[Football] Disparity in earnings

[Bold Seagull]

Challenge being that the current billions being found is a one off. Doubling NHS staffs pay is an extra cost every year - 2018 spending on NHS salaries was around £40bn, that's a lot of extra money to find every year, year in year out. And for the avoidance of doubt, I agree NHS staff should be paid more but I have no idea where the money would come from.

It is hard to pick up on individual arguments through this thread. I also agree that you can't double everything, but the structure of all our frontline service pay and how that paid the price for the 2008 crash for 10 years comes into sharp focus now we need them to put their lives at risk from a virus that has already taken 60 doctor's lives in Italy alone.

It's now laid bare for all to see we have run our health service so that it creaks under the strain of a normal winter, let alone contingency for any kind of extraordinary occurrence. The fact is pandemic scenarios will exist and these scenarios have been somewhat ignored, otherwise we would have stashes of PPE, apps for tracking, testing etc. The conversion of Excel may well exist as one of those plans, because it would be extraordinary if that has just emerged from nothing in the space of a month or so. I would have thought drawings, M&E plans and how that conversion could happen have long existed because the ventilation systems, drainage & sanitation, layouts etc must all have been previously assessed – if it has just been done on the hoof, I would be astounded.

There needs to be a new paradigm after this, as we cannot just pay through austerity again, simply because if this is hanging over us for a period of time, then we need to put more money into public services – there will be nothing to cut and nor should their be. Worldwide taxation of wealth will have to come into the equation.

Climate emergency, pandemic, these are real existential threats that should be funded as the life threatening immediate threats that they are.

 

[Bold Seagull]

Thing is, there are far more people in the country who have the ability to be a nurse, than to be a footballer. Like millions and millions more.

You also have to work a lot harder to become a footballer than you do a nurse. I'm sure that will be an unpopular opinion, but it is true.

Nurses should clearly be paid more, but to try and claim that being a footballer is easy and a nurse is hard isn't really true. How many promising footballers don't make the grade? Millions and millions. How many people who want to be nurses don't?

Footballers are clearly grossly overpaid, but at the end of the day they create hundreds of millions of pounds for their employers. Should that money just sit in Tony Bloom's bank account instead?

I'm sorry, but it's the context of what you mean by work really. Most professional footballers will have become footballers because they 'loved' playing football as a kid. They were likely never without a ball at their feet. All they would have wanted to do was play football. Yeah sure, it took some sacrifice, but generally when we talk about 'sacrifice' of a footballer, it's that they didn't complete their education, or gave up getting shitfaced with their mates at the weekends. The actual hard work part - what playing something they love everyday?

Now many of us pay to play football because we love it. It's an enjoyable past-time activity. Why would any of us do it if it could be classed as 'hard work'?

I'm sure many nurses love being a nurse, but unless you have done it, experienced it first hand, gone through the training, then your opinion isn't really unpopular, just completely unfounded.

 

[Perkino]

Don’t fall into the trap of making it a purely public compared to private sector debate.

There are millions of private sector workers on very modest pay, with no final salary pension scheme, working for bullying bosses, without union cover. No one on NSC is championing their cause.

Of course, but the difference is that in the private sector a company is free to spend their cash in whatever ways they wish. Paying their football players an obscene amount of money is something that is decided by each club whereas in the public sector there isn't the same opportunity to throw cash around in the same way.

 

[Commander]

I'm sorry, but it's the context of what you mean by work really. Most professional footballers will have become footballers because they 'loved' playing football as a kid. They were likely never without a ball at their feet. All they would have wanted to do was play football. Yeah sure, it took some sacrifice, but generally when we talk about 'sacrifice' of a footballer, it's that they didn't complete their education, or gave up getting shitfaced with their mates at the weekends. The actual hard work part - what playing something they love everyday?

Now many of us pay to play football because we love it. It's an enjoyable past-time activity. Why would any of us do it if it could be classed as 'hard work'?

I'm sure many nurses love being a nurse, but unless you have done it, experienced it first hand, then your opinion isn't really unpopular, just completely unfounded.

I think it's a complete myth that footballers all just love what they do and it's not hard work at all. I love playing football, but a couple of hours a week is more than enough. There seems to be this view that footballers are just people with a God given talent that just kick a ball about and get paid millions of pounds for doing so. That's clearly complete nonsense. Unless you happen to be an absolute genius like Maradona, Messi or Best, then to make it as a footballer requires an incredible amount of hard work, and anyone who claims it doesn't is completely deluded. I'd love to see you put yourself through the gym workouts, running, drills etc. that they do and then say it isn't hard work. Playing in front of 30,000 people every other Saturday (while thousands hurl personal abuse at you every time you dare to make a mistake) must be amazing, but that's about 10% of what they do.

