When you are a football player, and this is what you have been training and dreaming of your entire life, making $15mil instead of $30m, or maybe $1m instead of $2m on the low end, would not make you stop playing football and start selling insurance or whatever.

I was simply commenting about where the money goes. Players capture a lot of the revenue, a decline in revenue will thus likely be reflected in a decline in their compensation. To your point, they can go down quite a lot and still be viable.

Gotcha, I was just saying how I doubt it will result in worse player quality, at least not immediately.

Not player quality but maybe, just maybe extremely ostentatious lifestyle will be less visible.

Well that's tragic /s

It's more about young athletes who have the choice between sports where your brain turns to mush and make half as much as you used to or other sports that are easier on the body. Look whats happened to boxing.

Not as soon as you might think. NBA just signed a broadcast deal with Turner and ESPN big enough to allow every teams salary cap to increase to $94m (from $70m) per year. This is making even mediocre players incredibly wealthy this year.

Take for example this feature on a relatively unknown player named Tyler Johnson[0], who just signed a deal that'll earn him about half of Michael Jordan's entire cumulative career salary in just 4 years -- or $50 million. And that's one of the lowest new deals cited in the article.

I do know that it's a fact broadcast deals affect player salaries, but I expect salaries to continue trending upward even while broadcasters shift focus to web/streaming distribution.

0. http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/17892288/how-mia...

Doesn't seem so bad to me. Chances are they will try just as hard, as the minimum salaries in pro sports are still a fairly long distance from what those guys could otherwise be doing. There's also the prestige of participating in the spectacle. Even when sports people were paid merely above average salaries they'd do it. You can even look at lower league participants; they're happy to work a job as well as practice for the chance to make it.