http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/reading-captain-jobi-mcanuff-calls-1326354 It is true. Purchased tickets for me and my mate for next Saturday and it's costing us £75! Last season it cost us £20... The steep rise will have an effect on people, and I even wrote a report back at college talking about players wages. What is everyone's thoughts on the subject?
It's true of course but this is what happens when there is no limit. Lots of people may be priced out of tickets but the clubs don't care because someone else is buying them.
It is absolutely true and one day the football bubble will burst. But it continues to defy logic and carries on expanding at an alarming rate. I'm sure there are other Premier League footballers who would agree with the Reading Captain, just as long as they wouldn't get caught up in the limit. The star sports person or in this case, the footballer, is now becoming one of the best paid persons on the planet, bar almost anybody else. They are entertainers only. It has always been my contention that if footballers [or golfers, for example] were wiped off the face of the Earth, almost nothing would happen. Nobody would starve, nobody would be harmed. The World would be a slightly more boring place, although even that is contentious, as there are more people who don't like football than there are who do like it, and there would probably be less fat people, because they'd have slightly less reason to sit on their arses and go and do something themselves instead of paying to watch others do it. When I'm watching football, or some other seemingly relatively unimportant sporting activity [come on, football isn't THAT important] I sometimes get hit with the thought of seeing it for what it basically is, and that is 22 people running over a few acres of grassland and kicking a bit of inflated leather around, and into a netted area. I hate it when the thought takes hold of me because it spoils the whole thing for me. I know football is incredibly unimportant in the list of priorities. Making sure the whole world population are fed, fit and healthy, don't live in poverty, have access to clean and reliable sources of water and energy, are comfortable enough that no-one has the motivation to steal from another as everyone has enough, and that the planet is looked after well for future generations. Those are the highest priorities. Against those, football is very much nowhere near the top and footballers ought to be paid accordingly. But they won't be.
Ah, well. There's priorities and then there was Bill Shankly. When Bill Shankly left us we could return to our normal scale of priorities.
Salary caps won't happen over here anytime soon. They use a salary cap over in the MLS (and indeed a lot of sports over there) but in the MLS they're on MUCH less.
For a salary cap to have any chance at all of working, it needs to be a worldwide FIFA-run system rather than just the FA whacking it on the Premier League. Obviously.
Wage Caps are needed, but to suit the top clubs (Should it be introduced), whats the betting it'll be £150,000ish a week?
It would be very hard to implement a wage cap when each country changes it's tax and NI laws every year. Add to that they would need to consider that earning £1m in somewhere like Spain will buy a lot more than earning the same in the UK. Property, cost of living, petrol for 6 litre engines alone etc. This is all without the untold commissions earnt from image related things like shirt sales and the like. Oh and how many different bonuses are there? Only way that is going to happen is if the EU collapses and 700 useless irks are looking for work. It would take that many people to regulate and investigate.
