Premiership stars have earned their huge salaries (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Premiership stars have earned their huge salaries

1:36pm Sunday 4th November 2007

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Bradford MP Gerry Sutcliffe has stirred up a hornet’s nest by branding the £130,000-a-week pay packet of Chelsea captain John Terry as "obscene".
The inflation of players’ wages shows no sign of abating and has been a favourite topic of conversation for several years now.
Salaries were supposedly set to hit a ceiling price of £120,000 a week following the arrival of Andrei Shevchenko and Michael Ballack to Chelsea. Not a chance.
Terry negotiated his new contract in July of this year and became the highest paid player in the Premiership, upping the ante by another £10,000 smackers.
It’s rather like the housing market, where experts predict a slow-down every month or two, but one never materialises.
Sutcliffe knew he would win favour with the masses and be shot down by the clubs, and the inevitable hoo-hah in the media has made for some interesting reading.
After listening to both sides of the story, I accept that the huge salaries present a negative perception of the game and that they could alienate some fans.
The powers that be should certainly be looking into the creation of a maximum wage, which would eradicate much of the bad press in one fell swoop, however I still find myself responding to the detractors’ whines with the question: Why shouldn’t the top players earn huge salaries?
In such a short career, what is wrong with footballers maximising their earning potential?
In America, basketball, baseball, ice hockey and American football stars pull in considerably bigger salaries than our Premiership heavyweights, while tennis players, golfers, motor racers, athletes, even snooker players can earn vast amounts. Why should football be any different? It is the number one game in the world after all.
And let’s face it, whoever battles their way to the top in the most competitive career of all deserves a healthy financial reward.
You work your way to the top of any large company and you can expect to earn big bucks. Chief executives and chairmen, merchant bankers, your average city broker, they are all on ‘footballers wages’.
And what about actors and singers? The red-tops might exclusively reveal how much Oasis have earned from their last album or how much Kate Winslet has been paid for starring in her latest film, but it is never described as “obscene”.
It is only a miniscule minority of gifted footballers who make it to the highest level of the game, where they will remain for just a few short years. The average retirement age of a footballer is 35.
Almost every Premier League player will drop down the leagues as he gets older, commanding a significantly lower salary on his descent from the summit. High-flying businessmen, meanwhile, will continue earning six-figure pay cheques until they reach retirement age, some 30 years after the footballer has hung up his boots.
And when the Premiership player is at the top, the pressure off the pitch is more intense than on it. I’m talking about the pressure to live up to the saint-like status the media demand of footballers these days.
When children are growing up, they dream of playing for the club they support. They aspire to be like their heroes, being paid for doing something they love. They do not realise that if they make it to the top, they automatically become role models, who must live their life by a different set of rules than other young men of their own age.
Everyone who grows up playing the game knows that being lambasted by your own fans and the press when you play poorly goes with the territory (just look at the stick goalkeepers David James and Paul Robinson have come in for), but these days that is nothing compared to the coverage you get if you make a poor decision in your personal life.
Players are under such intense scrutiny that if you have one drink too many two days before a game, the press come down on you like a ton of bricks.
And even if Mr Sutcliffe disagrees with every point I make, he should at least console himself with the fact that if it wasn’t for Premiership footballers, the economy would be a damn site worse off than it is at the moment.
Think of all that lovely tax, Mr Brown. Nearly half of John Terry’s wage goes directly into the government’s coffers. You could argue that Premiership footballers play a vital part in maintaining the financial fabric of this country.