MONEY, THAT'S WHAT I WANT

Forbes, The Times, MTV etc enjoy making a fetish out of the lives of rich people, and their popularity suggests they are not alone. There are plenty of others who find the excesses of the rich sickening, indeed the lives of the super rich can be so gross that they are not to be aspired to. Footballers in the top European leagues fall into this category, yet it comes as no surprise to find some of their colleagues are not so luxuriously rewarded.

Inequality is not unique to football, though this is a fitting example. Many staff are on agency contracts, which apparently absolves the clubs involved from any responsibility, and are generally not paid the living wage, yet the players will earn in excess of a £100,000 a week for playing football (or sitting on the bench, and regardless of whether they play well or not.) Is this the market? Football is a very strange market, yet the value of the wages the players command is drawn from the lack of suitable replacements, yet the wage demands bring clubs to the bankruptcy or the brink of it. The cleaners etc are replaceable, there is an international reserve of labour waiting to take their jobs and the logic of the market is such that their pay and conditions are forced down through various means.

Not many other businesses will operate on these terms, with perhaps the exception of our forever loveable heroes in the financial sector, though they did used to have high revenues and will probably be handed them again after leaning on the state for a few years. Not much of the money these days comes from the fans directly – television, advertising, sales in ‘emerging markets’ etc form an increasing share of the big clubs earnings, yet instead of the owners benefiting from this boom it seems that a select few of the workers have cashed in. Again, we can see an analogy with the gods of finance, shareholders have lost out in the long term whilst the senior bankers and executives continue to be very wealthy.

The reason I bring this up is because it is all so unnecessary, so petty and so blatantly unfair that within one business someone should be earning so much money it puts the whole operation in financial jeopardy whilst others have to take extra jobs to subsist. Sky keep pumping more and more money in, is it actually at a point where a football club can’t shift a grand off a top p-layers weekly wage to ensure 3 or 4 employees who contribute to the running of the club can afford heating? Are the payers that greedy?

As with a football club, it is with the world. There are a lot of money and resources floating about, yet they seem to gravitate towards a small cadre of people, regardless of desert or effort from everyone else. So, why am I even surprised? Because football isn’t the financial sector, it isn’t food production, it isn’t the world economy. It is an association of clubs which belong to the communities and groups which formed them. There is no need for a profit incentive as the club exists for the sake of playing a game, and it should have the basic democratic structure where those that contribute to the club should have a say in its running, like a mutual or co-operative. There should never be poverty wages in premier league clubs where their earnings are so grand, and in smaller clubs people volunteer in order to be part of the club. Low wages are a much wider issue than the scope of this blog, my concern is more that if such blatant injustices have crept so unchallenged into football clubs, what chance do we have changing these problems in wider society.

For a football team, the market creates a basement price for its low wage workers. They, like all low wage employers put their arms in the air and submit to the gods. Regarding their superstars, they operate against the interests of their fans in paying outrageous wages in a market so distorted by the money from free market television companies like Sky and associated advertising, whilst courting the big money corporate sponsors and hospitality sales to further boost their income to cover the costs. Ticket prices go up, the game is more sanitised and dare is say it… boring!!... at the top level than it has ever been, yet those who clean the boardroom are like the rest of us in that their wages don’t go up for 30 years. It is a wonder how much extra effort can be made to accommodate the whims of £180,000 per week Yaya Toure, yet none of this extra finance can be used to reduce ticket prices or pay the living wage to those who work in the ticket office, even though the owner is a non-domicile multi-billionaire. Football has all of society in a few hundred yards, though societies change and so can football.