Are today's players overpaid?

Most people would be more than happy to make £138,000 a week. £138,000 a week is what John Terry makes a week. And he is not the only one. How come the salaries have got this high? Where does it end? And what can we do about it?

I know that many might have said this before but I think it is quite a problem, so therefore I think that getting focus back on it would be a good idea. The salaries of the players in for instance Premier League have almost exploded in the recent decades. Here we have the top 4.



1. Kaka (Milan) £6.9m

2. Ronaldinho Gaucho (Barcelona) £6.53m

3. Frank Lampard (Chelsea) £6.24m

4. John Terry (Chelsea) £6.24m



£6.9m is about £138,000 a week which most ordinary people would gladly make their annual salary. So how come there are so incredibly many money in modern football and is it a problem and if so is there anything we can do about. Even sport minister Gerry Sutcliffe has gone into the issue, he states that:

“The man in the street can’t recognise that sort of money. It’s obscene. There is increasing alienation between top players and fans.”

I think that it is indeed a problem because where does it stop? At some point the salaries will get totally out of hand and they players will get paid incomprehensible amount of money.

What we can do about is that firstly we have to take some inspiration from NFL who has dealt with this problem. Accepting that it someday would get out of hand it introduced salary caps. A salary cap is a rule which says that the total salaries of the players must not exceed a certain amount of money. This will also make sure that one team cannot just sign all the best players, which will make it more even and probably more exciting. All of a sudden it does not merely become a matter of who has the most money.

Another ‘side effect’ of this development is that this obviously means that the clubs have to make more money. And how do they do that; apart from selling the TV-rights for huge amounts of money and other stuff? The answer is quite simple: They raise the ticket price so that a ticket for a Premier League match costs around £50. It is way too many money for ordinary people to go and see every home match. Which again contributes to the alienation between the players and the fans.

I know this a brief introduction to a problem which you could discuss for quite some time. The reason why I am bringing this up is that I think it is very relevant now. So feel free to discuss the subject!