OTHER EVENTS

The Leader Column

Authoritative, independent and hard hitting, the weekly column on the business of football tackles some of the biggest issues of the week. Click here to sign up for your weekly fix from the Leaders in Football.

If the cap fits......

3:05pm Thursday, 30th July 2009

It can sometimes be difficult to stifle a sigh of resignation whenever the topic of 'salary caps' returns to the news. It seems like the idea has been in constant discussion for the last fifty years - at least, in the UK, ever since the 'maximum wage' limitation of £20 a week was broken in a law court back at the start of the 1960s.

Not that anyone in those days could ever have envisaged the idea that a few of the top players would end up five decades later earning up to ten thousand times more per week than that miserly twenty quid. Who could have foreseen that?

Certainly not the great Liverpool centre forward Ian St John who joined the Reds in 1961, just as the maximum wage was abandoned. He told an interviewer that when he left Liverpool, in 1971, after ten years of 'wage freedom', he was still only picking up a basic £30 a week, though that could double with crowd and win bonuses, enhanced if your team was also in the top five of the league. But the most he would get was only £70 a week.

Of course, we all know that football is a strange world. In parts of it, the natural laws of gravity seem to be reversed. The employees get paid more than the employers....much more in some cases. Apples can fall upwards off the tree on planet football.

This week, Fifa President, Sepp Blatter, appeared to rule out any frontal assault on top players' wages. The law simply won't allow it. He said: 'This is impossible, especially in the European Union, where any economic intervention would be just waved away by any court. What we are asking for is a little bit of financial fair play.'

The 'fair play' the President refers to is of course the disciplining of some big clubs who rely on hair-raising levels of debt to fund their player purchases and remunerations. How can clubs who run a tight ship compete? Making the other clubs conform is another matter.

The reality is that the only people who can slow down the dizzying growth of top players' salaries (which naturally filters down to players of much less talent), are those who run the clubs themselves. They do the deals and sign the cheques. But just the activity on one club alone can raise the bar for everyone, as this summer's player market illustrates. How could they ever all act in concert?

Yet, there is a question to ponder. Is there any other profession on earth that has seen wages rise by up to ten thousand times for doing the same job? (Answers in a large brown envelope, please.) No wonder the 'salary cap' keeps emerging from its cupboard to see if it will fit anyone.

back