Average NFL player salary

As NFL players have been paid increasingly ridiculous sums to do extraordinary things with a football, Americans have spent increasingly ridiculous sums to eat pizza in restaurants, producing a correlation that spans nineteen years and explains nothing except that the American economy finds ways to inflate everything simultaneously. The coefficient is 0.963, which is roughly the completion percentage you would need to justify a 40-million-dollar contract, and roughly the confidence with which we can say that pizza and football are the same thing to a scatter plot.

NFL salaries grew from about 1.4 million dollars average in 2005 to over 3.7 million by 2023, driven by television contracts that now exceed 100 billion dollars in total value. Pizza restaurant spending grew from roughly 38 billion to over 60 billion during the same period, driven by population growth, delivery app proliferation, and the general American consensus that pizza is acceptable at any hour for any reason. Both metrics are inflation-adjusted consumer expenditure measures that rise with GDP, population, and the cost of everything. The NFL and the pizza industry also share a literal business relationship: pizza is the most-ordered food during football games, and Super Bowl Sunday alone generates an estimated 200 million dollars in pizza sales.

Nineteen years of football salaries and pizza spending rising together is as American as a correlation can get. Both industries are selling entertainment, both are benefiting from the same growing economy, and both are charging more for it every year. The quarterback throws, the oven fires, and the consumer pays for both. Touchdown, with extra cheese.