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Brock Purdy signed a four-year contract with the San Francisco 49ers in 2022 that turned out to be one of the biggest bargains in the league today.
Because Purdy, 24, was drafted with the final pick in the seventh round of the NFL draft in 2022, he’s locked into a lower yearly salary for his first four years in the league. Typically seventh-round picks struggle to stay in the NFL for multiple seasons, and rarely become an MVP candidate like Purdy. In the preseason, Purdy outperformed Trey Lance, who was drafted No. 3 in the 2022 draft, and Purdy has been the starter all year.
See also: Peacock’s NFL game led almost 3 million people to subscribe. Here’s how long it needs them to stick around.
That makes Purdy the starting quarterback of the No. 1 NFC seed in the NFL playoffs. He is third among all quarterbacks in the NFL this season in touchdowns thrown — 31 — and fifth in yards thrown — 4,280.
But he will make just $870,000 in salary from his team this season, much less than his playoff QB rivals at other teams. For example, Chiefs QB Patrick Mahomes will make $44.5 million this season, Bills QB Josh Allen will make $28 million, and even rookie C.J. Stroud will make $24 million. And Lance, who started the season as his backup? He is on a four-year, $34 million deal.
Even more surprising? Purdy’s salary pays him less than what 16 college football players made this season, according to On3’s proprietary NIL algorithm, which is based on NIL-deal data, performance, influence and exposure.
The top five of that list includes the University of Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders ($4.7 million), Texas’ Arch Manning ($2.8 million), Colorado’s Travis Hunter ($2.3 million), Texas’ Quinn Ewers ($1.7 million) and Alabama’s Jalen Milroe ($1.5 million).
The NCAA began allowing college athletes to earn name, image and likeness (NIL) money in 2021, when student-athletes won a decades-long argument over the fairness of receiving no remuneration even as the games they played in generated millions of dollars for the institutions in which they were enrolled.
See also: These college athletes are making over $1 million a year from NIL
NIL deals for college athletes can come from collectives to lure presumptive students to come to a university, but they also can come from off-field endorsements deals.
In addition to his salary, Purdy makes money from off-field endorsements with brands including Alaska Airlines, Toyota and Buffalo Wild Wings, but terms of those deals have not been made public.
He has an average annual contract value of $934,253, which is 89th among all NFL quarterbacks, according to Spotrac.
In October 2023, Purdy told TODAY that he still had a roommate, “one of the offensive lineman,” and “I still drive my Toyota Sequoia,” while living in one of the most highly taxed states in the country in California.
The 49ers play the Detroit Lions in the NFC Championship game on Sunday at 6:30 p.m. EST.
Read on: The golfer who won $1.5 million but couldn’t accept it is turning pro. He won’t be able to recoup that money, though.
The Ligue 1 soccer club Paris Saint-Germain has entered negotiations with Saudi Arabian club Al Hilal over star PSG and France striker Kylian Mbappé, according to multiple reports.
Mbappé, who is in the last year of his PSG contract, could receive a massive payday of $776 million for a single year as part of the deal, according to reports from CBS and transfers expert Fabrizio Romano, by far the richest single-season sports contract ever out. That number would include “commercial” deals, Romano reported, in addition to Mbappé’s soccer obligations to the Saudi club.
After news broke on Monday that PSG is reportedly willing to move on from the 24-year-old superstar, athletes beyond the footballing world reacted to the news, perhaps wondering if they’d chosen the wrong sport to play.
Damian Lillard is one of the highest-paid players in the NBA at $45 million per season, but his deal is a fraction of Mbappé’s potential contract. His response to the money Mbappé might soon make? “Wtf lol.”
Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo — reported annual salary: $45.6 million — looked to be wondering if he could switch positions with the French footballer. “You can take me,” the NBA star tweeted to Al Hilal, referencing a purported resemblance. Mbappé replied to Antetokounmpo with a series of laughing emojis.
Mbappé’s reported contract offer is hundreds of millions more than LeBron James’s $530 million lifetime earnings over his 21-year NBA career.
James and Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green also reacted to the Mbappé news on Monday in Twitter posts.
Soccer stars are some of the highest-paid athletes in the world, and players like Lionel Messi, the Argentine megastar who spent decades at FC Barcelona before that legendary club’s sudden financial woes landed him at PSG (and, this summer, Inter Miami in the U.S.) and Cristiano Ronaldo routinely lead those lists, with recent contracts getting not only richer but more creative, including, for example, ownership stakes.
To be clear, Mbappé would need to sign off on a deal with Al Hilal to receive that record-smashing pay, and ESPN reported that he is unlikely to do so. Mbappé is one of the best footballers in the world and reports indicate he would prefer to play in a top league like Spain’s La Liga or the English Premier League instead of the less robust Saudi Pro League, even as, of late, a number of boldface names have been drawn to the kingdom.
Mbappé has made roughly $292 million in his career, according to Capology.com estimates.
