All sport stars making millions are making it because they are effectively advertising shills. How many of them are effectively getting paid for advertising shit food, like sugary drinks that humans are addicted to.

They aren't paid millions based on tickets to see them play, it's the advertising.

Nozick has a very interesting thought experiment about this. It poses a completely egalitarian world in which everyone has the same wealth and earns the same income. But there's a kid who's really good at dunking basketballs, and starts charging 5c to watch him dunk. Nobody is required to pay the kid, everybody does so entirely of their own free will. Things progress, and the kid now has 100x the wealth of anybody else. Nozick asks the question: is this something that a good society would try to stop?

Maybe the taxpayers who pay for those expensive sports arenas + the tax breaks that frequently shelter their owners/operators?

Besides indeed the taxpayer funded stadiums, policing and so on, the common man who gets a gambling addiction due to gambling ads being shoved in their face 24/7 while watching any professional sport. Those drive up the broadcast rights, which is where their wages come from.

Of course she wasn't talking about athletes (or artists, etc), she was implicitly talking about the business / tech world. I guess she should have been explicit about it so people don't come out with arguments like this.

Sports leagues exploit their monopoly power constantly. College football is the worst, but they all do it. If you watch a college football game you will see more ads than game. If there was a fair market competition people wouldnt watch these crappy broadcasts but since the college football teams all colluded to make their broadcasts shit together people dont defect. Athletes generally make around 50% of revenue from their league so they are taking advantage of the exploitation.