Footballers And Their Money

Since the England football team made their early, pre-finals exit from the European Nations competition the country’s journalists have been looking to work all the angles. Played just right, big sports news like this can provide at least a couple of week’s worth of material for them.

Years ago I did regular computer-related work for a local newspaper, the Hitchin Gazzette, and ‘Got any stories?’ was a regular refrain whenever I went into their offices.

The problem from the perspective of a journalist is that Joe Public has an insatiable appetite for news, but he’s heard it all before and nothing, no matter how momentous, dulls his hunger for very long.

The best example of this that I can think of was a story that ran internationally about a year ago, which informed us that scientists predicted that only 17 years from that time an asteroid which they were tracking would probably strike the Earth and obliterate life on the planet as we know it. This was a true story, though it was later downgraded by cosmologists to a likely near miss on the part of the asteroid. At the time, despite the clear portent of global devastation this news only had legs for about 2 days, after that they had to find something different to write about.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that journalists have a habit of returning to subjects that they know, or believe, exercise the public’s interest, or its ire. One such subject in the UK is footballers’ salaries and in the light of recent events there was yet another excuse to give it an airing.

The constant reference to what top soccer stars earn just has to be a class thing, doesn’t it? Rock stars, film stars, and entrepreneurs seem to get away relatively unscathed, but the working-class oiks who become elevated beyond their station by easy access to money are worthy of endless disapproval, and so is the sport that allowed it to happen, football. Both are, therefore, perennial easy targets for every crass politician, journalist and radio phone-in show that has become mired by a bankruptcy of ideas.

In actual fact, people who come from nothing and make themselves a fortune are the bedrock of the capitalist system. They are the ones who supply the evidence that it could be you; proof that wealth does not have to be conferred upon you by the privilege of high birth, but that it can be anybodies with the right degree of hard work, talent and luck.

There is no need to start a revolution and put all of the toffs up against a wall in a society where John Terry can earn £130,000 per week.

The Premiership is huge internationally, the recent Arsenal v Manchester United game was reputed to have picked up an audience of around a billion people and that generates massive TV revenue. Part of that revenue pays the wages of the best footballers on the planet and it does it via a system of supply and demand. Meaning that if you can do something better than anybody else and there is a demand for that something, then you will get paid top dollar.

And that really is the end of the story. People should either shut up about what footballers earn and stop boring us silly with it, or else they should come clean and proclaim the virtues of communism.