The biggest contracts in sports - How much is too much?

I certainly appreciate the value of a sportsman just as much as the next guy. The lifetime of training from before they even knew they were training. The countless hours of repetitiveness to fine-tune their skills and work on parts of their game that may be exploited by their opponents.

I also understand that since David Beckham broke down the walls of athletes becoming marketing and advertising pieces of meat, not just for sports brands but also for anything in the range between Gucci watches to home insurance, the value of having a player on your team on the field is now just as important as having them off the field.

The sports industry generates over a trillion dollars each year and clubs like the Los Angeles Dodgers make millions of dollars by having players like Shohei Ohtani as their face and take a cut of anything they touch, so both parties win. The Dodgers already get an average of just under 7,000 more fans than the next best organisation in the MLB, the New York Yankees, we can only imagine how many more bums on seats there will be in 2024 when the Japanese sensation is throwing strikes at Dodgers Stadium.

Look what it has done to soccer/football, with Christiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, Neymar and the likes moving to Saudi to play soccer, taking the best players in the game away from the best leagues. Lionel Messi moving to Miami also goes under the same category, despite coming to the end of his career, he was arguably still the best player in the game at the time of his outlandish transfer.

Money will always drive everything in this world, it is the truth about humanity, but it is taking the purity out of sport and could it potentially be its demise. $700M is too much!