Players, salaries and. . . Bosman 16 years on!!

Thursday 1 September 2011

Following the massive and, some may say, obscene “splash of cash” during the Transfer Window by Premier League clubs led by the two Manchester clubs and Liverpool, money is a popular subject in the world of football. Whilst we see the huge sums of money players attract in transfer fees, perhaps the biggest sums however go on the weekly wages of players. But how does the Premier League compare to its continental counterparts?

Reputedly, Frank Lampard commands a hefty £213,127 a week. His Chelsea team-mate, Fernando Torres, isn’t far behind with £210,568 a week. John Terry also weighs in with around £200,000. Other big earners at Chelsea include Didier Drogba (£221,641) and Micheal Essien (£71,019). Other teams in the Premiership have similarly large wage bills. At Liverpool, Steven Gerrard is reportedly on £187,992 and Luis Suarez makes £71,585. One would expect Manchester City players to be well paid, allegedly Tevez makes £125,322 a week, with Yaya Toure, apparently earning £183,956 a week.

Over at Old Trafford it is rumoured that Manchester United pay Wayne Rooney £263,824 a week, whilst ‘football icon’ Michael Owen somehow ‘earns’ £53,784 a week. It is however important to note that football on the continent doesn’t come cheap either. At Barcelona, the world’s No.1 footballer, Lionel Messi reputedly commands a weekly wage of over £250,000. Xavi makes a nice £187,559 whilst fellow World Cup winners Iniesta and Puyol apparently earn £185,248 and £218,000 a week respectively. However it can be argued that even Barcelona’s salaries are dwarfed by Real Madrid. It has been reported that midfielder Kaka, is worth £313,371 Monday to Friday and apparently the biggest weekly wage, in Europe, goes to Christiano Ronaldo on an astounding £451,215 a week!

With such mind boggling figures it may now be argued that these players are indeed “worth their weight in gold”. However as a consequence and the “drip effect” down the league structures and the use of comparable examples, some players in the Premiership seem to be vastly overpaid. For example, Manchester City’s Joleon Lescott apparently earns £90,000 a week. More than Micheal Essien at Chelsea, and almost as much as Schweinsteiger who was one of the stars of Germany’s World Cup campaign.

To put things into perspective compared with the “normal” man in the street – a newly qualified teacher, will expect to earn £18,750 a YEAR, a newly qualified nurse, if they’re lucky, will earn £18,240 a YEAR and an average Police Constable earns £23,259 a YEAR.

Given the new tough-talking initiative, Financial Fair Play (FFP), designed to crack down on debt-laden clubs or controversial practices, hopefully clubs will see a sense of perspective. However one should not hold their breath. Earlier this year, the Premier League privately canvassed clubs with the idea of introducing wage caps, in a bid to combat the problems caused by obscene wage bills. Unfortunately, only a few Premier League clubs went along with the idea!

All this is a different world from the position sixteen years ago when the European Court of Justice passed a ruling that foreshadowed a revolution in European football.

The desire of Jean-Marc Bosman to move from Club de Liege to Dunkerque inadvertently triggered a change in the law that altered the face of football forever. Little did the low-profile midfielder from Belgium realise what his court action was about to do… On 15 December 1995, the European Court of Justice ruled that players should be free to move when their contracts had expired. It also ruled that EU clubs could hire any number of European Union players. After the ruling, a player was free to leave as soon as his contract expired.

Result? The player became the boss.

Before Bosman, a player could not leave unless his club agreed to let him go. After the ruling, a player was free to leave as soon as his contract expired. Free-agent players moving clubs could demand huge signing-on fees and salaries, on the basis that the club they were joining had not had to pay a penny in transfer fees. Clubs became powerless to stop their best players leaving at the end of their existing deals. The Sami Nasri episode highlighted this with Arsenal prepared to sell in order to get a transfer fee, the player having decided to “run down” his contracts and leave at the end of his contracts for effectively nothing.

Players under contract could ask for bigger and better deals for staying put – because they could threaten to leave for free if the club failed to accede to their demands. A view widely suggested in the press when Wayne Rooney said he wanted to leave Manchester United last year.

Pre-Bosman, clubs were limited in the number of foreign players they could sign. That made impossible the phenomenon of clubs fielding teams without a single player from that country.

Without the Bosman ruling, Chelsea and Arsenal could never have fielded teams without a single British player, as both have famously done.

When players became more powerful, so did their agents. Agents were able to pick up fees from a club for bringing an out-of-contract star player to them, and take their cut of the signing-on fees and loyalty bonuses that they demanded for their clients. The savvy amongst them were able to set themselves up as international operators, acting as negotiators for the overseas footballers pouring into the European leagues and as unofficial scouts – or touts – for the clubs signing them.

Clubs were forced to pay higher wages to players post-Bosman – and that meant that they sought to boost their revenues accordingly.

The average fan ended up footing some of the bill, partly through increased ticket prices, buying shirts with the latest hero’s name on the back, even a pie and a pint at half-time but also for the television packages that allowed them to watch the new millionaires from the comfort of their own homes. To prevent their best players leaving on a Bosman transfer – and thus costing them potentially millions in lost transfer fees – clubs began signing their star names to long-term deals with high salaries.

The smaller clubs could no longer rely upon transfer fees to boost their coffers. Whereas before they could develop home-grown talent and know that they could sell it on to the big boys, their best young players could leave for free at the end of their deals.

The rich clubs, at the same time, were the only ones who could afford to match the biggest stars’ newly-inflated salaries. The pool of money available to the big clubs was increasingly diverted to the pockets of players and their agents rather than going on transfer fees to lower league teams. Those clubs who had access to all the money started to financially squeeze the smaller clubs, not just to get stronger themselves but to weaken the opposition!

Ironically, Bosman himself was left bereft by his far-reaching court action. He started his case in 1990 when he was 25 and in the prime of his career, was left in limbo for five years and then, one year after he won, he had to leave third division Vise because he said he could not make a living out of it. He gave his career to a court case to serve a cause, but he saw that the transfer fees were/are still there, quotas on home-grown players are making a comeback and the rich clubs are richer and the poor ones are poorer.

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