Average NFL player salary

It appears that somewhere around 2005, the universe decided that NFL players and industrial robots should enjoy precisely the same economic tailwinds, moving together with the kind of synchronisation usually reserved for pairs of shoes in a dryer. One wonders if there's a memo, or perhaps they've simply agreed to coordinate their salary increases with the installation schedules of manufacturing equipment in Southeast Asia. The correlation is 0.960, which is the sort of number that makes statisticians nervous in ways they can't quite articulate.

What's actually happening here is probably much duller and more interesting at once. Both trends ride the same economic waves: the post-2008 recovery lifted corporate profits and team valuations together, while automation investment surged as labour costs climbed and technology became cheaper. The NFL, for instance, saw median salaries nearly triple between 2005 and 2023, from around 770,000 dollars to over 2 million, while factories across the world installed something like 3 million industrial robots in that same span. They're both symptoms of the same wealthy-world economy reconfiguring itself, not causes of each other, though you could forgive yourself for imagining some invisible hand moving both dials simultaneously.

This is what happens when you plot enough things against each other: the world becomes a kind of cosmic joke where robot installations and quarterback salaries dance in perfect step, bound together by nothing but the grinding logic of global markets and our irrepressible need to find meaning in the wreckage. Neither one caused the other. They were simply both carried on the same tide. Which somehow feels lonelier than if they actually had been connected.