I see a lot of people who are very much into sports. Some are taking part in snowboarding competitions, some are doing swimming marathons, some are doing red bull like stunts, some are just doing sports for instagram and so on.
These professional sports dont tend to pay much to raise a family for instance. So what do these people do for a living to pay the bills for them and their family? How many hours do they work and in what type of occupation?
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Generally we split sports into professional, semi-professional and amateur. Professional players play/train full time (along with things like speaking, appearances etc.) and don’t have another job as they theoretically make enough to live off of it (although at the lower end it is admittedly borderline). Semi-professional athletes tend to have normal jobs (or really understanding partners), working anywhere from full time to part time hours. I know a couple of people who play semi-pro football, who were good enough to play in the lower levels of professional football, but can make more money working a normal job and playing semi-pro (as they aren’t good enough to play in the higher leagues).
Amateur sports are what you’d expect, although from experience I have encountered a handful of people playing amateur sports who seem to make enough through questionable “sponsorship” deals to not need to work (which is a bit shit having to compete with them when you have to work 40-80 hours a week yourself!)
German here. I think this really depends on the sport. A friend of mine was a really succesful and famous female soccer player. Like one of the best of the world. She didn’t earn anything with it so she studied and is now working in her profession and does some reprasentive and administrative stuff for female soccer. Some other people I know who where international succesful in their sports suffered the same faith. If you don’t play male soccer or maybe two or three other sports you’ll work the same way every other person does.
Pretty sure they literally get paid to be professional athletes, at least in Flanders. It’s considered an actual job title here, with the sports federations involved being highly regulated I’m sure, but it does seem to allow them to focus on their sport, though the numbers indicate that some will need to combine it with at least a part time job or sponsorships, or idk.
Depends on whether you’re a professional or not, and then the pay depends on the sport.
Professional football players in major clubs make at least a few thousands a month, and obviously the biggest clubs pay way better. Vast majority of people trying their shot at being a professional athlete try it with football as it is the most profitable sport by a landslide.
You can make a living out of playing other sports too, but not many. My cousin is a professional volleyball player for a major club Portuguese club and makes pretty decent money. He could live on that income alone.
On the other hand, our national rugby team recently made international headlines for being comprised of amateur players who have full time jobs unrelated to the sport.
Depends on the sport. Some football players can make a living from it, but most cannot. There have been players from the 3. Bundesliga who have to collect social security.
If you compete in sport that is olympic, you can become a soldier, police officer or customs officer. They get paid, have access to top notch training facilities and once their sports career is over, they can work as police officer or coach in the military.
[Georg Hackl and Susi Erdmann](https://cdn.imago-images.de/bild/sp/0002365180/m.jpg) are Sportsoldaten, as well as [Marcel Nguyen](https://scontent-ber1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.18169-9/14600860_10154689551149184_8523826737741441381_n.jpg?_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=c2f564&_nc_ohc=eAWy9iRDJ38AX-HxsBF&_nc_ht=scontent-ber1-1.xx&oh=00_AfBofUAx3LNMFa4qTkXATiOQ97jatx6vQggilC3Ab4_–A&oe=655B801B)
[Claudia Pechstein](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/2022-02-23_Empfang_der_Berliner_Teilnehmenden_der_Olympischen_Winterspiele_2022_by_Sandro_Halank%E2%80%93060.jpg) is a police officer.
Sport soldiers can spend 70% of their time on training, do a shorter basic training and get their travel expenses covered. And as we can see in the photo above, they also don’t have to follow the regulations on appearance.
If your sport is not olympic, you get no financial support until you find a sponsor or get some media recognition.
Sometimes local companies support sports clubs, my Jiu Jitsu club could use a VW bus when we started in competitions, we just had to find another company that sponsored the costs for the petrol. No one in our sports club was paid, it was all volunteer work.
In italy it depends: for team sports, and sports that generates high revenue the athletes are paid either by their team or by their sponsor: this is the case for football, tennis, volleyball, and the likes. Overall this is similar to how it works in most other countries.
For most other sports on the other hand the situation is a bit more peculiar: the majority of athletes in Italy are employed by either the armed forces or the police: each one of the Italian armed and police forces has its own sport department, with his own trainers and training centers: the athletes working for these military corps are given ranks and uniforms, and even receive promotions based on their seniority and sport successes. Their salary is the same as that of military personnel of the same rank, but they are not asked to take part in any military or police operation, just to train and take part in competitions.
Once they get too old to compete they can choose to remain in the military corp as a trainer or they can ask to be discharged to find a new job somewhere else.
I don’t understand your question. The idea of a professional athlete is they make a living of their sport. So that is what they do, they train and play matches/tournaments. Some sports, most notably football, are fully professional where even players in the domestic league earn a lot more compared to the average person. In some other sports the athletes have their personal sponsors. The sponsor is often placed on their shirt and the athlete act in commercials for example. I know in the past the ministry of defense had a special program for Olympic athletes where they were employed by the ministry. However this program is abandoned afaik. There are some smaller sport athletes or for example the lower leagues in football where the sports men and women earn something with their sport but do work part time. Some times one of the sponsors of the team provide employment, sometimes the athlete have their own business.
I work in a business which is a sponsor to an elite division handball team. A few years ago we employed one of the players part time, as their pay check from the team was not sufficient to live off. He had a pretty flexible schedule so that he could have time for training, meetings, matches etc