Professional athletes on the same team should be paid equal salaries to improve team performance

"Workers should be paid baed on performance, not affiliation with a company" How do you reasonably quantify performance? Performance always takes place within the context of the team, and the two cannot be separated in order to be fairly quantified, thereby making individual statistics rather meaningless. A true team relies heavily on one another, and it would be arbitrary to try to quantify their individual contribution/performance, particularly without factoring the dynamics of the team. Each teammate serves a vital and specific purpose that cannot be removed from the system. Every teammate is vital or they wouldn't be there. They are there, in theory, to accomplish one goal. to win for the team. This is collectivism. In the given example. even if you think you can quantify performance and pay accordingly, one player is getting paid exponentially more for doing less work than others. Just considering the factor of playing time alone, you could make the argument that one is contributing more, and it wouldn't be the guy making the most money, yet that would still be difficult to prove. Currently, teams mostly just sink a ton on money into one player to create a star who they can prop up and exploit for profit, even if they're not that great or substantially better than the average player. This is helpful for a company's revenue as individualism in team sports is unduly popular, but I would argue that it's ultimately harmful to a team's cohesion and consequently a team's winning percentage, championship potential, and existence. Sports TEAMS ARE COLLECTIVES! Or should be if success/winning is a priority. Otherwise it's just a collection of individuals who only have their own personal interests in mind, which consequently nearly eliminates the idea of the team itself. It becomes a spectacle of individual statistics, statistics which are unfairly attributed to one person, despite it being a team effort. Large wage disparities will disrupt the team cohesion, and will likely fail to produce the desired collective results, which is the ultimate goal, and the desire of the fans who support that collective. When a guy like Kershaw plays one game a week and still gets the million dollars per game, even if he looses, and a guy who makes a fraction of his salary and puts in more work, resentment and frustration will build just as a result of the salary disparity, and team cohesion will suffer. However, you also can't fairly compare the importance of the personal statistics of a starting pitcher, for example, who plays 20-30 games versus a catcher who plays 120 games or more. Their utilities are completely different, which is why there is a team in the first place. Each utility, in theory, is equally important. Humans are not immune to averse feelings that wage disparities cause, particularly not athletes who have already had their egos inflated from a young age. The fact that they work and live amongst each other in relatively close quarters for 8 months of the year must only exacerbate such feelings, as the hierarchy is more noticeable and thus more palpable. The current individualistic model doesn't represent a team. It's just an exposition of individuals who are competing against other individuals, rather than other teams. Their own statistics will inevitably come before the team's statistics for their own self-preservation, longevity and worth, and thus the team does not work together in the way it should. If the value of every player is considered equal by each participant, then you will have the perfect team. None of this is really the fault of the player, it's the oversight of the owners who create bad work environments for the sake of their own profit. We see individual players more than we see teams, and this is why teams lose. The system is broken. Players are passed around much too freely, and favorites are chosen by the executives in well choreographed stunts which break down the "team" by promoting individual players. Sports teams are self destructing by placing so much emphasis on individuals rather than the team itself. This hurts the cohesion of the team. And team cohesion is everything in attaining success. Other factors such as geographical residence (as geography is what ultimately binds people to their favorite team) are also important, however, money and the subsequent hierarchy that it creates, will always be the biggest factor when considering success and failure.