In the vaults of a smoky speakeasy out in the ‘burbs in Tennessee, after a few bourbons for the road a conversation topic of devastating importance arises: “do footballers earn too much?”
The instant answer from the laymen amongst us, of course, is usually ‘yes’, simply because it is incomprehensible that a basic motor action of the human body can be rewarded with up to £250,000 per week.
Many a time it is claimed by us mortals that it is ‘not fair’ for these top players to take home so much money, but is this really a fair statement to make? After all, if your talent is such that people demand, admire and follow it because it gives them great pleasure, what’s wrong with reaping the financial rewards from being popular on the world stage?
Sporting stars are of course the most picked on, and usually by people that don’t like sport. Roger Federer has banked around $200m over 12 years or so from hitting a ball with a bat. Tiger Woods has netted about $1bn from hitting a small white ball into a hole with a stick (and having black skin whilst doing it). Michael Schumacher has banked about the same for driving a car around a track. Boxer Lennox Lewis earned $60m for punching people in the face.
How about musicians? Elton John has reportedly earned $500m for playing a piano and singing. Paul McCartney similar, except he’s banked even more cash, reported to be around $650m. Australian princess Kylie Minogue has a reported $200m fortune for singing songs she didn’t even write.
Actors maybe? John Travolta reportedly has earned $200m in his career for reading scripts and dancing, Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame had banked $50m by the age of 20, with 21 year old co-star Daniel Radcliffe banking $10m more.
All of these people have monstrous amounts of money that are incomprehensible to most of us salaried slaves, but the big question is do they deserve it?
When considering this question, many people disambiguate the activities of the celebrity down to the bare bones, as I have done above, and in doing so remove any reference to talent or skill. Is Paul McCartney someone that has written songs that have given pleasure to millions of people around the world or just a stoned bloke that plays a guitar? Does Emma Watson portray an intriguingly innocent character, allowing the viewer to immerse themselves in a fantasy world or is she just a girl reading a script?
People dumb down these roles because in doing so they can imagine themselves performing the same role. I can kick a football, but I don’t get paid as much as Wayne Rooney. It’s not fair. I can do it. He doesn’t deserve it if I don’t. I can drive a car, so it’s not fair for Michael Schumacher to earn $1bn for doing the same thing.
Of course, it’s not the same thing at all, because once you add all of the meat back on to the bone, the actual role is rather different to what you perceive it to be and you couldn’t do it.
There was a bloke who died in 2008 called Don LaFontaine. You may or may not have heard of him but you will no doubt have heard him. He was the bloke that did the voice overs for a lot of popular film trailers (such as Terminator 2) and was well known for starting off with “in a world…”. He was able to earn $10,000 for 60 seconds of speaking and as a result of doing 65 voiceovers per week earned seven figure sums every year. Why? Because he had a unique talent in that he was born with a bizarrely deep authoritative voice that added punch and power to movie trailers. We could all read the scripts, but we wouldn’t be able to do it in his unique way.
Similarly, there is more to being a professional footballer than simply kicking a football. Wayne Rooney gets paid insane money because he is able to pass the ball deliberately and precisely. He is able to run with the ball at pace and keep control of it under pressure from other players. He is able to change direction and confuse opposition players with his skills and agility. When presented with the goal he is able to jump amongst a crowd and be the one to head the ball into the net. He is able to direct the ball into the net from all ranges and positions with his technique. He has the football brain that leads him into the right places at the right time on the football pitch. A high percentage of his football decisions are the right ones and over 90 minutes of football he has a fighting spirit and never gives up.
You might think it’s still easy, but the clincher for me that Mr Rooney is doing all these things consistently better than almost everyone in the entire world of almost 7,000,000,000 people; for this reason he is special and this reason he gets paid stupid amounts of money. His talent is in demand and millions of people like to watch him play. Roger Federer is the same: he’s the number 1 tennis player in the entire world, and therefore on top of his tennis winnings of around $50m, he rakes in $35m per year in sponsorship. Companies want to be associated with Roger Federer’s qualities both as the best tennis player and the fact that he’s a nice down to earth bloke.
