per this article, minor league teams (it says there are 160 of them – not sure why some sources say 260 and others 160). Gross revenues for them was $864 million for 2019. Works out to be $5.4 million per team (no doubt its not shared equally though with some teams making more and others less). If 50% revenue was the goal and $15,000/player/season is salary, you could have 180 on the roster. Don’t think that is the case. 25-30 seems right. So salaries as percentage of total revenues is about 10% (at most).
https://www.axios.com/minor-league-baseball-coronavirus-3784fac0-3494-4b9c-a158-856cd3f7ee62.html
Good info! This was particularly useful:
So these are a low-margin local businesses, where 89% of revenue goes to operating expenses. The entire revenue of a minor league baseball team is less than the salary of one college football head coach.
This to me does not seem like a good comparator for college football and mens basketball, hugely profitable nation-wide entertainment businesses.
If college football became a true minor league, they would not be able to sell 100k tickets @ $100+. The TV revenue would also go to zero. States are not going to run minor league teams. Most of the big teams are state schools.
I agree that revenues will drop significantly.
Dabo is ok with revenue sharing but thinks it should be tied to graduation:
MAC cancels football season.
@saillakeerie: Thank you for your helpful contributions to this thread.
Cancellation of college football for even one season will cause negative effects on university finances for several years. Cancellation of college football which affects the Power 5 conferences for two consecutive seasons is likely to cause substantial change in American college culture due to the loss of revenue.
Is it possible that Covid-19 or another novel coronavirus could result in two consecutive years of cancellation of major college football ?
If so, how will this affect the traditional American college culture & experience at major US universities ?