Odell Beckham Jr. Responds To Backlash Over Comments About A $100 Million Contract Not Lasting Forever: “Completely Out Of Context”

Odell Beckham Jr. ironically can’t catch a break at the moment.

The 33-year-old NFL wide receiver, who is currently a free agent (and just wrapped up a six-game doping ban), is currently making headlines for some tone deaf comments about money management. Beckham Jr. rose to NFL fame after his famous one-handed catch in 2013. That later led to him signing a 5-year, $95 million contract with the New York Giants in 2018.

He’s since bounced around the league, joining the Los Angeles Rams and helping them win a Super Bowl in 2022. His last meaningful snaps were played with the Miami Dolphins, and now, he’s waiting for a call to return to the league after sitting out to honor his suspension. Signing with a team could help freshen up the Odell media cycle, considering he’s catching flak from the internet for recently saying that $100 million isn’t a lot of money.

Those comments came on The Pivot Podcast with Ryan Clark. Odell Beckham Jr. sat down and explained how a lucrative NFL contract is really spread out, and tried to convince us non-athlete people that tens of millions of dollars per year isn’t all that it seems.

“If I didn’t have a dollar in my account, right here today as we speak, I’m gonna be straight for the rest of my life. No question. I don’t think everybody is in that. And when you’ve sacrificed your whole life to get here, yeah, I played 10 years in the league. I always explain this to people, you give somebody a five-year $100 million contract, right, what is it really? It’s five years for 60 million.

To Odell’s credit, he’s right in that the fact that taxes, agents, etc… eat up big chunks of money, and he ended by pointing out that athletes hear regular people say, “Oh that would last a lifetime.” And to everyone else’s credit, that’s exactly what they are saying. And you absolutely should be able to make that last a lifetime, but you gotta be smart about your money. He didn’t articulate it very well at all, but it sounds more like he was trying to warn other players that a big contract like that is actually a lot less than it seems. Not that you can’t live on it.

The former NFL star is currently getting dragged online, with people saying that they’d easily be able to make millions of dollars work, and even calling out the wide receiver for saying such an insensitive thing while many Americans and people across the world live off of much less:

This is pretty tone def given the current economy

— MillenialMillionaires (@milmillinetwork) December 1, 2025

this man can’t be serious

— sos (@FadedSolMaxi) December 2, 2025

Try making 30k a year

— G (@Geez_Squared) December 1, 2025

Beckham Jr. has since responded to the criticism. The football player claims that his comments were taken out of context, and I’m not really sure if that’s a valid argument, but he certainly wasn’t very clear about what he was saying. But that’s what Odell is going with:

“Boy you can’t say nothing in this world nowadays. That’s why I been in my own lane, my own world and put the way. People love to take s*** completely outta context to rationalize a statement in their own head that makes sense to them… what a world.”