There are of course many jobs and careers that are deemed more difficult than being a footballer or tennis player, such as being a brain surgeon. Many many years of study, many times when you have someone’s life in your hands and many more working hours than Wayne Rooney.
“It’s not fair that a brain surgeon earns £200k per year but Wayne Rooney earns £150k per week.”
“Wayne Rooney couldn’t be a brain surgeon.”
Perhaps he couldn’t, but there are many many more brain surgeons in the world than there are Wayne Rooneys. People can learn how to be a brain surgeon. If one brain surgeon leaves a job and moves elsewhere, anther brain surgeon can be recruited with similar, if not the same qualities. If Wayne Rooney leaves Manchester United, they would have to pay a hefty premium to replace him, because there simply aren’t many players that would bring the same qualities and footballing ability to the Manchester United team.
Do I think Wayne Rooney deserves the money? Simply, no. But I don’t begrudge him earning that money and and I can fully understand why he does.
There are, of course, footballers, singers, and other celebrities that do not deserve the money that they make. There’s a player named Kieron Dyer who reportedly is on £85,000 per week at West Ham and he has played only a handful of games over a number of years due to repetitive injuries. Does he deserve that money? Absolutely not.
How about pop queens Cheryl Cole and Posh Spice? Neither of them can sing and are kept in tune by computers. Neither of them write their own songs. Both increased their fame by marrying footballers. Don’t deserve it.
There are of course people that work in the city and in business that earn much more than Wayne Rooney does and whose jobs are probably less difficult than being a brain surgeon. Do business leaders deserve to earn the money they do?
loading…
Its called market forces and if there is a demand for these “people” then there is the great chance they will get big money,social ethics and economics rarely correlate.
loading...
Why shouldn’t they earn the big money? In football it does cause a problem with the league system and makes it very difficult for clubs to go up a league, but that’s not the premiership clubs’ concern. A footballer’s working life can be very short (Dave Whelan for example) – same goes for pop “stars”. If they don’t earn lots of money when they can, there’s a real danger they won’t end up with very much for all their years of work.
Rather than arguing they are getting too much, maybe we should look at the likes of television, record companies and agents who constantly push the money up and where they are getting it from. Ultimately people are paying for these sports and pop stars voluntarily – no-one is making them.
loading...
Fantastic article Phil, there is two sides to the debate and I agree at least its not public money paying these obscene wages but I think it is unfair. What makes these guys so special they deserve so much. There are people in the world who work a lot harder in much more important jobs who get peanuts. Many footballers I wouldn’t say are particularly ‘gifted’ and they are certainly not ‘sportsmen’. Wayne Rooney is nothing short of a thug if you look at the childish way he behaved when he was sent off in the 2006 World Cup throwing a temper tantrum and shoving Ronaldo like a playground bully. Apologies for going off topic but another reason I hate footballers is because they get away with murder. Rooney once got summonsed to court for a raft of driving offences. He failed to turn up at court. Now for any mere mortal that would result in an arrest warrant being issued and you would face a stiffer sentence even prison. But no Rooney got another court date which he also refused to attend and got away with it. A Portsmouth player also once nearly killed someone driving like an idiot in his flash sports car. He was taken to court for dangerous driving, he was let off because he claimed he didn’t understand English road signs and was unaware of the speed limit and claimed he would not be able to play without his car, he walked free. If you don’t understand English rules of the road you shouldn’t be driving in the first place. This is just double standards and it has got to stop.
loading...
It’s naive to think that non-footballers don’t do those things though, and Rooney didn’t have to turn up at court on that day anyway so you can’t use that against him. If the court requires your attendance, you have to attend else the police come and arrest you. They forced Tony Blair to turn up so they can force anyone.
