The Dick’s Sporting Goods NOligarchy Profile
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Dick’s Sporting Goods earned a NOligarchy Score of 59.64 out of 100 — a composite that rewards restraint on political spending and clean legal records, but penalizes heavily when executive paychecks and shareholder payouts dwarf what workers take home. Here, the score is dragged down by two compounding forces: a CEO whose compensation package eclipses the median worker’s salary by a factor that should stop anyone cold, and a shareholder payout machine running at full speed while frontline employees earn poverty-level wages.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
95.2
Wealth Extraction
7.3
Playing by the Rules
61.7
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
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Political Access Grade: 95.24/100. Dick’s Sporting Goods spent nothing on federal lobbying and ran no Political Action Committee (PAC) during Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — the full eight quarters covered in this profile. That near-perfect score reflects a company that, at least on the public record, chose not to buy a seat at Washington’s table.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 6.96/100. This grade is the story of the whole profile. A CEO-to-worker pay ratio that clears 1,880-to-one — combined with more than $610 million in buybacks across the two most recently reported fiscal years — signals a company that prioritized its executive suite and its largest shareholders while its median worker earned less than $12,000 a year.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 61.74/100. Two regulatory penalties landed in 2024, covering consumer protection and workplace safety infractions. The combined dollar amount was modest for a company of this scale — $57,528 against $17.2 billion in annual revenue — and the case count is limited. The score reflects that narrow footprint of documented infractions relative to the broader sector.
Dick’s Sporting Goods ranks 17th out of 22 companies in the Sporting goods, hobby, and musical instrument retailers sector, against a sector average score of 68.3. That puts Dick’s notably below the peer-group midpoint — its zero lobbying spend and no corporate PAC are real credits, but they are counterbalanced by the severity of the wealth extraction pillar, which is the lowest-scoring element in the entire profile. For higher-scoring alternatives in this sector, see the Better Alternatives section below.
The Bottom Line: A $17 Billion Business Where the Median Worker Takes Home Less Than a Thousand Dollars a Month
Dick’s Sporting Goods reported $17.2 billion in annual revenue, per SEC EDGAR 10-K (CIK 0001089063) — enough to make it a major player in its sector, capturing 19.79% of what Americans spend at sporting goods, hobby, and musical instrument stores. And yet the median Dick’s employee earned $11,259 last year, according to the SEC DEF 14A — roughly $938 a month before taxes, in an era when average U.S. rent alone runs higher. While that median worker struggled to cover basic expenses, the company simultaneously channeled hundreds of millions toward buybacks and dividends that enriched its largest shareholders. Two regulatory penalties collected in 2024 add a compliance wrinkle to the record, but the dominant imbalance remains the pay gap: a CEO earning 1,880 times the worker on the sales floor.
No Footprint in Washington
During Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 — the full eight quarters covered in this profile — Dick’s Sporting Goods filed zero federal lobbying reports under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) and ran no corporate PAC, as confirmed by Senate LDA records. There are no registered lobbyists, no revolving-door hires from Capitol Hill, no reported issue areas, and no bills cited in filings — because there are no filings.
That’s a meaningful choice for a company of this size. A $17.2 billion retailer employing nearly 60,000 people has obvious stakes in federal policy: retail labor standards, minimum wage legislation, firearm sales regulations (Dick’s made a high-profile decision to restrict certain gun sales), and trade policy affecting sporting goods supply chains. Companies far smaller than Dick’s routinely spend millions navigating those exact issues. Dick’s chose not to.
The one political footprint that does appear belongs to individual executives, not the corporation. Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show $6,000 in personal donations from employees listing Dick’s Sporting Goods as their employer, recorded in the third and fourth quarters of 2024. These are individual contributions, not corporate funds, and they are modest in scale. As a corporate entity, Dick’s Sporting Goods left no political footprint in Washington during this period.
A CEO Paid 1,880 Times the Median Worker While the Workforce Earns Poverty-Level Wages
The Wealth Extraction grade of 6.96 out of 100 is almost entirely explained by one number. Dick’s Sporting Goods’ CEO pay ratio is 1880:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, according to the SEC DEF 14A. Set that against a median employee salary of $11,259 a year — earnings so low they fall below the federal poverty line for a family of two — and the structural imbalance becomes impossible to miss. The CEO’s three-year average package came to about $21.2 million. The median Dick’s worker would need to labor for over 1,880 consecutive years — without a raise, a sick day, or a vacation — to earn what the CEO collected across that same span.
