What always confused me as a young'un was that US contracts were announced with the whole contract's worth, not just weekly/monthly/yearly pay. And US deals are quite often longer than the 5 year limit in our football, are they not?
In almost all leagues except for the NBA (where there is a 5 year max now on contracts) you will often see 6, 7, or even 8 year deals. The NHL (ice hockey) even has a couple of players on FIFTEEN YEAR contracts.
It's scary to think how high football salaries are now and how fast they are growing when compared to US sports. NFL teams are way down on the list despite being the most popular sport, AND they have the massive TV revenues that european teams just don't have - the NFL makes $5 billion a year from TV contracts alone, which are distributed evenly among the 32 teams (aka $150 million a year), and that's before even adding in tickets in larger stadiums, merchandising deals, radio, advertising, licensing, sponsorships, etc. Salaries also have a hard cap for each team, so it's impossible to spend more than something like $150 million a year. The NBA and NHL have similar structures (though not necessarily as profitable), and even MLB has a structure so that it hasn't spiraled out of control even with more imbalance between teams. With all that combined, it's a very healthy structure setup to continue for a while. When I compare that to how football is going with the wages and billionaires leveraging so much debt to fund teams, it's impossible to think how this is all sustainable.
Revenue in Football isn't spread around as evenly, but you do have some Football clubs earning a lot more from TV rights than any NFL team (a lot more in revenue overall as well). Also while the average NFL stadium is bigger, ticket revenue isn't due to the very small number of games in an NFL season.
I do agree that Football is much more out of control financially obviously. With even average Premier League teams often spending more than the top NFL sides. The whole billionaire play thing nonsense has totally distorted any financial sense and I hope the new Uefa rules will do something to counteract it.
Sorry, I should have clarified what I meant by most popular - obviously football is more popular worldwide, I just meant most popular in the US while still being relatively sane financially.
With BPL TV contracts worth about 1 billion annually, it works out to roughly 50 million per team per year depending on how it's split out, so roughly a third of what NFL teams get. This is by and large the biggest piece of revenue received by a team. Ticket revenue is nothing compared to TV revenue (yes NFL teams have about half the games as a football team, but seats are significantly more expensive and stadiums are nearly twice the size and always sold out, so it should roughly be similar). In any case, the point is that the money certainly isn't really much bigger in football overall than the NFL and might even be smaller, but it's concering how the cost structure is spiraling out of control, especially with the resources needed just to compete with the big spenders. The fact that a championship side like West Ham have significantly higher wages than any NFL team with significantly more revenue has to be a red flag. I'd expect plenty more financial implosions in the coming years as this continues.
