In other words, for small cap companies, yes, the ROI of athletes to their franchises is relatively higher than engineers to their companies. But for most of the SP500 this is not true, and there are lots of software-heavy companies with much higher market cap to the extent that even with 10k or 100k employees, I doubt an athlete’s ROI for a small sports franchise is proportional to the ROI of employees in the large company.
For example, virtually any engineer at a FAANG company should be making top pro athlete money (not considering endorsements). There are literally thousands of engineers at Amazon and hundreds at Netflix that have this ROI on the soaring revenues of these megacorps, to a much greater degree than athletes have on their teams.