Players must follow Eddie Howe’s example amid coronavirus crisis and take pay cuts… now

WITH every day that goes by, they slip closer towards the status of social pariahs.
Premier League footballers — millionaires almost to a man — dragging their heels over taking pay cuts as their game faces the prospect of financial meltdown due to the coronavirus.

Eddie Howe has become the first Premier League boss to take a wage cut amid the coronavirus crisisCredit: PA:Press Association

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Even after Eddie Howe and other senior management staff at Bournemouth became the first on the football side of a Premier League club to agree a wage cut, the players will not budge.
On an individual basis, most  are not insensitive, self-obsessed and mean-spirited. Some are, but the majority are not.
Yet their determination to stick to collective bargaining, under Gordon Taylor — the Barnacle Bill of the PFA players’ union — is making them look pig-ignorant.

I mentioned ten days ago that the first Premier League player to agree to a cut would be afforded heroic status — and ten days feels like ten years in these days of isolation. Yet still no player is willing to break ranks.
How much will those treasured ‘image rights’ be worth after all this, when reputations are reduced to mud? Or maybe the Government will recognise such rights as the tax break they are.
A YouGov poll states that 92 per cent of the public believe Premier League players should take reductions in their earnings at this time of economic crisis.
But collectively, the English top- flight is not having a good war during this global emergency.

Many are appalled by plans to rush football back in June with matches played behind closed doors to ensure that TV revenues continue to flood in.
Some players are included in that number — fearing it will increase infection rates and divert some front-line medical resources.
Others are also worried about burn-out if fixtures are crammed into the summer months.
These are worthy concerns but they only make the need for pay cuts even more stark.
And Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy — the league’s highest-earning executive with a £7million pay package — tried to get two wrongs to make a right by taking cash from the Government furlough scheme to pay some non-football staff, while highlighting the fact that players were refusing to agree to pay cuts.
As Julian Knight, the chair of the Commons digital, culture, media and sport committee, said: “It sticks in the throat. This exposes the crazy economics in English football and the moral vacuum at its centre.”
When even Tory MPs are accusing you of lacking scruples, the game is surely up.

Talking of moral vacuums,  that brings us to Taylor — the world’s highest-paid union leader on more than £2m a year — who said he was stepping down a year ago but carries on regardless, now having held power for almost 40 years.
That is longer than Robert Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe.
It is a sad irony that, at a time when workers who actually need unions find those organisations so toothless, the PFA maintains an iron grip on behalf of filthy-rich footballers.
Taylor (below) claims due diligence must be done before players agree to reduce incomes — and he is not entirely wrong to insist some clubs will use coronavirus as an excuse to cut wages.
Yet English football has been living in an unsustainable bubble for many years now and this pandemic has represented a bursting point.
And talk of ‘due diligence’ does not fit these extraordinary times — not as the public screams ‘do the right thing now’.
Bournemouth boss Howe  did the right thing by agreeing to a ‘significant’ cut along with his assistant Jason Tindall, technical director Richard Hughes and chief executive Neill Blake.
Taylor claims that if individual players or clubs took unilateral action, it would make others ‘feel uncomfortable’. Uncomfortable? Altogether now — ‘diddums’.

On the continent, Lionel Messi’s Barcelona and Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus are among many who have agreed to substantial wage reductions.
It feels inevitable Premier League players will succumb to pay cuts before long but the issue looks like dragging on beyond tomorrow’s  conference call.
Yet, even if it is just for the benefit of their precious images, footballers must see sense now.
Because, day-by-day, Taylor is allowing his members to look ridiculously remote from the rest of society, which is quite some feat during a national lockdown.

Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk