[Football] Disparity in earnings

[Weststander]

i'll add a footnote to the above by saying of course - in the case of footballers, even modest ones like the albion players earning 2m+ a year, they would find it a lot harder to avoid THAT much tax!...Maybe they can claim
100k ish for full time accountant
100k ish for personal massuse (for injuries of course!)
150k ish for personal dietitian
250k mortgage payments for their villas in the south of france or spain
100k travelling expenses to work (personal chaffeur as cant drive - due to being banned for drunk driving!?)
500k into pension fund so they can retire at 35
There thats over a million in taxable income theyve avoided already..

You need to set up that clever tax scheme.

With a £250k commission to you per player for running it.

You could draw in the brains of Jack Grealish as your first client.

 

[wellquickwoody]

Not at all. All I have seen people put is:
"footballers are more skilled" - false
"there are more people wanting to be nurses" - false
"footballers contribute to more profits" - false
"there are more foreigners wanting to be nurses" - false

Just admit it. We underpay them because we have CHOSEN to vote in party that CHOOSES to pay them badly. We CHOSE their low wages and funding. It is not some other thing external to us.

So would nurses actually earn more than football players if Labour were in government?

 

[jonnyrovers]

NHS pay levels aren’t a pure market though, are they? Inherently, government intervention and public sentiment has a huge say.

I’ve always said that I’d pay a few percent more in basic rate income tax if it could be directly funnelled to nurses and any other modestly paid, skilled workers who save lives and care for the infirm. I know other non-Momentum types who would too.

Any extra money made available for health and care will be prioritised in to increasing capacity before it gets anywhere near salaries.

You're right there's an internal market for healthcare pay & conditions. However pure or impure the market for pay levels is, relying on public sentiment is like relying on the weather. Look at the junior doctor working conditions mess from a few years ago. Move forward to now and a nation feels impotent to make a difference so signals it's virtue by getting its knickers in a twist about public sector pay. We are fickle folk.

 

[Brightonfan1983]

I am sorry if this has been aired on another thread but I couldn’t find it.

Recent publication said the some BHA players are on £50k per week, obviously those at larger clubs are on hugely more. Do you think this will be a watershed in addressing the disparity between top level football and nurses? A player earns more in a week than a nurse in a year, or one player would pay for 50 nurses. Difficult to believe that reflects their contribution to society.

I am not suggesting this is the players’ fault in any way, the whole system is skewed.

To answer my own question, I don’t anticipate a major change but I wish there would be one.

Yes, it's morally wrong, But with all the money that the Premier League generates, who would we rather be the recipient of it? The agents? The negotiating suits? The hedge funds?

It's got to be the players. The same way that film stars earn millions per picture. They produce the product, they should get the lion's share. For example, the starting West End wage for actors is about £500 a week. Stars will get £5g plus. And no one complains, and neither should they. Because stars sell the tickets. "Simples".

*I have no idea how to redress the balance, by the way.

 

[El Presidente]

I am not. I am genuinely amazed at the amount of people on here who defend the under-funding and woeful pay of the NHS and workers. To suggest footballers are more important, add more value money wise, and are more highly skilled is utter nonsense and just not backed up by fact!
I am sickened by the tory sycophants who refuse to lay any blame on the deaths and woeful health conditions on their beloved paty.

Can you show me all the people on here who have suggested that footballers are more important than nurses?

 

[Westdene Seagull]

I am not debating with you as you troll and ignore anything everyone says and go wildly off topic.

So I ask you a perfectly polite question and I'm trolling ? As someone else has put 'planet Plooks' !

 

[sparkie]

Can you show me all the people on here who have suggested that footballers are more important than nurses?

He can't see that there actually arn't any, because his horse is too high.

 

[Simster]

Not at all. All I have seen people put is:
"footballers are more skilled" - false
"there are more people wanting to be nurses" - false
"footballers contribute to more profits" - false
"there are more foreigners wanting to be nurses" - false

Just admit it. We underpay them because we have CHOSEN to vote in party that CHOOSES to pay them badly. We CHOSE their low wages and funding. It is not some other thing external to us.

You really do need to pay more attention to what is being said. Hardly any of this is true.

"footballers are more skilled". The reality is that most of the 100,000 people who play football do not get paid for it at all. They play for fun. A tiny handful are so good that they can make a living from it, and a tiny handful of those are so good that they are paid a fortune. Healthcare work is more skilled than being able to play a game, but if you get trained and work hard at nursing, the chances are that somebody will pay you to do that. Incidentally, like footballers, there is also a natural order as to who gets paid better in healthcare work.