The Shareholder Payout
Meanwhile, Dick’s Sporting Goods directed enormous sums toward its wealthiest shareholders. According to SEC 10-K filings, the company spent $347.1 million on stock buybacks in fiscal year 2025 and $263 million in fiscal year 2024 — totaling more than $610 million in buyback spending across those two most recently reported fiscal years. Buybacks are a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses. The primary beneficiaries are the wealthiest 10% of Americans, who own 93% of all stock.
The dividend record tells the same story from a different angle. Dick’s also paid $413.9 million in dividends in fiscal year 2025 and $361.7 million in fiscal year 2024 — a combined $775.6 million handed to shareholders in traditional payouts across those two reported years. Add buybacks and dividends together and Dick’s poured over $1.38 billion toward shareholders in just those two cycles.
The Missed Raise
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 60K employees
Spent on buybacks
$610.2M
directed to shareholders
÷ 60K
workers
Per-worker raise
$10,212
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 45% annual raise on the median worker's $11,259 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
Dick’s Sporting Goods employs approximately 59,750 workers, per the SEC DEF 14A. The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 59,750 workers a $10,211.77 raise, spread across the last 2 fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $5,105.89 annual raise the company chose not to give. For a median employee currently earning $11,259 a year, even that annualized share would have represented a nearly 45% increase in take-home pay.
EARNINGS STATEMENT — ANNUAL
EMPLOYEE: 1 of 59,750
Your share of the buyback
+$10,212
Per biweekly paycheck
+$196.38
SPENT INFLATING THE SHARE PRICE
Stock buybacks over the two most recent fiscal years: $610.2 million.
Spread across Dick's Sporting Goods's 59,750 employees, its stock buybacks over the last two fiscal years come to $10,212 per worker — about $196 on each of the 52 biweekly paychecks in that span.
The Dividend Factor
Dick’s did not abandon traditional dividends in favor of buybacks — it ran both simultaneously and at scale. The $775.6 million in dividends paid across fiscal years 2024 and 2025 went to shareholders who held shares at record dates, dispersed broadly but still disproportionately flowing to the largest institutional holders and insiders. The fact that Dick’s chose to maintain and grow dividends while also executing hundreds of millions in buybacks makes clear this was not a forced trade-off. The company had ample cash and chose not to direct it downward through the organization.
Executive Bonuses
When buybacks reduce the total number of outstanding shares, Earnings Per Share (EPS) rises automatically — even if the company earns the exact same total profit. Many executive bonus structures are tied directly to EPS targets. So the same executives who authorized the buyback program are the ones who collect larger bonuses when those purchases push EPS higher. At a company where the CEO’s three-year average package ran north of $21 million, those bonus triggers are worth paying close attention to.
Fines Treated as a Rounding Error
Over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026, Dick’s Sporting Goods collected 2 regulatory penalties, both recorded in 2024, according to Good Jobs First. The largest offense group by dollar amount was consumer protection, which accounted for $46,000 of the $57,528 total. For a company generating $17.2 billion in annual revenue, that combined fine is the equivalent of a rounding error on an expense report — a sum the company earns back in roughly 30 seconds of operating time.
The single largest penalty was a $46,000 consumer protection violation in 2024, assessed by the New Jersey Attorney General. The second was an $11,528 workplace safety and health violation in 2024, issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Neither case points to a pattern of serial misconduct — two cases in a single year across a footprint of this size is a limited record. What the numbers do illustrate is the asymmetry of enforcement: regulators collected $57,528 from a company whose shareholders pocketed more than $1.38 billion during the same reporting cycle.
$2 million
taxpayer subsidies
$57,528
regulatory fines
35:1
Dick's Sporting Goods collected $2 million in taxpayer subsidies against $57,528 in regulatory fines — 35 subsidy dollars for every $1 in penalties.
That asymmetry extends to the public money side of the ledger as well. In 2024, Dick’s Sporting Goods received a total of $2,014,384 in public grants and tax benefits across three awards — including two grants of $829,242 each and one of $355,900 — according to the Good Jobs First Subsidy Tracker. That’s more than $2 million in taxpayer funds flowing to a company that generated $17.2 billion in revenue and funneled over a billion dollars toward its shareholders in the same reporting cycle. The subsidy record does not detail the specific program conditions attached to each award. What the record does show is the direction of the money: from the public treasury to one of the most well-resourced retailers in the country.