Is there any reason to expect it should be otherwise? Competing in sports is a very selfish thing to do, and produces no benefit for anyone else unless you’re good enough to be entertaining to watch, so why should anyone expect to make money doing it? You’re adding no value to society.
I disagree that the low ranking athletes don't provide value to society. They are the motivation for the people at the top to continue to improve. The more people are nipping at the feet of the top athletes, the more they realise they increase their game. That's without mentioning that in some sports, a lot of people enjoy watching the lower level performers because they can more easily relate to them.
These sports in general provide value in the sense that many people find them worth paying for. That's the definition of value.
Now, it's true that they're not generally excited to see the #503rd ranked player in the world play the #489th ranked player. But, the top 50 players in the world were once ranked at the bottom. They played their way up.
In other words, how would you know who are the best players in the world unless you have a large pool of professional players?
Like many, I have a lot of issues with the way tennis rankings are calculated and the way prize money is distributed. You need those lower ranked players and therefore they should be paid more.
Also want to point out that top 500 ranked individuals in individual sports represent 99.99 percentile skill level against the entire pool of people playing that sport recreationally. It’s just that they’re playing against 99.99999% percentile skill level athletes.
But make no mistake D1 and Pro-Circuit players are, at the end of the day, still very good.
> They are the motivation for the people at the top to continue to improve.
That is improving at something that is completely useless still. It is not even more interesting to watch than, say, 20 years ago. That progress does not help anyone.
If you are better at making music, your music is better to listen. If everyone is producing better movies, we all watch better movies.
It is not the same with sport. You being 0.05s faster swimmer does not make swimming competition more fun to watch. Same with skiing or whatever. And pretty often, the performance improvements make the sport more boring to watch due to predictable optimal tactic.
The expectation is because sports are glamorized in media and pop culture, and people don't want to admit that talent is mostly genetic, and even the mental strength to practice every day is mostly genetic
What definition of "value" are you working with here?
An athlete creates something that many people do happily pay for, directly or indirectly. That is value.
Not everybody considers it worth paying for, obviously. But that's not the criteria for "value." I mean, there are a lot of things other people pay for that I don't care about.
Are there many people happily paying for what athletes produces? Because it does not seem to work that way economically. There are very few people on top who earn and massively more of those who are in financial loss. And a lot of money goes from governments and own families.
Because it does not seem to work that
way economically. There are very few people
on top who earn and massively more of those
who are in financial loss.
Well, there's two different questions there: "is there a lot of money coming in, enough to pay everybody very well?" and "are they distributing it equitably enough?"
For many sports, the answers are "yes" and "probably not."
Athletics is experimentation on human abilities and how to train them in various ways… instead of pubmed, your experiment results are published on the scoreboard.
Still selfish, albeit harmlessly so when only a voluntary hobby. Sadly some kids get a lot of family and peer pressure, regardless of their own internal motivation or lack thereof.