"there are more people wanting to be nurses". Nobody said that, they said the supply of nursing labour was far higher than that of top level footballers. Albion need a striker, they have to pay a fortune because there is a very limited number of people capable of scoring enough goals to keep us up. If Guys Hospital need a new nurse, they will find the person for the job but from a supply of thousands of people capable of doing the job.
"there are more foreigners wanting to be nurses". Again, you misunderstand what is being said. There are nurses trained in quite poor nations, who will therefore accept low wages from the NHS. Unfortunately, European health workers find that this is partially what drives wages down. With footballers, only the best foreign players get visas to work here, and rightly so because unlike nursing, we only want to see the best foreign players working here. It is recognised that flooding the player market with run of the mill professionals is in nobody's interest.

 

[El Presidente]

You really do need to pay more attention to what is being said. Hardly any of this is true.

"footballers are more skilled". The reality is that most of the 100,000 people who play football do not get paid for it at all. They play for fun. A tiny handful are so good that they can make a living from it, and a tiny handful of those are so good that they are paid a fortune. Healthcare work is more skilled than being able to play a game, but if you get trained and work hard at nursing, the chances are that somebody will pay you to do that. Incidentally, like footballers, there is also a natural order as to who gets paid better in healthcare work.

"there are more people wanting to be nurses". Nobody said that, they said the supply of nursing labour was far higher than that of top level footballers. Albion need a striker, they have to pay a fortune because there is a very limited number of people capable of scoring enough goals to keep us up. If Guys Hospital need a new nurse, they will find the person for the job but from a supply of thousands of people capable of doing the job.
"there are more foreigners wanting to be nurses". Again, you misunderstand what is being said. There are nurses trained in quite poor nations, who will therefore accept low wages from the NHS. Unfortunately, European health workers find that this is partially what drives wages down. With footballers, only the best foreign players get visas to work here, and rightly so because unlike nursing, we only want to see the best foreign players working here. It is recognised that flooding the player market with run of the mill professionals is in nobody's interest.

Tsk Tsk Simster, you and your pesky FACTS.

 

[schmunk]

He lied about the 10% tax btw. Exaggerating to boast?

It was very advantageous, BUT corp tax for starters takes a 1/5 and used to be more (post negligible expenses in his profession as tax deductible and the nominal tax/NI free salary which would’ve been lower at that time).

Was his turnover very high? Into higher rate tax, his wife and him would also paid significant sums in personal tax on dividends.

Your layman’s summary of how it works for tax now, is wrong in several ways.

I can well believe the 10% tax rate figure, as that was widely bandied about several years ago, usually in connection with some form of EBT loan scheme.

These have mostly been chased down and squashed, with tax recovered from the contractors through the 2019 Loan Charge, amongst other HMRC initiatives.

The most famous EBT case was Rangers, which they initially won at the First Tier Tribunal, but HMRC appealed and eventually won at the Supreme Court a couple of years ago: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/40505839

EBT loans were (to my mind) always very clearly tax evasion wearing a thin veil of semi-legal tax avoidance, and anyone with half a brain caught up in them deserves everything their greedy little mitts get.


On a lesser scale, but much more widespread, was abuse of travel and subsistence expenses through Umbrella employment companies, often undertaken by lower-paid contractors for whom a Ltd Co was not a feasible option. This would involve e.g. claiming for accommodation costs not actually outlaid (an example I've seen being a roadworker who claimed for a hotel but actually slept in his camper van in the roadworks), sometimes falsely treating places of work as "temporary" to claim reliefs, and most often claiming flat-rate per diem allowances for home groceries or even monies not actually spent (I've seen claims for £20 daily food expenses backed up by a receipt for a 50p Mars Bar). Such things could significantly lower the tax and (more importantly for the end-client) NI costs. I have more sympathy with these contractors (albeit still fairly little) as a key concern in the umbrella industry was to ensure that the reclassification of income to avoid tax didn't put the worker below the National Minimum Wage.

This dodge was squashed by HMRC in 2016 for those deemed to be under the "supervision, direction or control" of another person, which is true for the vast majority of the "independent contractors" concerned.