Tell me an industry that is as competitive as professional football, where as many people are desperate to work in it, and as few people succeed. You cannot tell me what they do isn't hard work! Are you suggesting a marathon runner doesn't work hard? Or a professional tennis player? Just because you enjoy it, doesn't mean it isn't hard work. I imagine a large proportion of nurses love what they do, does that mean it isn't hard work?

Nurses are clearly underpaid, I don't think anybody would argue that. But it isn't that hard to become a nurse, where as it is unbelievably hard to become a professional footballer. There are about 4,000 professional footballers in the UK and over 300,000 nurses. There's about 20 million men who wanted to become professional footballers and probably about 400,000 people who wanted to become nurses. And that is why footballers should get paid a far higher wage than a nurse.

I'm not sure why I've got myself in to this discussion because I knew it would be unpopular. I accept I've never been a nurse, but my mum was, for about 40 years until she retired, so I've seen what they go through.

 

[Bold Seagull]

I think it's a complete myth that footballers all just love what they do and it's not hard work at all. I love playing football, but a couple of hours a week is more than enough. There seems to be this view that footballers are just people with a God given talent that just kick a ball about and get paid millions of pounds for doing so. That's clearly complete nonsense. Unless you happen to be an absolute genius like Maradona, Messi or Best, then to make it as a footballer requires an incredible amount of hard work, and anyone who claims it doesn't is completely deluded. I'd love to see you put yourself through the gym workouts, running, drills etc. that they do and then say it isn't hard work. Playing in front of 30,000 people every other Saturday (while thousands hurl personal abuse at you every time you dare to make a mistake) must be amazing, but that's about 10% of what they do.

Tell me an industry that is as competitive as professional football, where as many people are desperate to work in it, and as few people succeed. You cannot tell me what they do isn't hard work! Are you suggesting a marathon runner doesn't work hard? Or a professional tennis player? Just because you enjoy it, doesn't mean it isn't hard work. I imagine a large proportion of nurses love what they do, does that mean it isn't hard work?

Nurses are clearly underpaid, I don't think anybody would argue that. But it isn't that hard to become a nurse, where as it is unbelievably hard to become a professional footballer. There are about 4,000 professional footballers in the UK and over 300,000 nurses. There's about 20 million men who wanted to become professional footballers and probably about 400,000 people who wanted to become nurses. And that is why footballers should get paid a far higher wage than a nurse.

I'm not sure why I've got myself in to this discussion because I knew it would be unpopular. I accept I've never been a nurse, but my mum was, for about 40 years until she retired, so I've seen what they go through.

Exactly! It's hard to become a professional footballer, it's not hard work though, it's great work, and if you dedicate yourself, make it, fantastic, they're living the dream. Nursing, yeah fairly easy to become a nurse, but 'hard' bloody work, difficult hours etc. Perhaps it's just what you mean by hard work. It's like 'type 2' fun. I'm sure training to ride a bike to be just 1 of the top 160 riders in the world to compete in the Le Tour is as hard physically as you can imagine. Hard work though, not really, not in comparison to say the slog of a junior doctor, it's a different meaning of 'hard' completely.

You listen to any professional sportsmen, from football to tennis to cycling to marathon running to motoracing. Whenever I've heard them, or read their books, they all collectively talk about 'living the dream' and how lucky they are, talking to young people to follow their own dreams. They all know there is a huge difference between the hard work they do, and the hard work the likes of nurses and doctors do.

 

[El Presidente]

Hear hear.

The freezing of their pay through austerity as late as 2017 was a disgrace. The under funding of the NHS so that it has no contingency capacity or equipment so that it operates at capacity through a normal winter is a disgrace.

We’ll now be paying obscene amounts for ventilators, ppe, temporary buildings and adaption of them.

Perhaps after all this, the current mindset of not taxing wealth proportionally to properly cover essential services, instead of cutting/freezing the pay of those key staff already on low pay to pay for the mistakes of others will stop. We have to have a fresh outlook after this. It cannot be down to austerity to pay for this again. There has to be another way.

I think many people will agree with you. Plooks is an disingenuous as a smack seller giving out freebies to schoolkids though, which is why he's pissed off so many.

 

[Westdene Seagull]

I think many people will agree with you. Plooks is an disingenuous as a smack seller giving out freebies to schoolkids though, which is why he's pissed off so many.

Disagree .... he's pissed so many people off because he's fvcking stupid !

 

[El Presidente]

Challenge being that the current billions being found is a one off. Doubling NHS staffs pay is an extra cost every year - 2018 spending on NHS salaries was around £40bn, that's a lot of extra money to find every year, year in year out. And for the avoidance of doubt, I agree NHS staff should be paid more but I have no idea where the money would come from.

