I read that Manchester United’s modestly talented midfielder Scott McTominay is to be offered a new contract worth a basic £60,000 a week. Far more amusing – or were they disturbing? – were the readers’ comments that followed, many expressing concern that the Englishman who plays for Scotland was ‘only’ being offered a mere £60,000 every seven days of his life. Others were on much more than that.
The logic, then is that Alexis Sanchez, who ‘earned’ around half a million quid a week was more reasonably rewarded for, in his case, mooching around and barely trying until United cut their losses and loaned him out. Football has gone mad.
I would say that if McTominay earned a more modest £60,000 per year it would be more reflective of the society in which we live. £60k is not a trifling sum of money to the vast majority who have never earned anything like that much.
Of course, it’s ‘our fault’ that footballers earn absurdly inflated wages. It is not the gates from home matches that ensure that even your average squad player is a multimillionaire earning more in a week than people earn over decades or even a lifetime. When we complain that a player is ‘only’ trousering £60k a week, we have lost touch with reality and accepted the new normal of obscene greed, by the clubs, and obscene wages, paid to the players.
As John Nicholson has pointed out in his new book Can We Have Our Football Back? we alone have the power to change this mad situation. We, by way of our subscriptions, are paying these mad sums. If we decide, en masse, to stop paying Sky and BT our hard-earned dosh, the edifice will crumble. We can stop the crazy cash-fest that football has become and, to coin a phrase, take back control.
I have been overruled in my attempts to get rid of Sky in our house so I remain part of the problem, but it doesn’t change my mind. I’m fed up seeing even the most modestly talented footballers earning millions of pounds every month and one day soon I’m hopefully join the vast majority of people in this country who don’t pay to watch their football.
