Recently came the news that Football’s Premier League is to sell TV rights for just short of £5.5billion.
Living in a male-dominated house with loyalties divided between Chelsea and Liverpool, I’ve learnt more about the beautiful game in the past few years than I could ever imagine.
I spend Friday nights and Saturday mornings standing around the edge of freezing football pitches and the rest of the week feigning interest in the latest football headlines, but I totally understand the joy that football seems to bring to so many people.
What I’m struggling with, is just how we can justify so much money being paid out just to watch 20 teams play a 90-minute game.
Despite the fact that footballers are paid ludicrous amounts of money, it seems we are heading towards the first wage of £500,000 a week and this to people whose sole purpose in life is to kick an air-filled sack around a grassy pitch. How on earth can that ever be justified?
Only last week, our football-mad middle son Jack told me that after extensive thought, he (along with just about every other nine-year-old boy) had decided his future lay in professional football.
He explained to me so very poetically, considering his nine years, that the feeling he would get as he walked out of the players' tunnel and onto the pitch at Stamford Bridge would be so spine-tingling, that he couldn’t even consider doing anything else.
Despite the fact that, as much as he enjoys a kick-around in the garden with his brothers and can score the odd goal for Henley under-9s, I couldn’t burst his bubble by telling him that as chances go, his were probably slightly less than one in a million.
I don’t think he even registered that a football salary would keep him in sports cars for life.
He’s still at the beautifully naive stage of believing that the man who delivers pizza has the best job in the world because he gets to drive around on a motorbike and eat as much pizza as he wants.
I explained to him that if he wanted to aim for the Premier League he was going to need to start putting in at least six hours practice a day.
I would wake him up at 5am so he could squeeze in three hours of penalty practice before school. A risky tactic to take had he agreed, but thankfully his fickleness was true to form and he has since reconsidered and is now plumping for the pizza-delivery option.
It would be nice to think that some of the £5bn being poured into the upper echelons of British football would somehow trickle down to the people who make the game what it is.
With ticket prices for some Premier League teams standing at close to £60, being a fan is an expensive commitment. Couple that with the cost of travelling around the country to support your club and the team strip, which seems to change as often as the direction of the wind, and there’s a pretty costly hobby.
Who would want to watch a match without any of the atmosphere that the crowd create? The players may be earning the same amount combined as the entire education budget, but it’s the fans who make it seemingly worth the astronomical sums.
When the £5bn figure was announced, there must have been Ferrari dealers around the country rubbing their hands together waiting for the likes of Wayne and his pals to come flooding in with their over-inflated wallets.
Perhaps a better way to distribute the wealth that football creates would be to put some of it in at the bottom, by capping tickets and improving facilities for kids.
The beautiful game it may be, but the financial morals of those at the top appear to be far from beautiful.
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