Wagers taken by Bet365 last year were £65 billion.

We've made our choices as how to prioritise our spending, picking on footballers is populist twaddle.

 

[schmunk]

Wagers taken by Bet365 last year were £65 billion.

We've made our choices as how to prioritise our spending, picking on footballers is populist twaddle.

Albeit, as there is an expected (hoped!) return on gambling, all of that £65 billion turnover is not as such 'spending' - some deluded fools might even see it as investment.

I get your point, though.

 

[sagaman]

Thing is, there are far more people in the country who have the ability to be a nurse, than to be a footballer. Like millions and millions more.

You also have to work a lot harder to become a footballer than you do a nurse. I'm sure that will be an unpopular opinion, but it is true.

Nurses should clearly be paid more, but to try and claim that being a footballer is easy and a nurse is hard isn't really true. How many promising footballers don't make the grade? Millions and millions. How many people who want to be nurses don't?

Footballers are clearly grossly overpaid, but at the end of the day they create hundreds of millions of pounds for their employers. Should that money just sit in Tony Bloom's bank account instead?

The long hours Prem footballers put in each week to earn squillions of pounds per annum makes me feel quite exhausted!!

 

[beorhthelm]

Stop hiding behind the old myth of there not being money for it. There is. We can easily find double the funding with higher taxes and you know it. If you really think NHS staff should be paid more and given more funding I suggest you stop hiding behind the "we can not afford it" excuse.

i didnt read any myth or saying we cant do it, just a rough number of what it'll cost. about 6-7p on income tax should cover it.

 

[Westdene Seagull]

Stop hiding behind the old myth of there not being money for it. There is. We can easily find double the funding with higher taxes and you know it. If you really think NHS staff should be paid more and given more funding I suggest you stop hiding behind the "we can not afford it" excuse.

I'm assuming you are in the 20% tax bracket - are you willing to pay 5% extra tax - i.e. tax it up to 25% for basic tax ?

 

[LamieRobertson]

Seems to be many people on here who bulk at such an idea though.

Do you think that those staff who work in hospitals say responsible for ‘housekeeping’ and services such as a fireman..and those educating our children etc should be paid more?

 

[LamieRobertson]

Most probably yes.

Quite a hike in tax for that lot i guess.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you.....if current events make us reassess the value of people like nurses etc then something good will have come from it. How we go about funding it...well thats the billion pound question....hopefully at the very least peoples mindsets will have changed

 

[Springal]

There are probably a lot of frivolous government spending already, I mean look at HS2. But yes, taxes would go up but it would be so worth it.

HS2 to add capacity to the north is no brainier.
Too many single points of failures at the moment.

 

[Hiney]

Seems to be many people on here who bulk at such an idea though.

baulk

 

[El Presidente]

Yup, pointing out an auto-correct is the main thing here. Why do you not want to fund and pay the NHS workers more? Why am I being a, to use your description of me: a lobotomisation scarred **** for suggesting we do?

As someone that knows Hiney well and is also aware that he has family members who work in the health service I can assure you he is very much in favour of greater funding of the NHS.

He called you those things because of your hysterical reaction to anyone who questioned some of your other comments and who don’t share your blinkered, self congratulatory twattishness followed by self pity and skewing of previous comments to justify your position.

 

[Whoislloydy]

I've scrolled past this thread countless times and only just occurred to me that it said earning and not earrings

Makes sense now, I really should wear my glasses.

 

[Acker79]

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...virus-matt-hancock-premier-league-footballers - Marina Hyde's latest column.

One of the great rules of British public life is that sooner or later, everything ends up being blamed on footballers. No matter how alien our new world looked at the start of the coronavirus shutdown, you could say one thing for sure: eventually, this will be the fault of Raheem Sterling.

I know that so-called experts will rewind through the testing failures, to the herd immunity row, to the 250,000-strong Cheltenham Festival, to the shifting epicentre of the pandemic, to Spain, to Italy, to South Korea, to air travel, to Wuhan, to patient zero, to the bat in the Chinese wet market. But in a very real sense – perhaps the realest – this whole thing traces way back beyond all that. Back, in fact, to UK humankind’s oldest enemy: young men who play in the Premier League.

Even in the good times, the same people who thought Brexit was totally worth the nursing crisis it vastly deepened can never wait to tell you how many NHS nurses a footballer’s contract is worth. As discussed frequently in this space, nurses are criminally undervalued. But strangely, it’s only ever footballers whose remuneration is discussed in these precise relative terms. The footballers-nurses discussion takes place in an exchange market in which only two currencies are traded. You rarely hear anyone convert how many nurses’ salaries we could have had instead of a Libyan intervention that helped create a failed state, or instead of some £53m drawings for a garden bridge, or instead of a load of nuclear weapons we wouldn’t even notionally be allowed to use unless the Americans told us to. And without wishing to downgrade the spectator pleasure anyone took from seeing a north African country slide into civil war – GET IN! – people actually like football. They watch it. They frequently claim to live for it. They get more bang for their buck for it than they do with a botched military intervention, which effectively plays behind closed doors. (Though Rupert Murdoch usually owns the rights to both.)

