[Football] Spurs put 550 non-playing staff on furlough

[Hampster Gull]

Is anyone surprised with the greed of PL football clubs?

No, you’re right, but it really is laying it bare. Its morally bankrupt, a cesspit. Things return to “normal” but people will remember for far longer. I’m part fo the problem, subscribe to both sky and bt, but need to cancel

 

[Stat Brother]

I just love the capitalist mentality. When we make a profit all my money goes to my tax haven account in the Virgin Islands. When I lose money the government, that is the public, pay off the lose. The banks did it so now others are doing he same thing. Always the same the rich get rich the poor get poorer.

I wonder how much the players pay in tax, every week, when compared to the Spurs owner?

 

[Dick Swiveller]

Good idea. Perhaps JK Rowling can cover the wages of bookshop staff as well.

Given JK Rowling has donated 10s of millions of pounds to good causes, not a great example. I genuinely couldn't live with myself if I was a PL player taking 100% of 50k+ per week for not doing the job I was paid to do whilst large swathes of the people that are my reason for earning that much are struggling to pay bills.

 

[Stat Brother]

Given JK Rowling has donated 10s of millions of pounds to good causes, not a great example. I genuinely couldn't live with myself if I was a PL player taking 100% of 50k+ per week for not doing the job I was paid to do whilst large swathes of the people that are my reason for earning that much are struggling to pay bills.

Does that mean you could live with yourself as a £4.2bn-aire living in tax exile?

 

[Dick Swiveller]

Does that mean you could live with yourself as a £4.2bn-aire living in tax exile?

Yes. That was exactly the subtext I expected someone to pick up on. Well done.

 

[Change at Barnham]

An article written by Paul Hayward in the Daily Telegraph (31/3/20).


Will Man City's owners redistribute wealth downwards, to society’s equivalent of League Two and League One players?

Will Man City's owners redistribute wealth downwards, to society’s equivalent of League Two and League One players?
Player wages are becoming the battleground in football - but beware the smoke that conceals so many other excesses, starting with the £260 million Premier League Clubs paid to agents last year and the huge salaries for directors.

Sticking up for the right of multi-millionaire footballers to keep everything they have would be counter-intuitive at a time when the state has had to step in to help British workers on a scale not seen since 1945. There will be no barricades erected to defend the income of a comparatively limited Premier League player earning £40,000 a week. But those who do the running around would be right to resist a campaign by some clubs to place the moral responsibility all on them to save football from meltdown.

First, let’s draw lines between the Premier League, Championship and Leagues One and Two. Each of those three spheres must be judged individually.

The Championship is really an arms race to reach the top flight: an orgy of living beyond one’s means.

This week the financial analyst Swiss Ramble took a look at Nottingham Forest and found that while the income generating side of the club was working well the wage bill had risen 31 per cent to £36.3m - or 143 per cent of turnover. Half the clubs in the Championship have wages to income ratios exceeding 100 per cent (Reading’s was 197 per cent). In simple terms, 50 per cent of clubs in the second-tier are paying out more to players than the whole firm is bringing in.

This financial lunacy was always going to be vulnerable to sudden, global disruption. And since the last global pandemic was a hundred years ago, nobody catered for the possibility of a virus shutting down football’s insanely unbalanced business.

Championship players are not the only ones being overpaid, relative to club income. The Forest directors earned £932,000 last season while Sunderland’s boardroom outgoings were more than £2m.

In the Premier League, payments to agents rose by £49m in 2018-19, with the best team in the country, Liverpool, handing over a table-topping £43m. Championship clubs parted with £50m, with League One dishing out £5.5m and League Two just under a million pounds.

