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Journalism of Courage
Rishabh Pant became the highest paid cricketer in the history of the Indian Premier League, after being sold for Rs 27 crores (approximately $3.1 million) in this year’s IPL auction. Pant’s contract, however, pales in comparison to the one signed by baseball star Juan Soto earlier this week, which will see the southpaw slugger make upwards of $50 million per year for the next decade-and-a-half.
Considered to be the best hitter in Major League Baseball, Soto has reportedly inked a 15-year, $765 million deal with the New York Mets which translates to an average annual value (AAV) $51 million. This figure can go upto $805 million if he declines the opt-out available to him in 2029 (translating to an AAV of $55 million for the remainder of the deal). The total figure includes a massive $75 million signing bonus.
Soto’s deal is the largest, and longest the game of baseball — or any professional sports league — has ever seen. Here are 4 reasons why he was awarded such a deal.
Although Soto’s contract is the largest in terms of the cumulative amount he will be paid over the course of the deal, it still pales in comparison to the yearly figures made by the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Karim Benzema, and Neymar in their swansong years.
For instance, Ronaldo reportedly earns $260 million a year playing for Al Nassr in the Saudi Pro League, with most of that money coming for his image rights and commercial deals with the Saudi state. Over in Major League Soccer, Forbes estimates that Leo Messi might be earning around $135 million a year, including his official MLS salary as well as deals with Apple and Adidas.
In the NBA, Steph Curry, Jaylen Brown and soon Jason Tatum, will all be collecting upwards of $60 million a year. Tatum’s ‘Supermax’ contract will net him 315 million dollars over five years — a better average deal over Soto’s. The bottomline is that sports contracts have gotten bigger over time, as sports has become an ever so lucrative business.
What sets the Soto contract apart is the length and guaranteed money he is pulling in. More baseball-specific reasons play a part here.
The way MLB contracts work is that players generally make the league minimum for three years after their debuts — which stood at $740,000 in 2024 — followed by three years of arbitration, where players and their clubs negotiate a salary. This is a bigger amount than the rookie minimum, but generally a smaller amount than what a player would be eligible for in the free market.
This means that players become eligible for big contracts only six years after their debut. Given the age most MLB players enter the league, they are usually in their late 20s or even in their early 30s when they receive their big contract.
Soto, however, is only 26. Having made his debut for the Washington Nationals at 19 , the baseball prodigy from the Dominican Republic has consistently been in the Top 10 of the MVP race in MLB. Soto’s age sets up the Mets not only for immediate wins, but also for long term success as a club.
This is indeed the kind of headline deal that Mets owner Steve Cohen has been trying to make for the past four years.
Historically, the New York Mets have been a mediocre team, and have lived under the shadow of the legendary New York Yankees. Cohen, who took ownership of the Mets in 2020, has been trying to change this status quo in New York baseball.
While every team courting Soto met the superstar in a California hotel during free agency, Cohen called for a meeting at his Beverly Hills mansion. For the richest owner in baseball, with a net worth of $21.3 billion according to Forbes, this was both an act of gamesmanship and an attempt to provide a personalised pitch to Soto.
According to The Athletic, Soto himself wanted to be close to the owner of the club he played for. While playing for the Yankees in the 2024 season, he saw how close Aaron Judge, the franchise’s multiple-MVP winning star player, was to owner Hal Steinbrenner. Soto reportedly wanted a similar status, something that might ultimately have pushed him to move from Bronx to the Queens despite the two New York teams offering similar deals. (The Yankees reportedly made Soto a 16-year, $760 million offer).
Soto’s choice has now ignited a city rivalry that was never really one. “The Yankees are the Yankees. I respect that,” Cohen told USA Today. “This is not about the Yankees versus the Mets. It’s about competing for a player. We both can exist in New York. There’s plenty of room.”
What makes Soto’s contract truly massive is its length. And for top hitters in baseball, lengthy contracts are the norm, albeit with smaller per-year sums than some other sports.
For teams, such offers reduce overall annual spending and help keep the club within MLB’s loose salary restriction. (The league does not have a salary cap but a progressive tax structure where beyond certain thresholds in terms of overall salary, teams have to pay hefty sums to the league). By paying players $300 million over ten years, rather than say $180 million over four years, teams reduce their overall annual salary budget. This also allows the club to build more rounded teams, by investing on multiple players rather than a single individual.
For players, such contracts provide them more guaranteed money than most other sports would allow for. And given that most top players are underpaid in their initial years, they allow players to recoup some of that lost money by being overpaid in the latter years of the contract as they grow older.
That said, top baseball players generally have longer shelf lives than most other sportspersons meaning that teams too are willing to offer longer contracts to tie talent down for the long term.