 

[dazzer6666]

i'll add a footnote to the above by saying of course - in the case of footballers, even modest ones like the albion players earning 2m+ a year, they would find it a lot harder to avoid THAT much tax!...Maybe they can claim
100k ish for full time accountant - who needs a FT accountant ??
100k ish for personal massuse (for injuries of course!) - how much do you think a massage therpaist earns ?
150k ish for personal dietitian - how much do you think a dietician earns ?
250k mortgage payments for their villas in the south of france or spain - mortgage payments on a foreign property from made income wouldn't be allowable for tax relief
100k travelling expenses to work (personal chaffeur as cant drive - due to being banned for drunk driving!?)
500k into pension fund so they can retire at 35 - 40k pa maximum contribution isn't it ?
There thats over a million in taxable income theyve avoided already..

LOL - no it isn't

 

[Seasidesage]

Footballers are an easy target, and the newspapers, owned in the main by billionaires, continue to peddle the comparison of players to nurses etc.

Footballers didn't cause the 2007 global recession, that was due to financiers, ratings agencies, and a pass the parcel mentality in relation to toxic debt that went through on a nod and a wink from all those connected.

Footballers didn't cause Covid-19 either, so why their wages, as opposed to those of bankers, lawyers, asset fund managers, accountants and others who provide far less entertainment and enjoyment in the world is beyond me.

This. Why people persist with condemning one of the few areas where working class people actually get to share some of the wealth they have created is beyond me. There are far more deserving cases for higher taxation than footballers as stated above. Revenue should be taxed at the point of creation and all companies and individuals should be paying a set rate with no exemptions and no allowances, but this will never happen as those in charge are the beneficiary's of the current system. Tax law has deliberately been made incredibly complex to allow those who can afford it to avoid it.

 

[schmunk]

i'll add a footnote to the above by saying of course - in the case of footballers, even modest ones like the albion players earning 2m+ a year, they would find it a lot harder to avoid THAT much tax!...Maybe they can claim
100k ish for full time accountant
100k ish for personal massuse (for injuries of course!)
150k ish for personal dietitian
250k mortgage payments for their villas in the south of france or spain
100k travelling expenses to work (personal chaffeur as cant drive - due to being banned for drunk driving!?)
500k into pension fund so they can retire at 35
There thats over a million in taxable income theyve avoided already..

They won't engage a full time accountant, masseuse or dietician. They will engage a full time manager/agent, who'll take a percentage of their gross income, so it's not a tax saving.

They can't claim tax relief for mortgage payments.

They won't be able to claim travelling expenses to the home ground or training ground as they would be classified as permanent workplaces. As I understand it the club pays for travel to away grounds.

UK pension relief for high earners is currently capped at £10,000 p.a. of contributions (£4,700 of tax/NI saving). This has ben reduced by the new budget down to £4,000 p.a. of contributions from April onwards.

Soz.

 

[lost in london]

Aaaaaaannnnyway.

Nothing will change. The Tories will say we need a strong economy to pay down the CV debt, raising tax in any material way to pay that off goes against that (and every other value they have), meaning there won't be the money in the coffers to give NHS staff material pay rises so everything will carry on just how it was before (except that we'll also be in a massive recession).

Despite this open goal of an opportunity for structural change to make society fairer people will be desperate for life to go back to normal as soon as possible, and the Tories will say that the huge deficit (that can only re repaid by a strong economy enabled by low taxation) ties their hands from making real change.

 

[schmunk]

Aaaaaaannnnyway.

Nothing will change. The Tories will say we need a strong economy to pay down the CV debt, raising tax in any material way to pay that off goes against that (and every other value they have), meaning there won't be the money in the coffers to give NHS staff material pay rises so everything will carry on just how it was before (except that we'll also be in a massive recession).

Despite this open goal of an opportunity for structural change to make society fairer people will be desperate for life to go back to normal as soon as possible, and the Tories will say that the huge deficit (that can only re repaid by a strong economy enabled by low taxation) ties their hands from making real change.

There are roughly 1.3M NHS staff, plus vacancies.

£1B extra spent would put roughly £500 into each of their bank accounts (with a few assumptions on pay and tax rates).

The Lib Dems recently pledged to raise all tax rates by 1p, which would apparently have raised around £7B.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

Aaaaaaannnnyway.

Nothing will change. The Tories will say we need a strong economy to pay down the CV debt, raising tax in any material way to pay that off goes against that (and every other value they have), meaning there won't be the money in the coffers to give NHS staff material pay rises so everything will carry on just how it was before (except that we'll also be in a massive recession).

Despite this open goal of an opportunity for structural change to make society fairer people will be desperate for life to go back to normal as soon as possible, and the Tories will say that the huge deficit (that can only re repaid by a strong economy enabled by low taxation) ties their hands from making real change.