See also: The top 5 highest-paid women’s soccer players at the 2023 Women’s World Cup
Other well-known players have joined the Saudi League in recent years for huge contracts. The Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, who has starred for Manchester United and Real Madrid, is earning an estimated $213 million this year from the club Al Nassr, the biggest annual deal in sports, and Karim Benzema of France and Real Madrid fame is reportedly collecting $214 million on his two-year contract with Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ittihad.
For its outsized roles in LIV Golf, English soccer and Formula 1, some critics have called out Saudi Arabia for “sportswashing,” a criticism leveled at entities alleged to be using an athletic event or association to polish a tarnished reputation.
According to the U.S. Department of State, Saudi Arabia has been accused in recent years of multiple human-rights violations, including: unlawful killings; executions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners and detainees by government agents; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; and taking political prisoners or detainees, among other offenses.
This month, Foxconn pulled out of its joint venture with Vedanta. The two sides “mutually agreed to part ways,” Foxconn said in a statement at the time.
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Foxconn is best known as the main assembler of Apple’s iPhones. But in last couple of years, the Taiwanese firm has made a push into semiconductors, betting that the rise of technologies like artificial intelligence will boost demand for these chips.
But Foxconn’s semiconductor foray has had a tough start, highlighting the difficulty for new players to enter a market dominated by established firms with huge experience and a highly intricate supply chain.
“The industry presents newcomers with high barriers to entry, mainly high levels of capital intensity and access to coveted intellectual property,” Gabriel Perez, ICT analyst at BMI, a unit at Fitch Group, told CNBC via email.
“Established players such as TSMC, Samsung or Micron count with several decades of R&D (research and development), process engineering and trillions of dollars in investment to reach their current capabilities.”
Foxconn, officially known as Hon Hai Technology Group, is a contract electronics manufacturer that assembles consumer products like iPhones. But in the last two years, it has stepped up its presence in semiconductors.
In May 2021, it formed a joint venture with Yageo Corporation, which makes various types of electronic components. That same year, Foxconn bought a chip plant from Taiwanese chipmaker Macronix.
The biggest ramp-up in effort came last year when Foxconn agreed with Indian metals-to-oil conglomerate Vedanta to set up a semiconductor and display production plant in India as part of a $19.5 billion joint venture.
Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research, said Foxconn’s push into semiconductors is about diversifying its business, and the company’s decision to launch an electric car unit is part of that plan. Its aim is to become a “one stop shop” for electronics and automotive companies, Shah said.
If Foxconn could assemble electronics and manufacture chips, it would be a very unique and competitive business.
Foxconn looked to India for its joint venture with Vedanta because the country’s government is looking to boost its domestic semiconductor industry and bring manufacturing on shore.
“Foxconn’s decision to establish a JV in India responds to two key trends – one of them being the market’s growing role as a consumer electronics manufacturing hub, the second one being India’s ambitions – mirroring other major markets such as the US, the EU and Mainland China – to develop its domestic semiconductor industry through public subsidies and regulatory incentives,” BMI’s Perez said.
This month, Foxconn pulled out of its joint venture with Vedanta. The two sides “mutually agreed to part ways,” Foxconn said in a statement at the time.
“There was recognition from both sides that the project was not moving fast enough, there were challenging gaps we were not able to smoothly overcome, as well as external issues unrelated to the project,” Foxconn said.
Deadlocked talks with European chipmaker STMicroelectronics, which was the technology partner for the project, was one major reason for the venture’s failure, Reuters reported this month.
Foxconn and Vedanta wanted to license the technology from STMicro and India wanted the firm to have a stake in the joint venture, but the European chipmaker did not, Reuters reported.
Foxconn’s hurdles point to a broader issue — it’s hard for newcomers to get into semiconductor manufacturing.
The manufacturing of chips is dominated by one player — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC — which has a 59% market share in the foundry segment, according to Counterpoint Research.
TSMC doesn’t design its own chips. Instead, it makes these components for other companies like Apple. TSMC has had more than two decades of experience and billions of dollars of investment to get to where it is.
TSMC also relies on a complex supply chain of companies that make critical tools to allow it to manufacture the most advanced chips in the world.
Foxconn and Vedanta’s effort appeared to rely heavily on STMicro, but once the European company bailed, the joint venture was without much expertise in semiconductors.
“Both companies … lacked the core competency of manufacturing a chip,” Counterpoint Research’s Shah said, adding that they were dependent on third-party technology and intellectual property.
Foxconn’s attempts to crack the semiconductor space highlight how difficult it is for a new entrant to do so — even for a $47.9 billion giant.
“The semiconductor market is highly concentrated with few players which have taken more than two decades to evolve to this point,” Shah said, adding that there are high barriers to entry, such as large amounts of investment and specialized labor.
“On an average, it takes more than two decades to be at the level of skill and scale to be a successful semiconductor manufacturing (fab) company.”