It’s time for another Thursday Thorns piece, as more and more the sports world just continues to disappoint us. What can we say? P.T. Barnum would have hated us. Yet the reality is that Barnum would have despised anyone with critical-thinking skills, and we all know about 75 percent of American society lacks those brain powers. Too many sports fans, let alone sports mediots, just don’t put on their thinking caps today, as it would ruin their feelings and illusions, for sure.

So, what led us to this lede today? Oh, where to start!

This is a universal issue, really, as it applies to pretty much all the major sports, including hockey. The guaranteed contracts given out by teams in MLB, the NBA, the NFL, and the NHL are just a joke—and truthfully, a complete insult to the hard-working fans who spend their money to go see athletes perform. We understand concepts of worker compensation when injured on the job, but like the vast majority of employees in the world, competence matters, truly.

Players who continue to get paid insane amounts of money while either underperforming or mildly injured really ruin the “myth” of sports competition and compensation. The most recent report about San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Brandon Aiyuk is just one example, of course; we’ve been commenting on this in baseball for years now, and the NBA really is no different. We understand teams have insurance policies for injuries and resulting loss of financial assets, etc.

But come on.

It’s a supply-and-demand issue we cannot understand anymore. Maybe we have gotten old, having grown up in a golden age of professional sports in the 1970s and 1980s, before salaries really started skyrocketing in the 1990s with the advent of a new era of owners and aggrandizement in sport. We’re not advocating for the times before free agency when most, if not all, players in all sports had to work offseason jobs to make ends meet. We understand the value of entertainment here.

Yet how much is enough? Baseball salaries are climbing toward $50M a year in many cases, and we’re not sure the average fan can even comprehend that amount of money. It seems like Monopoly money to most of them, in truth, when a family of four can’t go to the ballpark without spending almost $500 themselves. If sports on TV goes to a PPV/streaming model soon, then how will young fans even begin to care about sports? They won’t, because they can’t.

Greed kills all good things in the end, and we’re in a slippery-slope situation in so many ways when it comes to sports as entertainment for the masses. These guaranteed contracts are just part of the problematic equation, of course, just as giving public funds to billionaires to build stadiums is a terrible practice for the general populace. Giving athletes excessive amounts of money when they have not earned it is quite problematic, as it creates even more social inequity.

In the end, sports figures are just entertainers, and yes, some film actors get guaranteed money whether a film flops or not, and even those contracts shouldn’t be that way in an alleged meritocracy. What happened to making money the old-fashioned way? Actually earning compensation through achievement via hard work is still the norm for the vast number of people in the world, and it really should not be any different for sports figures. They’re not integral members of society.

However, their value will continue to be derived from the supply-and-demand markets out there, so we do implore sports fans to pick their sport spots very carefully: you work hard for your money, so don’t just give it away to merely anyone out there. Perhaps give it to the athletes who really deserve it, and maybe we can return this world to sanity.