WHICH person in the world received the best Christmas present in 2024?
If we think purely in terms of money, I suggest that the man who is ahead of the field is a Dominican baseball star called Juan Soto, who was reported shortly before Christmas to have signed a 15-year, $765 million contract with the New York Mets, which is by far the largest contract financially in Major League Baseball (MLB) history.
And not just baseball. It’s been widely reported to be the richest contract in the history of all sports.
Baseball contracts have grown substantially in size since 1995, the year that the launch of Super League was being planned, because of a combination of factors creating increased revenue for the sport.
The total income of MLB has increased by more than 250 per cent in real terms (i.e., accounting for inflation) since 1995. Like all major American sports and European football leagues, baseball has excelled at squeezing the maximum out of conventional and satellite broadcasters while exploiting new technologies like the internet, smartphones, and social networking to increase its revenue streams.
The financial rewards that baseball can deliver have seen a series of salary milestones with the major stars receiving salaries that dwarf those of the average fan. And that was true even in the pre-war days of the 1930s.
Babe Ruth, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, the mention of whose name still makes New York Yankees fans go misty-eyed, earned an estimated $856,850 over his entire 22-year playing career from 1912 to 1934.
When asked in 1930 whether he thought he deserved to earn $80,000 a year while the American President, Herbert Hoover, had a $75,000 salary, Ruth remarked, “What the hell has Hoover got to do with it? Besides, I had a better year than he did.”
Almost 70 years later the first $100 million contract was signed in 1998, when the Los Angeles Dodgers signed their pitcher Kevin Brown to a seven-year, $105 million contract.
That equates to $15 million per year, whereas that figure has now grown to $51 million per year in the cast of Mr Soto, who is now 26 years old and his contract, if he fulfils it, will take him up to the age of 41.
It’s a dizzying rate of growth for players’ salaries in baseball and it shows no signs of slowing.
And the same is true of American Football (NFL) and basketball (NBA), while it is also true of Premier League football.
So why isn’t it true of rugby league?
Super League launched in 1996 with an initial income of £87 million over five years from Rupert Murdoch’s broadcasting organisation, equating to £17.4 million per year.
It is now almost 30 years since that initial deal was agreed by the RFL’s then chief executive Maurice Lindsay.
And the current income from Sky Sports has risen by just over £4 million per year to £21.5 million.
Simply to keep pace with inflation, the amount agreed in 1996 would by now need to have doubled to around £35 million per year.
Strangely enough, Lindsay’s successor Nigel Wood negotiated a deal worth £40 million per year in 2014 but the income since then has almost halved.
Wood left the RFL in January 2018 and since then rugby league’s income has declined precipitously.
And the knock-on effect is that player salaries have effectively stagnated, with the average salary of the top 250 Super League players being probably around £70,000 per year.
And for that we invite young men to play what may be justifiably claimed to be the toughest sport on the planet.
If we judge the health of a professional sport by the income it generates, we have to conclude that rugby league has been a failure.
The question is why other sports have left rugby league so far behind financially.
Is it the fault of those people who have run the game for so many years?
Or was there nothing they could have done to have boosted our sport’s revenues at the same rate we’ve seen in other sports?
Let’s look at what happens to the income that other sports generate.
The NFL, for example, in the 2023 season generated in excess of $20.24 billion, the highest amount it has ever generated, of which it distributed just over half to the clubs while retaining the remainder to spend on administration and marketing.
Depending on how you define marketing spend, the NFL is thought to spend at least £500 million per year promoting itself.
The problem for us is that Maurice Lindsay created the template in 1995 when he agreed to forward virtually the whole of that £87 million to the clubs, retaining virtually nothing to market and promote the game.
At that moment the die was cast and rugby league condemned itself to a future without the financial capacity to create a marketing and expansion strategy.
And in doing so it condemned our leading players to a standard of living that is well below what they should be earning, given the demands of the sport they play.
While Juan Soto is celebrating his $51 million per year contract this Christmas, the first £1 million per year contract for a Super League player looks to be as far away as ever.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 504 (January 2025)
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