No. Football is one of the few professions where the players actually get paid close to the true value of their labour.

As basically best players = best results = maximised revenue, the best players hold the negotiating power to capture all the profit from football. Clubs are very unprofitable in general for their revenue and I think it’s better that players get this share than owners and shareholders.

You can’t compare to public sector, so don’t. Compare to bankers, lawyers and other private sector professions.

Compared to jobs that actually matter to the continuation of a healthy society like doctors and teachers? Yes. Doesn’t help that football is one of the only professions where teenagers suddenly become millionaires with no preparation for it.

However I would rather the players get the money than their employers, generally speaking.

No. This question always seems to be asked a lot in school. People always bring up nurses and doctors etc but how much revenue do they generate? How hard is it to become a doctor/nurse compared to a footballer? It’s basically supply and demand, the demand for a footballer is huge and the supply is rather low in terms of talent.

You should not think about how much players earn but you should think about how much people spend to watching football.

I’m Italian so I will give you the example of my country but I am sure that is happening the same situation everywhere.

Players earn much money because they help teams to earn money from championships prices. Where do you think the championships prizes come from?

They come from TV rights, tickets, shirts and other gadgets and sponsors.

TV rights prices are increasing season by season. In Italy to watch Serie A you have to spend 50€ per month. To watch a game at the stadium you have to spend 40€ (And you are in a place where you can’t see anything).

The fact is that if people will stop to spend money on football, they won’t give so big prizes and players won’t earn so much money.

I don’t think so ,if football players are overpaid ,then club are overspending if club are overspending then they will face financial problem in a long run, in my opinion other profession are underpaid. If u look at football, one of largest share of revenue goes to football salaries but this is not the case with let say hospital revenue and doctors.
some will argue that they dont deserve it , then in that situation blame the demand market

Yes, it’s also not so much about being overpaid but the attitude behind it.

Whenever a professional athlete fucks up/doesnt do their job properly enough, we hardly hear about it unless its been consistent for months and even then we’re told that “oh they’re just humans, cut them some slack” which is completely fair but we refuse to elevate the rest of the society’s working population to the same standards, you get chewed up and kicked out of your ‘much harder’ job for not doing it properly enough, reminds me of the infamous meme video wherein a Spanish guy is yelling at the players reminding them how privileged they are what kinda lifestyle they live yet fuck the easiest parts of their work up by missing 5 yard sitters, really puts things into perspective.

Not at all.

A bit of a crude demonstration, but take a sold out match at a 50,000 seater stadium.

~25,000 season tickets at ~£20 a game ~25,000 match day tickets at ~£30 a game.

That’s £1.1m just from match going fans on a single match day. Add on top the massive sums that the top paying leagues get for their domestic and international TV rights (particularly the PL) and also the very lucrative advertising deals (shirt sponsors, club sponsors, stadium sponsors etc) and the incomes are huge for clubs in the big leagues where high salaries are paid.

A lot of this money goes on the actual talent, the workers that people come to see rather than even more going in to the owners pockets. I do think clubs should do more for their lower paid matchday/support staff (some salaries are dreadful even for roles as crucial as scouting) and investment in their local area (some clubs are better than others here). But the very top 0.001% of talent in the world’s most popular sport that is also a lucrative industry deserves to reap the rewards imo.

The best way to look at I think is that the money is always going to exist in football so would I rather a billionaire profit from this or people from all around the globe coming from different backgrounds, some who had truly awful upbringings, benefit from it. I think the answer becomes a lot more straight forward then.

I also think these players coming from less privaliged backgrounds are more likely to do good with there money. Of course you’ll get a handful of individuals who spend recklessly and give footballers a flashy bad name, but the charity work that is able to to be done in countries like Senegal (Mane is one of the first names that came to my head due to being a Liverpool fan) would never have been able to have been done without football.

They’re paid pretty directly per market forces. Clubs can afford to pay high wages because it’s worth it in terms of the money that brings in.

In that sense, no, they aren’t paid too much (as a group), because if they were then clubs would rapidly stop paying them as much and/or go out of business because of it.

Morally, it does seem a little revolting.

Elite players? No, I don’t.

a) they generate vast amounts of revenue for their clubs, they should receive an appropriate share of that revenue

b) It is the most hyper-competitive job market out there. The world is full of footballers, the game is studied, coached and analysed like no other. Talented young players are identified early and resources devoted to developing them. Whoever you are, other elite players are always hungry to take your job, from across the entire planet to within your own club, and your employers are always on the lookout for a better option. To be at the very top you have overcome astonishingly long odds and are, by definition, absolutely exceptional at your job to a global standard.

c) It doesn’t last long and can all be over in a moment.

Do I think there is too much money in modern football overall? That would be a much trickier question to answer, and I’d probably come down yes, there is. But whatever money there is in football, I absolutely do not begrudge the actual players a single cent of their share.

At the top level? Absolutely they do, along with a lot of other professional sports people. I was a professional educator. My job was to teach young people to express themselves via their language and among other things I taught Mathematics, History, Geography and German. The highest salary I ever earned was about $80,000 AUD per year for this work. According to the website “www.statista.com/” the average pay earned by Manchester United players was over 7 million GB pounds (about 13.3 MILLION AUD) per season. Every club except 3 had players earning over 1 million pounds per season. For me as a teacher, even if I earned 100,000 AUD a year, it would take me 133 years to earn what a player for Man U to earn in a single year.

He kicks a ball around, sometimes not even all that good. I taught kids to read, to value themselves as humans, and a thousand other things. And yet, the world in which we live values and rewards a ball kicker vastly more than people like teachers, nurses, police offers, firemen and women. I even hear that teachers in the US have to get second jobs to get by. If that is true, then that is bullshit which a capital B.

Yes. Ideally, they wouldn’t earn mega wages that threaten the stability of the clubs. The players could get paid a decent wage and then the leftover money could be used to stabilise the club and be invested in the local community. But we all know that if they didn’t take the money then the chairman/board would take it instead. And because the players are the ones on the stage, generating the product then they deserve it fair more than the shareholders.