When Is a Superstar Just Another Employee?
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Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and I thought you might need a bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio for the upcoming Super Bowl. We recently put out a new episode about the economics of the running back position in the NFL. This episode, which we first published in 2023, looked at NFL teams as employers. We've updated facts and figures as necessary, although the team rankings we discuss are from the 2023 report card. So stick around to the end to hear what changed in 2024. As always, thanks for listening. Hi, what can I get for you today? Maybe even something like this. Stand clear of the closing doors, please. What you probably don't think about when I say workplace environment is this. But if you are one of the roughly 2,000 men who play in the National Football League, that's your office. I mean, it's business. Let's not get it wrong. It's business. The NFL Players Association, or NFLPA, is the union that represents the players. And in 2023, they conducted their first ever employee survey about workplace conditions.
I would never have thought to ask, are there rats in your locker room? And they gave letter grades to each of the league's 32 teams.
This is really about, are we giving you the inputs you need to be as productive as possible?
The NFL is the richest and most successful sports league in history. Each team is worth at least $4 billion.
Nobody wants to be known as the cheapskate. Before, when it was rumored you were the cheapskate, it was harder to prove. Now there's data.
And what does the data have to say? Among U.S. employees in general, job satisfaction is higher than it's been in decades. How satisfied are NFL players? Now, you may be saying to yourself, who cares about the workplace environment of NFL players? They make so much money, the environment shouldn't matter. Or you may say, pro football is so different from what I do for a living, there's no way I'm going to learn anything worthwhile from this. Well, if we have done our job in making this episode, you will. At the very least, with another NFL season in the books, you will learn which teams got the best grades and the worst. Never really heard of an F-minus before.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
Imagine that you have just graduated from college with a degree in, say, mechanical engineering, and you know exactly what kind of company you want to work for. And let's say there are 32 such companies within a hundred mile radius of where you want to live. So which company will you end up at? To a large degree, that is up to you. You can apply wherever you'd like, and if that company thinks you are qualified and they make you an offer, you can decide whether to accept or reject the job. This is not how it works in professional sports. Imagine now that instead of studying mechanical engineering, you went to college to play football. If you are good enough to play in the National Football League or if you're an athlete good enough to play in any of the other major American sports leagues, you don't get to choose which team you play for. It's the teams that choose the players in an annual draft. Teams with the worst records the previous season typically get to pick earlier in the draft and the best teams pick later.
In the NFL, most rookie contracts will bind you to that team for four years. The top-ranked players may sign huge rookie contracts with millions of dollars guaranteed, but that's just the top of the pyramid. Around 50% of NFL players make the league minimum. This year, that was a base salary of $840,000 for a rookie, with gradual increases for each year of service. So, yes, that's a big paycheck compared to most first jobs, but... The average NFL career is barely three years long, so a lot of players are out of the league before their rookie contract expires. They are replaced by someone even younger and cheaper. If you are good enough to stick around past that rookie contract, and if you're lucky enough to have remained healthy – those are two big ifs – then you become what is called an unrestricted free agent, and you can sell your services to whichever team wants you – Finally, after four years in the NFL, you have achieved the workforce freedom of a newly graduated mechanical engineer.
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