unlike amateur athletes, who do not get paid for playing, professional athletes expect financial compensation.
At the lower levels, this compensation may not be so much.
At higher levels, whether they perform or not.
Salaries can be so high that some people get angry about them.
These controversial salaries are the result of market forces that few people fully understand.
One way to explain it is to study the numbers from professional sports clubs.
these clubs earn money in many different ways.
They sell tickets and souvenirs to fans.
They sell the games to television companies.
And they sell products like caps,shirts, and even computer games.
The sum of all this gives the total revenue of the club.
Then there are the expenses.
The club spends money on salaries and facilities.
They spend money to recruit new players to the team.
The plan for revenues and expenses is the budget, and any revenue left over after the expenses is the profit.
But if expenses are greater than revenues, the club will go into debt.
The writers of the book Soccernomics used a type of investigation of these figures called a statistical analysis.
They compared different figures in the budget with the actual revenues and found that players' salaries best predicted revenues.
In other words, players with high salaries attracted more fans, and the clubs sold more tickets and television time.
In short, fans want to see famous players.