IThere are always more voices to be offended by the fabulous salaries of big bosses than to be indignant at the huge incomes of footballers. Opinion may change when it compares the remuneration paid by Paris-Saint-Germain (PSG) to its poor results in the Champions League. The Parisian club collects very high salaries: 990,000 euros gross on average per month, against 67,000 euros for the rest of the French championship, Ligue 1, reveals the newspaper’s annual survey The Teampublished Tuesday, March 22.
Its players arrive in the first fourteen places of the best paid in the French championship. When you have gas, you don’t count. And the club, controlled since 2011 by the sovereign wealth fund of a rich Qatar with the third largest reserves in the world, does not skimp. The Brazilian Neymar dominates the ranking with 4.1 million euros monthly, followed by the Argentinian Lionel Messi (3.4 million) and the Frenchman Kylian Mbappé (2.2 million euros), who could earn at least twice as much if Real Madrid managed to redeem him.
You have to go down to fifteenth place to find the first player not wearing the PSG jersey: Monaco striker Wissam Ben Yedder (650,000 euros gross monthly). The other teams play in the second division: Marseille (226,000 euros gross monthly on average), Monaco (185,000 euros), Nice (130,000 euros) and Lyon (120,000 euros).
The price of the dream
In total, the sports daily estimates the payroll of the twenty Ligue 1 clubs at 1.73 billion euros (against 1.38 billion in 2018-2019), while its income has fallen by 29% since March 2020, planed by the health crisis and the fiasco of the Sino-Spanish broadcaster Mediapro. Surprising, when all the experts warned in 2020 of the imminence of a “acute cash crisis” ! That the leaders swore to their great gods that there would be an “after-Covid-19” coupled with an “after-Mediapro”!
The return to more realism has not come. Nor the cap on the salaries of players, who capture most of the revenue from the round ball, which has become a solid golden ball. Like the financialization of the economy in the 1980s, which had boosted the salaries of managers of CAC 40 multinationals and others, the total freedom of movement given to athletes by European justice with the Bosman judgment of 1995 has raise wages and the amount of transfers.
the beautiful game no longer has a price except that of the dream, exorbitant. But what ! “There is no place in the world where man is happier than in a football stadium”asserted Albert Camus, adding: “What little morality I know, I learned on the football pitch. » It was in the 1930s, long before the mad run of football business.
