My son is an Arsenal Supporter. For the top home games against the likes of Chelsea and Spurs the cheapest seat is £65, my son paid £90 to see the forthcoming Spurs match and the top price is well over £100. On such games the total take is £6m!!. 50 years ago Redruth and I were paying 15p to get into Carrow Road!!!
Liverpool's wage bill is even worse Liverpool's wage bill by player. No wonder Sterling wants more! Shocking - Steven Gerrard - £120,000 Luis Suarez - £100,000 Pepe Reina - £90,000 Joe Cole - £90,000 Jamie Carragher - £85,000 Stewart Downing - £80,000 Glen Johnson - £80,000 Jordan Henderson - £70,000 Martin Skrtel - £70,000 Daniel Agger - £70,000 Lucas Leiva - £65,000 Jose Enrique - £55,000 Joe Allen - £45,000 Sebastian Coates - £29,000 Oussama Assaidi - £21,000 Danny Wilson - £20,000 Brad Jones - £20,000 Jonjo Shelvey - £18,000 Martin Kelly - £15,000 Suso - £10,000 Andre Wisdom - £10,000 Raheem Sterling - £5,000 This is sourced from the latest version of the Sports Interactive football management simulation game, Football Manager. While the figures are not official, theyâre not far out. (credit to @football__tweet) about an hour ago
Frightening isn't it! I remember going to see a top level game in the Czech republic about 15 years ago (Vitoria Zizkov vs Ceske Budovich)(was on holiday). Cost me 10p to go in!!!!
When I finished my apprenticeship at Jarrolds in 1971, my journeyman wages were approaching £40 a week which was more than the average wage in Norwich at the time admittedly but City players were only on £80 basic. So Championship level players were getting twice as much as tradesmen. What ever is the difference now? If a tradesman is on £500 pound a week, then so are Blue Square South players. And I wonder what Whitbread is getting at Leicester if he didn't like the contract he was offered by us?
It will all come unstuck big style, football is getting boring as there is far to much of it, too much coverage and sooner or later people will drift away to find other forms of entertainment and Sky's money will follow that drift Can't blame the players if I could command £100k a week I would take it while I could! Wage caps don't work as they would find ways around it but salaries should have to be funded by gate receipts not from handouts
Which is where FIFA and UEFA come in. It has got to be across the board. If the UK clamped down on its own, all the top players and the Sky money would move to Spain or Italy. Detailed vigorous rules have got to be enforced across the board especially on wages and transfer fees with no cop outs on extra rights for money put in by owners/sponsors etc but hands up who thinks they will be strong enough to tell Man City that from now on their total wage bill will have to be less than they are currently paying to 6 or 7 players? Nobody - i thought so!!! The arguement will be that if they do clamp down, all the top clubs will form a breakaway European League with all the nasty consequences such as all the players involved not being able to play International football for their Countries. My attitude to a breakaway European League? Piss off, good riddance, thanks for the opportunity to get our domestic leagues under control.
One of the many times the money they are paid really pisses me off is at Sport Relief. If all PL players gave a weeks salary and none of them would miss it, it would easily exceed £10million, this is before all other highly paid sports folk donated. I know they do give to charity, but it would be a nice it charity donations were in thier contracts (wishful fanciful thinking I know)
The financial fair play league will be a joke. Chelsea announced a £1.1M profit but that is creative accountancy. That excludes many of the transfers because they don't pay for them all at once. If a player costs £50M on a 5 year deal then they only count that as £10M a year.
To be fair (and I am no lover of Chelsea or their financial model) it is not creative accountancy to amortise a £50m asset over the 5 years of the contract. It is usual accountancy practice to match the depreciation against the life of the asset in question (in this case a contract). The justification is that whilst the player is still under contract at the club the transfer fee spent has value as if the player leaves a fee will arise crystalising either a profit or loss on disposal. This treatment is also approved by HMRC otherwise the clubs could claim tax relief on the whole transfer fee at once depriving the country of tax revenues which I feel none of us want. Guess what I do for a living!
Arshavin being paid that is an absolute pisstake, he had a great first season but has hardly done anything memorable for a while and from the games I've seen this season he has been a total liability.
The thing that really surprises me is that Suarez is only on £100K He's worth double that to Liverpool
Do you know if HMRC have managed to create any new loopholes to make up for all the ones they have closed? I mean, all the immoral ones that have been pointed out to them have been firmly close haven't they.
To be honest there are a huge number of loopholes out there if you are rich enough to be able to afford the services of a decent tax accountant and lawyer and obviously earn enough to warrant their use. Back when I was a slip of a boy I auditied an SPL side (sadly not one of the old firm) and they used the matching of contract length to transfer fees even then. At the time they ran at a huge loss but had a wealthy owner and so survived - fair to say a common operating model for a British football club!
