You really think top level footballers work for 4 to 5 hours per week?

Premier League players often play 2 games in a week. That's 3 and a half hours. Are you saying their training, fitness, physio, etc can all be done in up to an hour and a half per week?

Also, with your reference to product price inflation that is true of many celebrities and the price increase is probably proportionately tiny.

Also, what Parksey said.

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The average pro footballer will probably do around 3 - 4 hours training a day (although not on games days) and then they might have to do a couple of hours press work a week, so I guess they will work around 25/27 hours a week. One of the top footballers will probably do a lot more press type stuff as well as photo shoots for various bits and bobs so might work as much as 35 hours a week.

EDIT: you've also got to remember that playing football puts a lot of other constraints on their time they have to be available for games, they can't eat what they want etc.

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Lexus Manson - The Worst Blog on the Internet or your money back!!!

Footballers are private employees of private companies, they should be able to be paid whatever the hell their employers deem appropriate.

Even £0.01?

I never thought I'd see so many people defending what footballers are paid.

It's a business. People will pay the best players they can in order to win more games which in turn will make them more money. The mor money they earn the better players they can afford. Which means they make more money. Which means they can buy better players.

I think you can see where that would lead.

I doubt that anybody here thinks it is morally right for a footballer to be payed more than a soldier for instance. But that's just how the world works.

GRCADE Believes in the free market.

However I think football is a weird business as you need your competitors. But also it has monopoly power and if it was any other business there would probably be price controls. In a normal competitive market their will substitutes either homogeneous or close to homogeneous, but in football due to the emotional tie there isn't,
any substitues either another football club or another sport, I wouldn't say this is 100% the case but it's quite close, with o substitutes this creates inelastic demand not perfectly inelastic but fairly inelastic (nominally price inelasticity both you could also say to an extent say things like income inelastic and quality inelastic) as such it allows the industry to price its goods with this in mind exploiting its monopoly power which allows for high wages, whilst other industries which share these industry qualities e.g trains, water/sewage are regulated.

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In America, the home of money making, salary caps exist for both the NBA and NFL. Not only is this morally superior to our free market footballing system, it makes a lot of games more exciting too.

They're self imposed though through agreement by the players union and the owners association so it's a free market solution. Also NFL players on average are piad more than football players.

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#boycottSeanPenn

Those leagues also don't have a handful of super-teams and dozens of tiny ones, the playing field is a lot more level.

I always assumed that was a governmental thing, huh.

Though I agree it makes the leagues more exciting a large reason the salary caps exist is so a bunch of billionaire owners can make large guaranteed profits each year, it's hardly morally superior.




On average premier league players are paid batter than NFL players, not to mention they have far longer careers and guaranteed contracts.

Ever watched the NBA?

It's just a bit of cop-out to have a go at footballers for earning good money, they're an easy target because football is the biggest sport in the country and has massive media coverage. Plenty of people earn more money than nurses and soldiers, why pick on footballers? Because they sleep around and have big houses and lots of nice cars? What a weak argument. They are commercial commodities in a multi-billion pound industry, they have short careers and so need to make what they can when they can. Don't forget that the vast majority of footballers (in this country at least) leave school early to follow their dream of becoming a professional, and often wouldn't have the necessary qualifications or inclination to work after they finish playing. They pay massive taxes in the UK so probably contribute more to our national coffers than most of us, I really don't get where the hate comes from. Most of us on this forum probably earn more than soldiers and nurses, is it morally wrong of us to take our monthly wages?

Also, compared to the earnings of other sports people, footballers earn comparatively modest wages. It's only the top 2 leagues in England that pay big money, and only the elite clubs in the Premiership pay the mega wages.

In my own experience I find that people who blanket-criticise football and footballers are normally the people who were gooseberry fool at playing football in school

So, in conclusion, the free market rules, and Sean Penn is a mentalist. And something about the Falklands.

The Financial Fair Play Rules are coming in soon which should limit players wages anyway and hopefully make the leagues more competitive.

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Lexus Manson - The Worst Blog on the Internet or your money back!!!

It's better in terms of what the players are paid, the taxation of the billionaire owners is a separate issue. Also, those billionaire owners would probably make more money if they owned the top couple of teams, removed the caps and let the other teams die below theirs. (If it were up to them)

I hope a day arrives when nobody in the WORLD can earn more than, say, £1 million a year in wages. That we say it isn't a problem because it depends on the money floating around the sport makes me feel really rather sad.

Why? What's so wrong with having ambition and being rewarded for being good at a job?

Nothing's wrong with ambition. How much do you have to be rewarded with though?

At £1 million present day, you would be rewarded with all the food, water, clothes, gas, electricity, dvds, holidays you wanted. You could buy a house a year, or two. A small boat.

Let's downsize that massive boat a footballer could have got, to a small boat, and use the money on... saving lifes?

That's a bullshit argument and you know it. People are spending money on what they want to spend it on. If they're not spending it on football tickets, they're not about to start spending it on saving lives. They're going to buy something else fun.