To my knowledge there has been no call for agents to refund any of these annual windfalls. There is no concerted pressure either on Premier League club executives to press the ‘reset button’ on salaries. At Manchester United, where player wages account for £287.5m, Ed Woodward was paid £3.16m to run the club while Daniel Levy, the overlord at Spurs, collected £4m in salary and £3m as a stadium completion bonus. Tottenham’s announcement that 550 non-playing staff - including directors - will take a 20 per cent pay cut during the pandemic is an example of the process fracturing into club-by-club responses.

Against this backcloth of generalised extravagance, the spotlight falls increasingly on the players, many of whom can indeed afford to earn less, or defer parts of their income until order is restored. At Juventus and Barcelona for example dressing room sacrifices have already been made. Voluntary reductions are the simplest and most commendable.

But even a quick flick through the disaster capitalism playbook will tell you that big companies use crises to correct their own structural errors: in this case, paying footballers far too much. In fact, many clubs are paying huge sums they can afford. Manchester City, for example. Again, has the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi made any public move to redistribute wealth downwards, to society’s equivalent of League Two and League One players? Have the Saudis looking to buy Newcastle stated that furloughing first team non-playing staff will no longer be necessary when the petrodollars flood on to Tyneside?

Thought not.

This column is not in the habit of agreeing with Gordon Taylor, whose £2m salary as head of a union and charity is a scandal (it was previously higher than £2m). He is right at least however to say player wage cuts and deferrals must be conducted in a fair and orderly way.

The clubs say they wanted Taylor and the PFA to “step up” and show leadership: to impress upon their members the urgency of the game’s predicament, and the need for everyone to chip in. They wanted a united front and an agreed formula. Already though, individual clubs have broken ranks to make their own deals with their playing staff, thus creating competition and anomalies. Birmingham City and Leeds were among the quickest out of the blocks.

“We don't just want anyone taking advantage of this crisis to suit their own ends,” Taylor says. “A request for deferral of wages has to be realistic and meaningful and needs due diligence. Players have their own welfare to think about.”

The clubs would reply that the PFA is a self-serving, reactive organisation that failed to start the conversation with its members when the crisis broke. But who has allowed the PFA to evolve (or rather, not) in this way? Which firm has kept funding a trade union where the boss earns £2m-plus a year? Correct: the Premier League.

As a player in the world’s highest-profile league, you might look at the billionaires, speculators and sovereign wealth funds who own the clubs; ask what the PFA is for; tot up the boardroom salaries; observe the vast fees paid to agents, and then think: ‘I’m not the only problem here.’

 

[sparkie]

It amazes me that football seems incapable of doing the right thing in this crisis, but it seems there are too many billionaires ( not all ) looking after number one.

 

[Springal]

It amazes me that football seems incapable of doing the right thing in this crisis, but it seems there are too many billionaires ( not all ) looking after number one.

Which is how you become a billionaire....

 

[Stat Brother]

Which is how you become a billionaire....

Good point well made.

Seemingly being a billionaire also makes you bullet proof and above criticism.

You can shite on any number of people and the general population will hold your employees to account.


Life is good.

 

[Publius Ovidius]

I'd be absolutely mortified if our club goes down this route. It would leave such a bitter taste in the mouth, please, please BHAFC do the right thing.

On radio 5 live, I think our esteemed CEO was preparing us all for that eventuality.

I know footballers earn obscene amounts and fans want us to spend money on more expensive players, but when this is all over, I think that there will be a lot of soul searching


Jeff sterlling said on twitter about messages we are all getting about prospective big money signings....” who cares...”

 

[wellquickwoody]

I actually would like our club to take a lead. We are led to believe that BHAFC has a ‘no dickhead policy’ when it comes to player recruitment. Well, maybe our first team squad could prove it if and when required.

Perhaps they could offer to take a 25% wage cut, on the condition it is paid to non playing staff. The club could then retain the services of the non playing staff and utilise them to carry on doing the good work that has seen club employees phoning the elderly and vulnerable in our fan base. This could be extended to the wider community, and maybe involve shopping or collecting prescriptions or medical supplies.

I know some of this is already happening, but TB hasn’t actually got never ending resources I would guess. If the players made this offer in advance then it could offer some semblance of job security, if only short term, to the non playing staff. It would also earn them a lot of respect, and might prompt players at other clubs to do the same.

 

[sparkie]

I actually would like our club to take a lead. We are led to believe that BHAFC has a ‘no dickhead policy’ when it comes to player recruitment. Well, maybe our first team squad could prove it if and when required.

Perhaps they could offer to take a 25% wage cut, on the condition it is paid to non playing staff. The club could then retain the services of the non playing staff and utilise them to carry on doing the good work that has seen club employees phoning the elderly and vulnerable in our fan base. This could be extended to the wider community, and maybe involve shopping or collecting prescriptions or medical supplies.

I know some of this is already happening, but TB hasn’t actually got never ending resources I would guess. If the players made this offer in advance then it could offer some semblance of job security, if only short term, to the non playing staff. It would also earn them a lot of respect, and might prompt players at other clubs to do the same.

We took a lead with free tickets for the NHS, and then got moaned at by more selfish clubs for doing it.

 

[Stat Brother]

[tweet]1245358133628801026[/tweet]

 

[Not Andy Naylor]

[tweet]1245358133628801026[/tweet]

"Voluntary"? I suppose so, but the press release says "we are continually looking at ways to ensure the future of the club" and yesterday there was some doubt whether they'd still be paying people to house their youth players.

 

[Eeyore]

If all their players came down to 30k a week that would probably more than cover the losses.

That's more than many of us earn in a year.

Taxpayers should make it clear that they are not willing to put up with this. And Levy should pay his other staff in full.

 

[LamieRobertson]

I actually would like our club to take a lead. We are led to believe that BHAFC has a ‘no dickhead policy’ when it comes to player recruitment. Well, maybe our first team squad could prove it if and when required.

Perhaps they could offer to take a 25% wage cut, on the condition it is paid to non playing staff. The club could then retain the services of the non playing staff and utilise them to carry on doing the good work that has seen club employees phoning the elderly and vulnerable in our fan base. This could be extended to the wider community, and maybe involve shopping or collecting prescriptions or medical supplies.

I know some of this is already happening, but TB hasn’t actually got never ending resources I would guess. If the players made this offer in advance then it could offer some semblance of job security, if only short term, to the non playing staff. It would also earn them a lot of respect, and might prompt players at other clubs to do the same.

The club has already guaranteed to pay match day staff until end of season...a brilliant gesture.

 

[Weststander]

The club has already guaranteed to pay match day staff until end of season...a brilliant gesture.

Which they announced weeks ago, according to 5Live at the time the only UK club to make that commitment. Some other clubs have since done the same.

 

[Not Andy Naylor]

If all their players came down to 30k a week that would probably more than cover the losses.

That's more than many of us earn in a year.

Taxpayers should make it clear that they are not willing to put up with this. And Levy should pay his other staff in full.

Tax itself is potentially an issue here. As a taxpayer, I'm happy for high-earning footballers to pay a lot of tax that the government would have to find from somewhere else. But of course we shouldn't have to fund Spurs' laying off of other workers. Maybe if the players simply made up their wages then everyone would be content.

 

[sagaman]

It’s disgraceful the behaviour of Spurs.

Immoral to get tax payers to bail out the lower paid while the millionaires remain untouched
High time the PFA came to an agreement to cut Premier League wages like Barcelona

 

[Stat Brother]

Tax itself is potentially an issue here. As a taxpayer, I'm happy for high-earning footballers to pay a lot of tax that the government would have to find from somewhere else. But of course we shouldn't have to fund Spurs' laying off of other workers. Maybe if the players simply made up their wages then everyone would be content.

Nobody more content than the owner of Spurs who's doing this to his staff while living in tax exile with a reported £4.2bn.

But yes you're right the players should definitely be pay even more into the kitty.