New York Giants’ Odell Beckham: NFL players ‘should make more money’

It appears New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham isn’t satisfied with just being the youngest player ever to make the cover of an EA Sports Madden football video game.

Speaking to the Huffington Post, Beckham gave a confident response when asked what was the one thing he would change about the NFL.

“I think that we should make more money, personally,” Beckham said.

Beckham is guaranteed $10.4 million over the first four years of his rookie contract, but the 22-year-old said he believes football players should make similar money to athletes in other mainstream sports. He cited the football’s physical nature and the relatively short career spans of NFL players as reasons behind why they should see more green.

“I understand that basketball plays 80-something games, baseball plays this many games, soccer plays that many games, but this is a sport that’s most-watched in America,” Beckham said. “A sport where there’s more injuries. There’s more collisions.

“It’s not even a full-contact sport, I would call it a full-collision sport,” he continued. “You have people running who can run 20 miles per hour and they’re running downhill to hit you, and you’re running 18 miles per hour. That’s a car wreck.”

Beckham went on to say that NFL players need to make more money in order to supplement the cost of caring for their physical health after their careers. According to the NFL Players’ Assn. the average career for an NFL player is 3.3 years.

“There’s injuries that you have after you leave the game, brain injuries, whatever it is, nerve injuries,” Beckham said. “And it’s just something that I feel as if there’s no way someone who -- even if they did their three or four years in the league -- should have to worry about money for the rest of their lives.”

According to Forbes, NFL players, on average, earn less than players in Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL. Much of that has to do with the size of rosters, which are much larger in the NFL. Beckham said he understands this but hopes that there’s “some way to balance that out.”