Well, this will be a tough one to justify, but hear me out.
Sometimes when watching a football game in any of the major leagues around Europe you can almost hear the commentator saying '€200,000 a week passes it to €120,000 a week, he jinks around €80,000 a week, feints to pass to €250,000 a week before falling over €180,000 a week.'
The wages seem obscene, especially for what it is a game with no inherent purpose or intrinsic value. How can we pay a man who kicks a ball around a field ten times more a week than a teacher gets in a whole year? How do we justify that? It's easy really; we tax the shit out of them.
Warning: this next section is about taxes, please bear with it.
Last year, Barclay's Bank, using various legal loopholes, only paid 1% corporation tax in England. This is compared to the 50% tax rate paid by a Premiership footballer*. This means that it only takes 2 Premiership footballers earning €250,000 a week to pay more tax in a year than a bank that makes €1 billion in profits. In 2010, Google’s Irish operation took in some €10.1bn in turnover – and paid only €15.3m in taxes.
In most industries, money flows upwards. Directors get huge bonuses for performance (or usually, for not actually dying) and money is paid out to shareholders in vast amounts. The employees on the factory floor are squeezed to a minimum, so profits are at a maximum, justifying the massive wages and dividends paid out. People are fired; wages are cut - just so profits, and the value of the shares, go up. And all the while the people taking all the money can say 'look at the bottom line, we're successful, we deserve it.'
In football this is turned on its head. Although kicking a football has no intrinsic value, it's still the core function of the business, just like the dressmaker is to the fashion industry. But while the dressmaker gets minimum wage, in football it's the factory worker, or our overpaid footballer to be exact, that gets the money. At some of the major English clubs, wages account upwards of 80% of turnover (Liverpool are one of the biggest spenders).
Imagine if your own company paid out 80% of its turnover to its employees? It's essentially a massive profit sharing scheme. Its communism as it's supposed to be. The workers work hard, and the workers are rewarded for performing well by sharing in the profits of the company.
This is way beyond the stock option bullshit that was peddled around over the last two decades. That is a long-term scam, creating employee loyalty while also driving up the company's stock price, most of which is owned by the big executives. And when the company goes tits up, it’s the employees stocks that end up being worth the least and sold last.
So football is one of the few industries that truly rewards its mid-level employees (unfortunately, the ubiquities tea lady can only be paid so much, no matter how good a brew she makes) and links its financial success to them. And this is in one of the most competitive environments on the planet, so pure capitalists can’t complain that these massive wages dent productivity.
Football is capitalism tamed, because society lets it make as much money as it wants, and then takes half of it back. The money is not lost to the directors who funnel it to offshore tax havens. The real question is how the government then distributes that wealth, because real democracy is not one person, one vote, it’s really about the equal distribution of wealth, something that we have been getting worse and worse at.
The gap between rich and poor has grown in more than three-quarters of first-world countries over the past two decades, mostly due to the inadequacies of our tax systems. We, as a race, have gone backwards; and this all happened during one of the biggest booms in the history of the world.
In order to ensure a minimum standard of living, protect the weak and give opportunities to the poor - all while still rewarding achievement – then wages (and taxes) have to both go up. And when the money flows into wages, suddenly we have a method of control, a way of distributing this wealth to where it is needed. Once you start dragging money away from the 1% super-rich of the world’s population, then the tax breaks and loop-holes start to disappear and the money starts to trickle into government coffers.
Then it’s up to us to make sure that Bertie Ahern isn’t the one spending it.
* It has to be pointed out here that Premiership footballers, through a variety of means, can dramatically reduce the amount of tax paid. This is a universal problem with the tax systems. There is essentially no difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion if it comes down to your ability to pay someone to do it for you. This is an entirely different argument, but in reality corporate tax rates are much, much lower than personal ones. In 2010, 25 CEO's of the top 100 companies in the U.S. were paid more in wages than their entire organisation paid out in tax. Read that sentence back again. It’s a different, and much bigger, story.
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