Some good info here. NY Giants and Jets players pay NJ taxes. It's a little lower than NY, but still very high. Also they pay the "jock tax", taxes from playing at visiting team's state.
As high earners, NFL players face top tax rates at the federal and local level. In some places, these marginal rates exceed 50%.
But it doesn’t end there. In addition to paying taxes to the IRS and their home team’s state, many professional football players have to pay taxes to every single state in which they play a game, the so-called “jock tax.” That can mean filing as many as 10 different tax returns and coughing up as much as 50% of their salary and bonuses in taxes.
New York Giants
New York City has some of the highest taxes in the country, with marginal rates reaching 12.7% when including both the state income tax and city income tax. The good news for players on the Giants: they don’t actually play (or practice) in New York. The Giants’ stadium and practice facility are located in New Jersey.
Instead of paying New York taxes, Giants players face the moderately lower tax burden of the Garden State. That means that Jason Pierre Paul and Eli Manning (the top two earners on the Giants for 2015) pay a “mere” 46.6% of their NFL income in taxes, instead of the over 50% rate they would pay in NYC. (Note: Our analysis was done before JPP’s newest and smaller contract.)
New York Jets
The Jets, like the Giants, save their players a fairly substantial sum of tax dollars by playing in New Jersey rather than the city of New York. If, for example, the Jets played in Queens, they would face a top state and city tax rate totaling 12.7%.