Footballers salaries causing clubs to go bust
The economic recession has been hard on everyone around the world. It has been especially hard for certain sports. If we take the example of football which is a fairly popular sport around the world, if not the most popular, we can see that numerous football clubs have been going bankrupt. Could this be because of the recession or could it be for a number of other factors?
Football clubs depend on ticket sales of fans coming to watch their matches. They use the revenue they generate from this to maintain their stadiums, their club and pay their players salaries. What is an issue for any club that is struggling financially is that in order to attract fans to their games; they need to win those games. The only way to win games is to have very talented players on your team and the only way to get very talented players on your team is to pay them exorbitant salaries. Paying exorbitant salaries requires the club to be financially sound which it isn’t and so the poor club gets stuck in a catch 22 situation. Also in order to attract the biggest stars away from the bigger clubs the smaller and poorer clubs need to out pay the bigger clubs. But the bigger clubs usually have the upper hand in this regard because they have bucket loads of money to throw at players.
When did the great game of football become all about money. It seems like the skill of footballers goes hand in hand with their greed. No one seems to care about winning a game and giving it your best shot because it is for pride or honour. Those things can’t even compare to the allure of some cold hard cash. It is said that cash is king and it is so right in this situation. It seems that now at a league level all the players care about is how much money they can make. The situation is slightly different at a national level with players still playing for national pride but not so much at the league level.
Another odd thing about stuffing your team with the best talent that can be found in the game today and throwing money to attract even better talent in the future is that no one stops to think what happens to the team. Those days are gone when a team would gel together as a single unit and win matches because they were all playing for honour and something more than money. Now most football clubs are full of athletes from all over the world, which is a great thing for breaking down cultural barriers, but it stops a club from working together when all the players are speaking a different language and no one can understand each other.
In order to find a solution to this issue maybe the football federations around the world need to put a cap on players’ salaries and then maybe it won’t be so lucrative to jump around to another club whenever it takes your fancy. At that point maybe we will see an end to the insanely high salaries of people like David Beckham who was paid 32.4 million Euros a year when he joined LA Galaxy, or Messi who earns 28.6 million Euros a year and is only 22. Once the flow of cash stops maybe clubs will also stop going bust and football will become a sport that is about more than just money.
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