What are your thoughts on footballers salaries?
It irks me when people moan about footballers’ salaries. Whether or not you feel that they make their living diving and rolling around and hounding the referee is beside the point. Footballers earn exactly what they are worth in relation to serving others. The best footballers earn the most.
The best footballers entertain the most people, giving the most people passion and purpose and hope and enjoyment.
The best footballers inspire the most people to want to play football and be as good as them one day.
It is the way.
And if it is transient or not deserved, then it corrects itself.
If a footballer keeps getting injured then the owners of the club negotiate a ‘pay per play’ contract.
If the player doesn’t live up to the hype or play as well as they did in the previous club, they get sold and their value goes down, as does their salary.
If they don’t maintain a level of performance or play for the team they get dropped and sometimes get forced to play with the reserves.
Footballer’s salaries are a micro-insight into how the world works regarding serving, solving and remuneration. As footballers get better, they get peripheral deals that earn them more money, sponsorship, endorsements, even paid social media posts.
They have attracted this because of their level of mastery, linked to how it serves and solves for others. This compounds upwards. According to the sport bible, Cristiano Ronaldo can get paid up to €230,366 per Tweet. This is the compounded manifestation of the years of hard work, mastery and level and scale of service to others. And as soon as this value erodes, so does the level or remuneration.
Think what happened to Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong – once things began to unravel in their own way: sponsors cancelled their contracts, media started making demands, the volume of people they served reduced as people changed their perception of them and the value they added to their lives.
