I didn't read closely enough and was just thinking NBA. There are three athletes whose salary/winnings exceeded $100M last year, according to https://www.sportico.com/feature/highest-paid-athletes-in-the-world-1234765608/.
Depending on how you want to treat boxing, athletes have been making over $100M/year for a while now.
I didn't really think of European soccer or sports with prize money like Golf or sports where athletes can get a fraction of ppv sales like Boxing.
I was more thinking the four major North American leagues but I should have been more specific.
I wasn't really factoring endorsements. Ronaldo and Rahm were both paid ridiculous sums to play for Middle East organizations. I guess it counts but that seems more like an anomaly to me.
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I was excluding endorsements, too. I looked it up because I remembered that Mbappe story, but not the amount.
My guess would be that we'll see it in baseball first, just because of the lack of salary cap. NBA will be there soon, though, with the supermax contracts.
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Baseball has a luxury tax though that most teams don't want to surpass. Ohtani's contract would have worked out to 70M a year if not for deferrals but that's kind of unique case because you get an elite hitter, elite pitcher and the biggest star in a country of 120M people you can use to market your team to.
I think the Juan Soto contract this offseason will give us a barometer of what the peak annual salary for an elite player in MLB will be going forward. I am guessing it will be in the 50M range which is a long way from 100M.
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I wonder where we will be in terms of QB salaries and NFL salary cap by the time the opportunity for the Bears to extend Caleb Williams rolls around. Assuming he becomes an elite QB and a face of the league. Which is a big assumption.
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That's going up very fast. It was only like five years ago that Carr was the highest paid player ever, at only about $25M. Now, they're already over $60M. Pretty soon Mahomes' half-billion dollar contract will be the biggest bargain in the league.
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Agreed but it might slow down. We have seen a rebalancing of where teams will allocate capital. QBs, WR, DE, DL seem to have gained the most from the cap going up.
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I suspect that's going to snap back to rewarding elite QB's. I think teams are screwing this up by paying non-elite QB's as though they're elite, but Mahomes or Allen may well be worth $70 or $80 million, already.
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No one wants to be the team that gave out the next Daniel Jones contract. I hope the 49ers don't go too crazy with Purdy. I want them to keep him long term and he fits the system well but if he wants a Joe Burrow contract I am not sure.
I saw that Dak made over $90M one season, so we probably have to also be clear about how to think about salary cap shenanigans.
If baseball doesn't get there soon, basketball definitely will. Wemby will make over $100M per season at some point in his career, if he stays healthy.
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Yeah NFL is funny with the cap shenanigans. Bosa's cap hit was only 11M last year and 14M this season but it goes up to 52M in 2027. 49ers play a lot of games with the cap hit. Jed York is a good owner and pretty much lets the front office do what they want. So they will restructure guys and pay them out huge amounts of their salary in signing bonuses to manipulate the cap.
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Davante is going to have a non-guaranteed contract next season with a $44M cap hit. Something tells me they're going to renegotiate that one.
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I thought they were trading him to the 49ers. We only have 10 receivers on the 70 man. Shanahan says "moar weapons"
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How about Davante for Warner, straight up? We only have 7 LB's on our 53.