Salary caps in sports are a big topic, because all of the different leagues has different rules when it comes to money. For starters, In American professional sports, particularly in the National Football League, National Basketball Association, and National Hockey League, there is a salary cap on how much teams can spend in salaries on players.
You might have noticed that i did not list Major League Baseball, and thats because the MLB does not have a salary cap. This is a serious problem because teams that make the most money off of ticket sales, merchandise, etc, will be able to spend more money on players contracts, simply because they make more money. This makes it extremely difficult for teams that don’t bring relatively the same amount of revenue (the Colorado Rockies) to get good because they can’t sign as many good players.
For comparison, the team with the highest payroll in the MLB, is the New York Yankees, with $290,541,666 to be able to spend on contracts. The team with the lowest payroll is the Oakland Athletics, with only $45,525,000.
The MLB would say in contrast, that it all evens out because if you exceed the “established threshold” set at $237 million, get taxed more than the teams that don’t exceed it, and that money gets disseminated to the teams who don’t surpass the threshold Although they say its even, these 4 teams (Phillies, Astros, Mets, Yankees) would have to cover for the other 26 teams in the league.
Enough baseball talk, the National Hockey League does have a salary cap, which is the lowest of the big 4 sports in America, which for the 2023-2024 season, sits at $83.5 Million, this levels the playing field for all teams to have a chance to get good. Sure, teams will still be bad for a long period of time, but every team has to rebuild at some point. This salary cap is slowly going up, as it was $81.5 million for the last 3 seasons.
The cap is expected to make one of its biggest jumps in the 2024-2025 season, being a raise of $4.1 million, while its largest raise was $4.5 million.
For the National Basketball Association (NBA), the salary cap is slightly different, the cap currently sits at $136 million, but they have what they call a “soft cap” which means that teams are allowed to go over $136 million, but it changes the way you get taxed, as well as other work-arounds. For example, the Golden State Warriors had the largest payroll at the start of this season, spending $208.2 million. This soft cap was first expected to make a large jump to $142 million, but that projection has gone down and people speculate it will sit around $141 million for the 2024-2025 season.
Lastly, the NFL is seeing the largest increase in league history jumping from $224.8 million, to $255.4 million. Even with this 30.6 million dollar increase, some teams exceeded the cap, and are in the negatives, meaning they have to make more cuts in the off season, with less signing of large contracts. The Buffalo Bills are the team the furthest in the negatives as they went $43,815,909 over the cap.