It has been mere days since a few clubs (not players) began revealing their plans to apply for government aid for furloughed support staff, and footballers are already getting it in the neck for not having what we might call an oven-ready formalised response to it. On Wednesday, we heard from the Digital, Culture, Media & Sport select committee chair, Julian Knight, about the “moral vacuum” of the Premier League, which means so much more coming from an MP who literally wrote a book on tax avoidance. For now, the question seemingly frothing off everyone’s lips is: are Premier League players taking a pay cut? The answer, as of Friday afternoon, is yes: 30%.

Yet to put that into perspective, last year Forbes estimated that just 12 of the richest Premier League owners had a combined worth of £74bn. Are the owners taking a pay cut?

Or to put it into another perspective: the Professional Footballers’ Association is run by the galaxy’s highest-paid union boss, one Gordon Taylor, who took home more than £2m last year, yet continually fails his members in a variety of ways, and somehow managed to head off a coup and string out his already 41-year tenure at the top by commissioning a review – a full 16 months ago – into how the union is run. Is he taking a pay cut?

Or to put it into arguably the most relevant perspective: it has now been months since Boris Johnson began to be briefed about the threat of the coronavirus; many weeks since he was able to watch its ravages take hold on our European doorstep, yet persisted in a mitigation strategy that left the UK’s response a remarkable outlier; almost three weeks since he radically changed course; two weeks since he promised 25,000 tests a day; and a good 48 hours since it was revealed that his government’s pledges had seen just 2,000 NHS frontline workers tested in total. Is he taking a pay cut? Because I want to be sure he’s personally paying the taxpayer £350m a week to be prime minister before we give one second of his airtime to the Newcastle midfield.

Disappointingly, Matt Hancock seized on this piece of footballer misdirection in his comeback briefing on Thursday night. That said, the health secretary’s return was relatively welcome, not least because mere hours before, Nigel Farage had broken another 14-second silence to demand his sacking. (Mr Farage, a 56-year-old occasional freelance journalist, called for Hancock’s replacement with a tough outsider who “gets things done”. Louis Van Gaal?)

Hancock’s briefing was a vast improvement on the previous day’s effort with alleged business secretary Alok Sharma, when we had to accept the government was not so much playing its reserves but its most talentless fan, who duly spent the entire fixture running away from the ball. As time has worn on, these daily three-person televised set-pieces resemble the prelude to an Apprentice firing. Who will you be bringing back into the boardroom with you, Alok, and attempting to offload the blame on to? The only thing missing is Alan Sugar shouting: “30 bladdy ventilators?! That is a bladdy disgrace!”

Hancock unveiled his Five Pillars strategy, which is arguably compromised by the fact that Pillar One is not “Procure a Tardis”. As former Conservative cabinet minister Greg Clark, now chair of the science committee, warned on Thursday, the UK is now “obviously too late” to recover the time lost by failing to mass-test NHS staff. Our best hope is a “Dunkirk” strategy of allowing smaller labs to assist the effort.

Ah, Dunkirk. There’s something slightly heartbreaking about watching experts apparently judging that this might be the only language the government understands. Clark himself was only echoing the plea of Paul Nurse, chairman of the respected Francis Crick Institute, who this week urgently tried to find the government’s sweet spot. “Institutes like ours are coming together with a Dunkirk spirit,” he explained. “The government has put some big boats, destroyers, in place. That’s a bit more cumbersome to get working and we wish them all the luck to do that, but we little boats can contribute as well.”

This desperate appeal strategy has the flavour of giving a toddler a potty branded with its major obsession. Ooh, look at this thing! What’s that then? You like the Teletubbies, don’t you? Shall we go over and have a closer look? This, but with imploring the government to do what it takes to even get near to adequate virus testing. See, it could be like Dunkirk! You like reading about Dunkirk, don’t you? Shall we make it a fun Dunkirk game and get some health workers tested, yes? Aw, who’s a big boy, Churchill?

We began this column with one of the great laws of British public life, and we end with another: the pathological insistence on filtering everything through the prism of the second world war. It runs from Johnson’s Churchill obsession through Nigel Farage’s career misunderstanding of what a single minute of the conflict meant, to people who weren’t born in the blitz telling you “we survived the blitz”. We are never more than six feet away from the events of 75 to 80 years ago. Let’s hope we get the three points this time, too.