He’s not the first to use lawyer Nick “Mr Loophole” Freeman to get off charges on technicalities and many non-footballers have used him in the same way. He didn’t get off because he was Wayne Rooney, he got off because the police failed to properly produce the paperwork.
Loads of people get caught for driving offences and loads of people get off them. Wayne Rooney is certainly no special case.
I know what you mean about Rooney being thuggish, and he is, but what do you expect from a deprived family of amateur boxers from Toxteth? Is that his fault or the by-product of a poor upbringing that left him out on the streets playing football because his parents were not interested?
He is better at football than billions of people, and for that reason he is paid a lot to play it. Yes that means he can afford mansions and cars but so what? When you are a world leader at something, cash tends to follow you around.
As for the Portsmouth player, are you really saying you think no other foreigner has got off for the same reason? Some people are bad drivers and in this case it was a footballer.
I bet plenty of doctors have been done for driving offences, and plenty of foreign ones too.
Harold Shipman murdered loads of people but that doesn’t mean I hate doctors.
Osama bin Laden orchestrated mass terror but that doesn’t mean I hate all Muslims.
loading...
I see what you are saying Phil, fair points but I once saw a doctor get done for driving at 36mph when he was rushing to hospital when a pregnant woman was bleeding to death. He saved her life by his actions yet the police force refused to waive his speeding fine even with a letter from his chief executive backing him up, it was only when The Daily Telegraph intervened he was let off. So he saves someone’s life and gets given hell and a footballer can claim ignorance of the law and gets away with it. Whatever happened to the old saying ‘Ignorance of the law is not an excuse’. To an extent you are right I hate footballers in particular because I hate football once a proper sport corrupted by this greed and yes I do feel most of them are intellectually inferior and I do not feel they earn a penny of that money. David Beckham is as thick as two short planks yet has more money that most of us will ever see. The reason I hate footballers is because they are not proper sportsmen, they only care about the money. I do my job because I care about my patients and I am passionate about my job. I don’t feel nurses get paid anywhere near enough I am sick of smug BA trolley dollys vastly outearning us for such an easy job, but money is not everything.
loading...
Nah, don’t agree. Footballers don’t get off road traffic incidents because they are footballers, they get off because they can afford lawyers that think outside the box and exploit failures in the police’s procedure to damage the case brought against them. It’s the fault of the police alone for any footballer, football manager or celebrity that gets off on a technicality.
But if you want to talk about speeding and driving offences exclusively, how can it be the case that out of 88,536 police officers that were caught speeding last year, only 0.02% of them were prosecuted? Yes, only 153 of them. Did they get off? Is the police an old boys club?
In saving someone’s life the Road Safety Partnership would argue in the case of your doctor that the doctor put plenty of other lives in danger with his ‘reckless’ act of going 6mph over the speed limit.
David Beckham has loads of money because women fancy him, because he was a good footballer and because he’s fairly likeable. Most of his money was not from football, it was from sponsorship, although I believe he’s on about £500k a week at that American team.
If you do your job because you care about the patients, why does the amount you get paid matter so much? To be fair, you refer to it a lot!
The simple fact is than were you to walk out of the NHS tomorrow, there would be a replacement in place. Nurses are ten a penny and can be brought in from any foreign country as well as the UK. Just because your job involves health, doesn’t mean you should be paid millions.
loading...
I agree completely I think the police is definitely an old boys club, they will always cover each other’s backs and they can get away with murder. I don’t trust the police as far as I can throw them. I never said nurses should be paid millions, I just think we deserve a better deal than we get now. I do deeply care about my job and patients but when I have a mortgage and bills to pay when I and my girlfriend already have huge student debts I think we deserve a fair wage. But I don’t feel footballers should be paid millions either.
loading...
Why not? The ones that are, are the best in the world at their profession. That creates a demand and clubs are willing to pay them high wages. Its a career that lasts 10 years, whereas you have a job for life with guaranteed increments and pension contributions if you want to carry on working there.
loading...
