It's essentially slavery in the sense that most of these athletes have nothing else going for them (coming from poor backgrounds, with no education) and have no better options than to sacrifice their bodies to the sport so the owners can rake in huge profits while players only get a small percentage of it.

Take for example the number of NFL players who have been diagnosed with CTE after leaving the NFL ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgKfoatl8hk ) . A lot of these guys suffer severe mental issues and personality disorders, and they get left in the dust because they're no longer turning a profit for the owners. A lot of those guys get no medical care, and die painful deaths from drug overdose on painkillers or taking their own lives. This is the ugly side of the sport that the NFL tries to hide from the fans.

If you take a step back and look at college football, you see college football is even worse. They entice athletes with full scholarships, but most of the athletes cannot graduate because the demands of being an athlete are too much to handle while also balancing a full school workload. Schools instead create fake classes to pad athletes grades so they can stay in the program. It's the athletes that suffer in the end, they get a subpar education that is not worth anything close to a real college degree, get no money/salary, and the universities and sports programs pocket all of the money with their multi-million dollar salaries on coaching staffs.

I have heard some people say athletes are lazy and that's why they don't graduate. Haha. For those of you who went to a top 50 university in the USA, have any of you guys ever tried to work a full-time job while attending college full-time? I bet most of you have not. I did it but worked part time and I felt like I wanted to die from how burned out I was all the time after a while. School athletes spend 12-16 hours a day training and practicing, waking up at the break of dawn, but somehow need to find the time to balance an additional 20-40 hours a week of lectures and assignments.

It's an impossible task and it's setting these people up for failure, and the schools know it but don't care, and this practice is perpetuated further in the NFL. Players' best interest is never taken into consideration. Long term health? Who cares. They will dope up many athletes who are in severe pain or injured, and should not even be on the field with painkillers like Toradol so they can go out and risk aggravating their injuries and cause permanent damage so the coach/owner can have an a shot at making 1 play ( Look up "Painkillers in the NFL" on YT, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq9ytX0G5BM ). How would you feel working for a company/boss who makes you risk your life by running across a busy freeway to get him a cup of hot coffee?

Is a cup of coffee or 1 play of football how much you value your entire life and future? Is that what you consider normal? Is this what people in this country believe the relationship between a worker and employee should be? If you get injured, they fire you and toss you out to fend for yourself, and go on to hire the next person, desperate for a chance to escape poverty and a chance at a better life.

NCAA athletes don't get paid, and if they get injured, they don't get medical or workers' comp even though they contribute to billions of dollars in sales per year for team owners and the NCAA. Imagine college football like a 'training' ground where weaker 'slaves' are weeded out and thrown away, only for the 'strongest and most talented slaves' to make the cut and become 'official' workers on the plantation, and they get rewarded with medical care, actual pay, and prestige.

You say they have a choice, but they look behind them and they see their brothers who did not make the cut either due to lack of talent or injury, and they're without an education or job, having to work as a job that doesn't require a degree such as salesman. Is that really a choice? It's like telling someone to swallow poison, or you're going to shoot them in the head. Yes, they have a choice, but not really.

Behind all of the machismo, glory, and athleticism that gets promoted and advertised in sports, there is pain, addiction, manipulation, and abuse done by the rich playing their game of throwing pennies on the ground so the poor will dive in to rip each other apart while they laugh and collect stacks of $$$ bills from the audience, and the aftermath are athletes who are not the top 1% of the top 1%, the college athletes who got injured and never made it pro, the pro athletes who got injured and released, buried in hospital bills, homeless, suicidal, with no skillset, and nowhere to go. It might not be 'slavery' in the traditional sense where you are chained and forced to pick cotton, but I still think it is an abuse and disrespect to human life, and it isn't right.