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Simon Jordan would like to see top footballers take a pay cut up to June 30 – and put the money back into the lower leaguesCredit: AFP or licensors
The world will bounce back from this but the sporting landscape will undoubtedly change.
What we are seeing now — with the exception of the elite — is just how fragile the majority of football clubs and sporting institutions in this country are.
Given the illusion that sports presents — that of being indomitable, influential and financially powerful — what is remarkable is that it often exists because of the will of those that want it to and sometimes simply by chance.
The desire to hold the football season together says as much about vested interests as the integrity and authenticity of the sport.
Let’s not forget sport provides light and meaning to so many lives and must be preserved.
If there’s anything meaningful about that overused term “the football family” then solutions to resolve this crisis that threatens to wreck our club structure outside of the Premier League will be found.
And not by simply suckling on the Government’s teat. The stakeholders — the FA, Premier League, Football League and PFA — will do it meaningfully.
And, crucially, the players will have to make sacrifices.
I raised this issue on talkSPORT earlier this week and it got a big response from listeners.
I will expand on it further here — and I’m not talking about clubs (yes, you Barcelona) cutting stars’ wages for their own good.
This is about saving football clubs down the ladder.
English football has to take a pay cut. This is an extraordinary measure that absolutely should not be contested by the PFA or agents.
Players, too, must not be allowed to just walk away from contracts.
Football now has the opportunity to clean its own house and resolve its own problems.
With immediate effect, clubs should be allowed to reduce wages by 30 per cent until June 30.
This was what former Reading chairman John Madejski wanted in 2009 — but his idea was solely based on relegation rather than a complete meltdown of football finances and it was laughed out of the meeting as unworkable.
That shouldn’t be the case now.
For once, the existence of clubs supersedes the importance of what individual footballers and managers are able to achieve for themselves.
We’re told the demise of smaller clubs is imminent, that nobody can sustain significant periods of financial inactivity. We are talking about sporting institutions going bust in weeks, not months.
The sustainability of clubs is far more important than the return date for players and managers, given that without the clubs they’ll have nowhere to play.
The average Championship club has a £20million wage bill.
If that is reduced by 30 per cent for three months that would save each club £1.5m.
In League One, the average wage bill is £4.5m and the cut would save £350,000. League Two sides, with an average £2m wage bill, would save £150,000.
In total, that would mean the EFL would save £50m.
Should we be more ambitious, perhaps?
The Premier League wage bill is around £3BILLION. If top-flight players took a 20 per cent pay cut for three months, that extra £150m could be redirected into the EFL.
Remember, the average Premier League footballer would only be asked to give up £100,000 after tax of his circa £2.3m net salary (which is about four per cent).
If Premier League clubs gifted that saving, by reducing contractual obligation for 90 days, they would actually save around 13 per cent in employers’ national insurance contributions. That would mean another £20m.
Then take the £30m due to go to the PFA next year, and put that into the mix alongside reducing league levies on season tickets and transfer fees, and you would have a fighting fund of up to £300m.
Because of the success of the Premier League — now run by chief executive Richard Masters — the football industry has lost control of reality and reasonable conduct.
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It has truly become a sport that eats itself.
How does this industry allow agents to rip close to £300m a year from English football and pay nothing back?
How can the players union take £27m a year from broadcasters when every other union in the world is funded by its members?
How can grass-roots funding deals by elite leagues be reneged on?
And why is an industry governed by how much it can lose so determined to resist financial controls to protect the ecosystem of football?
I’m not jumping on a bandwagon because of the coronavirus crisis, I want football to change, to be about more than just gain for the few.
It’s not because I’m a former club owner who got his financial head handed to him.
Despite the unprecedented nature of this crisis, we can discover a renewed vigour to protect our sporting institutions, to make them profitable and keep them as valued and meaningful community assets.
Simon Jordan’s Final Word is on talkSPORT on Sunday from 5-8pm.
Simon Jordan gives his opinion on Man Utd’s interest in Jude Bellingham
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
