http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/jan/13/tottenham-jermain-defoe-harry-redknappThere you go, straight from the boss himself.
This debate has been done to death but I think it's pretty clear that those wages are totally unsustainable and that the influence of cashed up foreigners is going to have profoundly malign consequences for our game.
This is a bloke, remember, who could no actually make the grade at genuinely big clubs.
Comments
The rest is coming from Manchester City.
With Tottenham currently enjoying a great run of form, perhaps City's decision to lend him to us for the entire season wasn't the brightest bit of business they've ever done.
For Harry to suggest they are not paying top dollar like the others is not quite true is it?
It stinks.
Would never get of the ground and probably flaws in this but if the FA held back a bit of money from the PL teams and put in a fund just to help small teams survive because this is a whole club just being wiped off, Well over 100 years of history gone.
http://www.emmanueladebayor.com/charity-work
Tax deduductable and probably no more than £10k - less than two hours of his working week. I suspect a lot more people on these boards contribute more than that to various charitites - including African ones, where we have no family ties.
The point here is that the foreign "sink" money is now totally over the top when someone like Adebayor can earn that amount.
I am sorry, but I think at some point the whole thing is going to implode, it just cannot be sustained.
We all know that in a free market like ours, if someone offers you a ridiculous wage, you'll take it. The system's flawed but what are the alternatives? Communism? Nah I'm alright thanks. Wage inequalities are a consequence of capitalism - some people win, some people lose.
who actually gives a shite other than those that are jealous of the money,
if you had a talent, in which thousands of people came out to watch you display that talent every week sometimes twice a week, are you telling me that if you were offered 250K a week you would say no sorry sir i only want to earn a non obscene amount of say 50k per annum
would you bollox youd rip their arm off and not give two hoots about what people like you and me think,
http://siakhenn.tripod.com/capita.html
In ball park terms Adebayor earns in one week an amount roughly equivalent to that earned by 200,000 people in Togo.
The point here is obvious and the danger for the game of football is very clear, the huge sums of money pumped in by the Man City owners - and before them by Abrahmovich, although not quite to the same degree - have inflated the player wages market to an unsustainable level.
Chelsea are losing - primarily thanks to their wage bill - around £100 million PA and Manchester City lost a staggering £197 million in the last FY - anyone who thinks those kinds of losses can be sustained does not know their arse from their elbow.
Abrahmovich is not going to stay at Chelsea long term, he had actually started to pull back funding until the bizarre Torres transfer, an when he goes they will be deep in trouble.
As for Man City, their owners are basically using the club as an ad vehicle for Abu Dhabi, they are trying to boost the profile of their city state and make it a 'world' destination, once they have achieved that goal - if they ever do - then they will no longer need Manchester City.
Arguments like, "you would take the money if it was offered to you" or "they are being paid market value" are entirely fatuous and completely miss the point.
First off, they are NOT being paid market value, that is a gross distortion of reality.
In a truly capitalist model, under which businesses compete fairly with each other for revenue, it would be unthinkable - not to mention illegal in many jurisdictions - to do what Man City are doing because it actually destroys the market system.
Lets give an example here, let's say you run a flower stall and you need to sell your daffodils for £2.00 a bunch to make a 15% margin, you are just about making a living.
Then another bloke opens up shop round the corner, he is selling his daffodils at just £0.50 a bunch, he is prepared to make a massive loss on each bunch he sells because he is not really interested in selling flowers as such, he is only running the business as a PR exercise to drum up support for his run for the local Mayoralty.
This is effectively what Abrahmovich and the Abu Dhabi people are doing in the EPL, they are paying huge wages - thereby forcing the wages up at every other club in the league - despite the fact that they know that the club itself cannot possibly support these levels of wages and that there is going to be a sea of red ink at the end of the FY - but they don't really care about that at all.
Once Abrahmovich and the Abu Dhabi tide goes out - as it surely will - then we will really see who - in the words of the great Warren Buffett - who has been swimming naked.
You're approaching it in a similar way to predatory pricing, which as you say will have disastrous effects on the affected clubs when the investors pull out (as well as their competitors whilst they are subsidising the losses incurred from such an activity). That is clear and I agree with you that the system is flawed, and also appreciate Buffett's quote - a particular favourite of mine when discussing the financial crisis. But, the idea of there being a truly capitalist model is, as when discussing 99%, if not 100%, of economic models, fanciful, as that situation will never be reached in the real world, due to the free market mechanism that exists. Hence my contention that, the footballing wage model is like any other in the UK at this time - if for some stupid reason I wanted to pay my toilet cleaner £200k a week, it may be unsustainable if you looked at my bank balance but the cleaner would take it and I could offer it if I so wanted to. No doubt all the other toilet cleaners would be angry in such a situation, as would others which claim that they work harder for their money, but my cleaner's ridiculous wage is purely a consequence from having a system where I can pay my employees what I want.
Therefore you can't dig out Adebayor for signing a contract he was offered as a result of that system, which was my point, because some people earlier in the thread were criticising him.
What I find more interesting is looking at the alternatives to such a system, which may make it more 'sustainable'? Personally I think it's an impossible dream and have yet to see a model that will do so
Just a bit.