There are a lot of interesting school of thoughts about the money a player makes from selling their merch. Believe it or not, most players who have their merch available to the people get less than a fraction of the selling price. Of course, the rules change if we talk about people like Tom Brady, or any other famous NFL legend for that matter, except for Ryan Fitzpatrick.

Where do you think Ryan Fitzpatrick is on the popularity meter? He has to be pretty high up there, right? But he still misses out on a major chunk of bread from his merch sales. Don’t believe us? Check out his post on X, where he hilariously dissects his earnings in this quarter of the fiscal year.

Ryan Fitzpatrick exposes himself

The retired NFL QB shared a screenshot of his earnings from merch sales. Clearly, those merch sales don’t significantly contribute to his $30 million net worth. “Nice to still have 💰 pouring in for merch sales in retirement…and yes this is quarterly so I get a payment like this 4 times a year!!!!,” Ryan Fitzpatrick titled his post on X.

You can see the transactions of two separate amounts: $7.33 and $0.13. $7.46 isn’t even enough to buy a pizza with a pint of beer these days. The Amazon TNF analyst hilariously replied to his own post saying, “Thank you to the mystery fan (Grandma) that got me 13 cents in royalties for FANNINCRM.” But honestly, kudos to the former Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB for sharing those numbers because not a lot of players do that.

Well, is the payout usually this low? Well, it depends on popularity and merch sales numbers of course. But for starters, “Between 11 percent and 15 percent of the merchandise sales will go to the league and is then shared equally among the teams. The rest goes to the manufacturer,” per a 2016 report from CBS. These are outdated numbers so if any of you know what the real math is, feel free to chime in.

Anyways, coming back to the CBS article, it further states that the major sportswear giants don’t make the contract information public. But we do know that Nike signed an 8-year $1 billion extension deal with NFL in 2018, so it has to cover the costs somehow. The extension started in 2020 and it will run through 2028.

Coming back to athlete side of it, the NFL players have too many options these days. Their NIL is enough to earn them millions. Players can sign a Group Licensing Agreement with NFLPA and it will help them with licensing. Trading cards, jerseys, hats, sweatshirts, sneakers, video games, toys, you name it. But forget merch sales, athletes even get paid for podcast appearances these days. This wasn’t the case a decade ago.

But the sports and financial landscape has evolved exponentially over the years. It’s more player centric now and there are more avenues to earn these days. Enough about the logic of it all. Let’s talk about the players who took the merch-sale-thing as an issue and voiced their concerns. One of those players is Richard Sherman, who talked about his NFL experience in great detail.

Richard Sherman gets too real

The reason we’re talking about this is to understand the nature of this business. In 2014, Sherman gave some valuable insights about the financial side of the league. “10 Things I Learned After America Learned About Me,” is the piece Sherman did for Sports Illustrated and it’s the sixth learning that stuck out instantly.

“6. The NFL always wins. Every time a game ends on a controversial call or somebody loses it on camera, it’s free advertising for the NFL. It’s not just my name being talked about on all the shows; it’s the NFL’s logo on all the shows. That means more eyes on the Super Bowl, more clicks for their websites, and potentially more sales of my jersey, for which I don’t see a kickback. Even when they’re taking money out of my pockets with fines, the league is constantly winning,” the former Seattle Seahawks CB wrote in 2014.

Sherman is not wrong, but that’s not so say that NFL is the bad guy here. It was Sherman’s experience and his unique one. The Super Bowl winner has earned nearly $84 million in his NFL career. Merch sale money is probably chump change to him.

There are too many variables at play when we consider semantics of business. Some of us never even studied Business 101. But it’s not hard to understand that dealing with the players, the manufacturers, distribution etc., it’s a costly affair.