We all like to dream. For any football fan, one of those dreams that we try to enact out every time we watch the game is to play the role of a coach. We yell out suggestions with the hope that our sheer will can translate across time and space and reach them. We cheer when they make the right move, or a better move, and we bemoan when they don’t listen to us.
With how much these footballer players cost, you might think that they are the best paid sporting professionals in the world. Shockingly, as this Cash Lady infographic showcases, they aren’t. The richest football player, Roger Staubach, owes most of his fortune to his exceptional real estate business and investments.
Thankfully, in this exercise we won’t be basing their cost on their total net worth, just on the price per season. So, how much would you need to make for the most expensive football players?
The Most Expensive NFL Players (By Salary)
- Russell Wilson: $70 Million USD Salary and Bonuses
- Ben Roethlisberger: $45 Million USD Salary and Bonuses
- Drew Brees: $23 Million USD Salary and Bonuses
- Tom Brady: $23 Million USD Salary and Bonuses
- Nick Foles: $30.8 Million USD Salary and Bonuses
How Much NFL Teams Make
Mostly, however, like any business, you will be paying these players through tickets, memberships, merchandise, TV deals, and sponsorships. The NFL as a whole earned an approximate $8.1 Billion USD for the year. Split evenly between each time, this amounts to $255 million, and that’s just the money coming in from national revenue channels.
Local revenue is earned and kept by the leagues themselves. To put into perspective how much you can earn from local revenue, the Packers brought in an additional $196 million on top of the money earned from national revenue.
So, you have around $450 million earnings as a top tier league, and the total earnings and bonuses for the top 5 players is $191.8 USD, which gives you just $250 million left for the 50 other players on your team, your coaches, staff, lawyers, design teams, marketers, and everyone else. It’s fairly safe to say most of us will never see this amount of money in our lifetime, but we can continue to support our favorite teams.
Build Your Fantasy Football Team
Thankfully, we have our fantasy football teams instead, which you can learn how to build on Dummies. These teams are far easier to build as you’re given a set budget and the cost of players is entirely dependent on how popular they are. You don’t want to automatically go for the most expensive players in real life. A well balanced, developed team is far more important for your fantasy team’s success. Choose one or two superstars, sure, but the rest of your team need to be chosen based on their skill and how well they balance out the team.
The big superstars are expensive in real life, and in the fantasy football world, they are expensive, too. So it is still important to pick and choose with care.
