The sports analogy is not great, because tech companies can't trade engineers to fill a need, and there are no multi-year contracts, so any engineer can quit at any time.

There's also no hard industry-wide salary cap. With the salary cap, the best way to maximize your overall team performance is to get superstars under contract when they're young and underpaid, because a team can only afford a few veteran superstars. Also, sports teams have a hard roster limit, whereas big tech companies can hire as many employees as they like. The analogy breaks down in so many ways.