The price of conflict and art
So that’s alright then.
Amidst all the eye-watering detail — I was particularly struck by the small print showing that the clubs paid out €90 million to agents — the obvious headline-grabber was the news that more than two-thirds of the Premier League’s €2.8 billion income in 2011/12 was gobbled up by players’ wages, accounting for 67% of turnover.
When, a couple of months ago, a list purporting to name the top 10 highest earning players in the Premier League showed that all were being paid in the region of €200,000 a week, one supporter probably spoke for the majority when he went online to complain: “Crazy money for kicking a ball. People work hard all their lives and most will have to work five to ten years to earn that sort of money. Kids starving and living on the poverty line in the UK and players are getting paid stupid money. Something’s wrong. The rich get richer the poor, poorer, where’s the justice? I’m a Chelsea fan and think it’s a disgrace.”
And, of course, when it’s put like that, who could disagree? And it’s also true that it’s the ordinary supporters who, at least in part, are obliged to help subsidise the players’ remuneration through exorbitant ticket prices.
Yet, before the politicians and other pillars of the establishment hop on board the bandwagon again to castigate professional footballers in the usual banal terms — “under-worked, over-paid prima donnas” tends to be a hardly perennial — it’s worth pausing to reflect on one striking point in the players’ favour: at least they are where they are entirely on merit and nothing else.
No footballer gets his place in the team on the basis that he comes from a privileged background, is a relative of the manager or went to the same fine school as the chairman. In other walks of life you can end up on the bench through having the correct political affiliations; in football, you only end up there if you’re not as good as the 11 blokes in front of you.
And the meritocracy of sport is at work from the earliest age. Yes, there may an element of genetic luck in being born with a superior ability to manipulate a football but, thereafter, it’s all about commitment, hard work, self-sacrifice, good fortune, beating the injury odds and constantly having to prove oneself in the face of ever more demanding tests, if a player is to progress from the street or back garden all the way up to the great footballing theatres of the world.
Not that the majority of pros will ever get to grace Old Trafford or the Nou Camp, of course. When it comes to the high-earners in football, we are talking about an elite within an elite, a doubtless happy few who really have only the mechanics of the game in common with their innumerable fellow pros, journeymen footballers who, toiling in the shadows of lower leagues, battle to keep body and soul and family together, the same as the rest of us. And, unlike the majority of the working population, they also know that the game will definitely be up for them in more ways than one before they reach 40, leaving them with potentially more than half their lives in which to try to find new ways to pay the bills.
Yet, who among us aficionados wouldn’t have gladly swapped places with any of them, if only we’d been good enough to do so? The fact that top footballers are wildly over-paid doesn’t diminish the lavish quality of the gift they give us in return.
I’ve no doubt that JB Priestly would be as gobsmacked by football’s latest financial report as any of us who are around today but, writing in 1928, he nailed a truth about the essential appeal of the elite game in words that have probably never been bettered. In his famous essay Saturday In Bruddersford he wrote: “To say that these men paid their shillings to watch the hirelings kick a ball is to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling, the Bruddersford United offered you Conflict and Art… Not only had you escaped the clanking machinery of this lesser life, you had escaped with most of your mates and your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were, cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgments like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through the turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life.”
And how do you put a price on that?