There are plenty of cases where doctors have done things far worse. I’ve mentioned Harold Shipman already. Locally what about Colin Hendry’s wife who died following complications after a botched surgery? That doctor got off scot free.
But what about the Alder Hey hospital scandal where doctors removed organs from children without permission, or the Stafford Hospital scandal where up to 1,200 patients died due to being “abused and neglected by hostile staff and were left in humiliating and undignified conditions” which had an “unimaginable” impact on them.
The official report went on to say that the attitude of some nurses “left much to be desired” and that “some staff were dismissive of the needs of patients and their families.”
It went on to say that “considerable suffering, distress and embarrassment were caused to patients as a result.”
“Nurses were routinely ordered to lie about how long patients had been waiting”
“Patients and relatives were referred to using obscene language”
The report is worth a read, I’m sure you can find a copy knocking about at BVH because it was sent to every hospital.
All the staff in both of these cases have got off, or in the case of Stafford Hospital been awarded promotions or massive payoffs. Indeed the boss of the trust that failed these 1,200 patients got a £400,000 payoff and had amassed a £1.27m pension pot.
What’s worse is that my girlfriend’s grandad is in there at the moment after a fall broke his hip and the care is still appalling. You’ve got issues like nurses giving drugs to patients without knowing what the drug does, and filling him up with painkillers when he doesn’t need them such that he had to forcibly stop them. He required physio in order to regain his mobility and received a single fucking session of it, as a result of this neglect he probably wont walk again now.
So yeah, Wayne Rooney might have been caught driving his BMW over the speed limit but at least he isn’t killing people.
loading...
I am sorry to hear of your bad experiences with the NHS, but in most areas I have worked I have never witnessed these sort of incidences. Yes there are shoddy areas like but the vast majority of NHS staff do an excellent job in my experience as a patient/relative and member of staff. My biggest complaint is the damage Labour has done with its obsession with targets and red tape.
loading...
No, but my point is that you can create a special case out of anything.
Some footballers might well “get away with murder” and behave like the louts that they are, but not all doctors and nurses are perfect either.
loading...
I agree, fair point.
loading...
It is worth mentioning must people on this board can be trained to be a Nurse I am sure a good 50% can become doctors. But I will bet my house none of us could play like Wayne Rooney or fill the O2 stadium like Mz Cole.
loading...
What confuses me the most is why you target footballers exclusively. Is it because you believe yourself to be better educated and intellectually superior to the likes of Wayne Rooney (and you probably are) and therefore are jealous that he has a talent for a different profession that requires physical prowess and training rather than mental and happens to be well rewarded for it?
Why not look at pretty boy Lewis Hamilton. He was recently done for performing a burnout on a public road in a powerful Mercedes, lied to race stewards about being told whether to let a car past – and he reportedly makes £75m per year. Rooney makes a fraction of that.
loading...
yep, it’s always a fair debate, and if you accept the rule of the market you have to accept what the market will pay someone. There is a scarcity value in being able to play sport at an elite level – and many fall by the wayside. Roger Federer is a multi-millionaire. But can you make a living at #200 in the world rankings? At least sports stars actually do have some ability – unlike half of the executives on the FTSE 100, who are largely accountants who climb the oily poll by learning how to butter up fellow accountants who control pension and investment funds. What’s common to all of them is that they should contribute – get heads of state together and close the tax havens and loopholes. The same applies to big business
loading...
Actually most of them aren’t accountants but connected public school boys in the main with little ability other than to be ruthless at the expense of other people (much like our politicians). But that’s how the markets work and I doubt anyone can change that in our lifetimes as it’s a global phenomenon. I totally agree that the sportsmen earning high wages at least have to have real talent of a sort. The wages may be obscene but at least they all deserve a good amount of money. Ire is better directed elsewhere I feel.
loading...
I agree there and its about time the bankers were made accountable, there is a campaign to bring about a robin hood tax, see here: http://robinhoodtax.org.uk/
loading...
Probably but so are Council Executives and the Gravy Train is pulling into the Station.
loading...