Why do footballers, musicians, actors/actress get paid the highest salaries around the world? Instead of teachers, doctors or nurses?
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The best doctors and teachers are rarely well known whilst we all know average teachers and nurses. We know about the best stars but not the lesser known ones
In England there are 12 levels of professional football (with lower leagues being regional there’s actually far more than 11 leagues)
If you’re playing for a club that qualifies for European football you’re a millionaire. If you play in a championship or league 1 club you’re still likely well off but will need a plan for once you retire.
Once you get into a regional league (level 5) you will need a second job just to live as the payments are nowhere near enough to live off.
The same is true for actors. The best actors are millionaires but the vast majority live gig to gig.
Take any film with Tom hanks, whilst he earns millions every extra on his films are likely earning less than a £80 a day. Actors in adverts get paid small amounts and bit roles in theater TV and movies pay well enough to live but not enough to be rich.
My boyfriend is a singer-songwriter and dj. Pre covid he earns enough to live but actually it’s not massively more than a 40 hour week minimum wage job. He still prefers gigs to bat work as its more fun and less hours for a similar amount of money. He, rather than Ed sheeran is the common outcome of being a musician (maybe not common because there’s even more who can’t earn enough just doing music)
For doctors, nurses and teachers you can bet that those who treat/teach the 0.1% are millionaires but because they’re not famous we rarely here about them.
Tldr we only hear about rich footballers, not poor ones and we only here about poor nurses and not the rich ones. In reality both have the same hockey stick earnings graph
They are being paid depending on how replaceable they are. If one teacher dies you can replace the same for same salary, but let’s say if Kim Kardashian dies You are losing billions of $ because the money making industry was centered around that face.
Because they make the most money for other people. They generate much more money for those paying them than they cost. This is not true of teachers or nurses. It is true of doctors, which do get paid more than teachers or doctors. It’s also why CEOs and others can make so much more than others.
Because they bring in money. Movies starring famous actors make significantly more money than ones starring unknown actors, and millions of people watch their movies. People pay $500 to hear famous musicians play.
You get paid for how much money you will bring in. This is similar to law firms, consulting, or investment banking. How much money you will bring in to the firm governs how much money you will be paid. Movie stars have ‘box office draw’ that links their involvement in a project to hire much money it will bring in. Same for footballers etc. Teachers, doctors, nurses, etc make money based on them being a resource (i.e. we need a number of doctors per 100,000 people or things will be bad). Not based on them bringing in money.
Because of generating money.
A musician will normally be signed to a record label, sell records, tickets, t-shirts, posters and other merchandise which makes money for the record label.
Same with actors: often a studio that is making a movie might decide to increase the budget and do more advertising because they can get a specific person to be in the film, selling more tickets and making them more money. A person that is an A list performer might be offered several different roles in a year, and they may chose to go with the one that offers them more money.
On the other hand, a teacher might make a priceless contribution to countless students over the course of their career – but that doesn’t directly translate into big dollars coming back to the school.
The monetary and value system is being governed into the wrong things, monetary value comes from market demand and supply, and if the markets are then controlled by an external factor lets say like minded individuals that have a secret agenda behind it. Follow the money 💵, because where it flows there is an ideology always behind the person earning it.
Most actors, footballers, musicians etc. don’t there are an awful lot of them barely scraping by and doing extra jobs etc. However the elite in each of those areas can be paid a fantastic amount of money because the public want to go and see those people in particular perform, with so many people paying so much to watch them they get a “percentage” of ticket sales etc. Some elite doctors and teachers can get quite high salaries though not on a scale with the others.
Another way to look at it is volume of crowd sourced pay. A top level footballer can easily get maybe millions to support him with a small fee (tickets, merchandise, TV contracts), but a typical teacher (nurse, Doctor,etc) maybe has a 100 people that would make an input to salary.
Basically people vote with each Dollar, famous people in entertainment just get more votes.
Supply versus demand. There is a very small pool of hyper talented athletes, actors and musicians, which serve a huge demand, perhaps millions of consumers every year. Where as there is a ‘relatively’ and i do mean relatively large amount of doctors, nurses and teachers who can do the required job to perhaps a few hundred people every year. That being said the top doctors which specialise in anesthesiology for example, can be paid similar amounts to top tier performers because they are in such high demand.
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