Originally Posted by deltav

Major League Baseball has even larger contracts. Football (soccer) aren't far behind - Messi & Ronaldo each make over 20 million per year, plus many tens of millions in endorsements and their total contracts are in the hundreds of millions (tho I dunno offhand how much of those are truly guaranteed).

Professional sports is a seriously fucked up misappropriation of resources from a moral standpoint - that money could surely go towards more productive causes - but hey, the market created those salaries. We watch games, buy merchandise, eat all that stuff up, we've indirectly enabled those $$$ to become totally insane.