Sports fans are a particularly tribal sort, particularly when it comes to their own teams - if it helps them win, all manner of things can be justified, while their sense of justice and morality goes into overdrive if the opposite is true. I don't mean to specifically attack sports fans for this behavior. First of all, I am one myself, and I am certainly not immune to bending my judgements to support my prior affiliations; further, this sort of cognitive contortion is a feature of human nature, as a cursory examination of political discourse will tell you. However, there's a particular form of partisan dissonance that I have observed in the sports world which I think is particularly corrosive - how athletes are seen as distinct from other workers.
This perspective can be seen most prominently in the United States in the attitude towards various protests opposed to police violence against black people, as well as in objections to paying college basketball and football players beyond their scholarships. Race has a lot to do with this, especially in a country such as ours where a substantial majority of the most prominent athletes are also from the lower racial caste.[1] The issue that catalyzed this essay, however, is personally important to me a different way. By the time you read this, the English soccer team I follow, Liverpool, will have sold one of their best players, Philippe Coutinho, to FC Barcelona for the third-highest transfer fee ever. I will dispense with discussion of the sporting considerations of this transaction to avoid boring the non-soccer fans to tears, but suffice it to say that most Liverpool fans have not been taking this well, especially as it comes in the middle of a promising season for the club.
Beyond the patently unprofessional way Coutinho has been trying to bring this transfer about, some of this discontent has been centered on characterizing him as greedy in some way, as he already makes a lot of money[1:1] and is likely in for a substantial salary increase at Barcelona. To me, this is beside the point. Regardless of his current economic position, he is still a worker employed by a larger, more valuable commercial entity (albeit, one with exceptional brand loyalty), and he deserves the same rights that we would expect for any other worker. This is not to say that he is "working-class" or anything like that, but he deserves any protections that we would want to grant people making a tiny fraction of what he does. Coutinho and other athletes at that rarefied level deserve to be fairly compensated in line with the value that they generate for their employers - while the sports industry is surprisingly small compared to the attention it receives, it is still a multi-billion dollar concern,[1:2] and the athletes are responsible for the majority of that valuation. By implying that he is greedy for wanting to increase his salary, as many people would if given the opportunity, fans are also implying that they would prefer that owners (one might even say "capital") take more of that value as opposed to labor.[1:3]
Further, most professional athletes are not making enough to buy a Ferrari every week or so. In the soccer context, American players that play domestically, both male and female, are most often making middle-class or worse wages,[1:4] and in England, players below the top two divisions, most of whom will never earn the big wages of players in the top flight but nonetheless play in front of crowds that frequently exceed 10,000, earn comparable salaries.[1:5] These salaries may even be artificially low because of salary caps or financial fair play restrictions on team spending. Of course, these checks also serve the purpose of preserving competitive balance and keeping teams from going overboard and destroying themselves, but they also have the effect of keeping athletes from maximizing their earning potential.
Another objection raised is that these players sign contracts, and they should honor those contracts. At the very least, this point-of-view is disingenuous, since no one seems to object when it is their own team inducing another team's player to get out of their contract through trade or transfer. But beyond that, demanding that players always stick to their contracts vastly favors the teams (once again, substantial corporate entities) over the labor. Depending on the contract, it can provide substantial economic security for players,[1:6] but they are taking on basically all the risk of the deal - if they suffer a debilitating injury while playing or training, or even while not playing, then it's fairly easy for their teams to kick them to the curb, with minimal guaranteed support if they are unable to play anymore. Seeing as even the most successful professional athletes are usually out of a job by their mid-30s, holding someone to a long contract, when they could earn quite a lot more with a different team substantially leverages management over labor.
Along those lines, unlike other contract negotiations between employees and employers, most professional sports leagues have some level of restriction on which teams a player can play for. From sports drafts, where players entering a league must initially sign with whichever team picks their rights, to transfer windows and trade deadlines, which restrict player movement to certain times of the year; the sports industry is very unlike other professions where employees have substantially more freedom of movement.[1:7] What this means is that even in a ostensibly fair negotiation, where each entity has all the information they could want, the athletes have much less ability to walk away from an unacceptable deal if they want to.
All of these bits of friction, juxtaposed with the incredible popularity of many sports, put many professional athletes in a peculiar place - high status in broader society due to their money (sometimes) and visibility, but still subject to some of the same forces that cause problems for workers much further down the ladder. With regards to broader society, these workers ought to be treated like anyone else at their particular level of income, and in their labor relations they ought to be treated like anyone else who depends on the good grace of their bosses to get paid.