There has to be money and there will be money. But it will be interesting to see how One Nation Boris actually is. Taking the NHS as an example, post Corona will be the prefect time for him to drive appropriate funding levels through parliament. Funding levels which will be totally unpalatable to many in his party. Unpalatable, but unstoppable. It will be his choice whether he supports the NHS or not.

 

[Weststander]

I can well believe the 10% tax rate figure, as that was widely bandied about several years ago, usually in connection with some form of EBT loan scheme.

These have mostly been chased down and squashed, with tax recovered from the contractors through the 2019 Loan Charge, amongst other HMRC initiatives.

The most famous EBT case was Rangers, which they initially won at the First Tier Tribunal, but HMRC appealed and eventually won at the Supreme Court a couple of years ago: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/40505839

EBT loans were (to my mind) always very clearly tax evasion wearing a thin veil of semi-legal tax avoidance, and anyone with half a brain caught up in them deserves everything their greedy little mitts get.


On a lesser scale, but much more widespread, was abuse of travel and subsistence expenses through Umbrella employment companies, often undertaken by lower-paid contractors for whom a Ltd Co was not a feasible option. This would involve e.g. claiming for accommodation costs not actually outlaid (an example I've seen being a roadworker who claimed for a hotel but actually slept in his camper van in the roadworks), sometimes falsely treating places of work as "temporary" to claim reliefs, and most often claiming flat-rate per diem allowances for home groceries or even monies not actually spent (I've seen claims for £20 daily food expenses backed up by a receipt for a 50p Mars Bar). Such things could significantly lower the tax and (more importantly for the end-client) NI costs. I have more sympathy with these contractors (albeit still fairly little) as a key concern in the umbrella industry was to ensure that the reclassification of income to avoid tax didn't put the worker below the National Minimum Wage.

This dodge was squashed by HMRC in 2016 for those deemed to be under the "supervision, direction or control" of another person, which is true for the vast majority of the "independent contractors" concerned.

I was very aware of Ranger's cases 1 and 2. There were sophisticated tax schemes set up for the wealthy and high earners, some famous celebs and broadcasters included.

The poster was talking about an IT employee at his firm, who simply set up a small limited company five years ago and was paid 3x as much as a freelancer, and boasted that he paid a grand total of 10% in corporate and personal taxes on the whole lot (through a basic salary and dividends). For the average Joe consultant grossing fantastic money like that, typically £300 to £750 an hour (equating to several £100k a year), and I've known many, 10% was not the tax rate 5 years ago. It did definitely paid off compared to be employed, but not to that extent.

Totally agree with you about EBT's plus the Image Rights scam.

 

[Weststander]

They won't engage a full time accountant, masseuse or dietician. They will engage a full time manager/agent, who'll take a percentage of their gross income, so it's not a tax saving.

They can't claim tax relief for mortgage payments.

They won't be able to claim travelling expenses to the home ground or training ground as they would be classified as permanent workplaces. As I understand it the club pays for travel to away grounds.

UK pension relief for high earners is currently capped at £10,000 p.a. of contributions (£4,700 of tax/NI saving). This has ben reduced by the new budget down to £4,000 p.a. of contributions from April onwards.

Soz.

I think his silly post was an early hours wind-up, after a glass or two!

 

[drew]

You really do need to pay more attention to what is being said. Hardly any of this is true.

"footballers are more skilled". The reality is that most of the 100,000 people who play football do not get paid for it at all. They play for fun. A tiny handful are so good that they can make a living from it, and a tiny handful of those are so good that they are paid a fortune. Healthcare work is more skilled than being able to play a game, but if you get trained and work hard at nursing, the chances are that somebody will pay you to do that. Incidentally, like footballers, there is also a natural order as to who gets paid better in healthcare work.

"there are more people wanting to be nurses". Nobody said that, they said the supply of nursing labour was far higher than that of top level footballers. Albion need a striker, they have to pay a fortune because there is a very limited number of people capable of scoring enough goals to keep us up. If Guys Hospital need a new nurse, they will find the person for the job but from a supply of thousands of people capable of doing the job.
"there are more foreigners wanting to be nurses". Again, you misunderstand what is being said. There are nurses trained in quite poor nations, who will therefore accept low wages from the NHS. Unfortunately, European health workers find that this is partially what drives wages down. With footballers, only the best foreign players get visas to work here, and rightly so because unlike nursing, we only want to see the best foreign players working here. It is recognised that flooding the player market with run of the mill professionals is in nobody's interest.

It's actually about 11m that play football, not 100,000. About 8m adults and 3m kids

 

[nwgull]

What's the suggestion for removing this disparity then?