The question is what do you bring to the table that no one else has got. Being the best at a sport? Well, if you quit someone else is the best at a sport. So being the best at a sport isn't really scarce.
Now with a team sport you do start to run out of the best pretty quickly. And because there is competition to get them signed with a team, you can actually negotiate some pay. That and am atheletes real delivered value is entertainment, and many team athletes spend at least a couple hours on TV once a week when in season, while an olympic athlete, some of them are on the TV for 20 seconds once every 4 years.
If these athletes want to improve the pay for their slice of the industry they should figure out how to turn what they do into a team sport. It offers more value and it forces another slice to compete for you. Then the player slice has more leverage over the owner/organizer slice.
It doesn't have to have the same television appeal of football or basketball. Organizing it as a team event should still help the money go from nothing to something. But tournaments are the way to get more watch time. Snooker isn't even a team event and gets tones of watch time. The fact that these athletes are competing in a single scored event is really working against them.
In fact I bet people who do curling make more money on average than most olympic atheletes. But they are locked into their country so that's the other thing that is hurting them.
It's entertainment and politics wrapped in the myth of patriotism - the way they sell us the idea to unquestioningly support the troops, yet fail them at every turn.
Also, keeping them down and in check prevents them from having an authentic say.
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The question is what do you bring to the table that no one else has got. Being the best at a sport? Well, if you quit someone else is the best at a sport. So being the best at a sport isn't really scarce.
Now with a team sport you do start to run out of the best pretty quickly. And because there is competition to get them signed with a team, you can actually negotiate some pay. That and am atheletes real delivered value is entertainment, and many team athletes spend at least a couple hours on TV once a week when in season, while an olympic athlete, some of them are on the TV for 20 seconds once every 4 years.
If these athletes want to improve the pay for their slice of the industry they should figure out how to turn what they do into a team sport. It offers more value and it forces another slice to compete for you. Then the player slice has more leverage over the owner/organizer slice.
It doesn't have to have the same television appeal of football or basketball. Organizing it as a team event should still help the money go from nothing to something. But tournaments are the way to get more watch time. Snooker isn't even a team event and gets tones of watch time. The fact that these athletes are competing in a single scored event is really working against them.
In fact I bet people who do curling make more money on average than most olympic atheletes. But they are locked into their country so that's the other thing that is hurting them.
It's entertainment and politics wrapped in the myth of patriotism - the way they sell us the idea to unquestioningly support the troops, yet fail them at every turn.
Also, keeping them down and in check prevents them from having an authentic say.