IT DEFIES BELIEF THAT NO PLAYER HAS SACRIFICED EVEN A SMALL CHUNK OF PAY

The genuine acts of sacrifice are the ones there is little song and dance about. Those from people such as Swansea City’s head coach Steve Cooper and chief executive Trevor Birch, quietly foregoing wages to protect those who earn less.

Such acts are pitifully thin on the ground. Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford posted a message recently to his eight million Twitter followers, appealing for donations to help deliver food to children whose schools are in lockdown.

he made some phone calls and is thought to have contributed himself, and it was gratifying to learn that, as of yesterday, the public had chipped in £150,000 of their hard-earned cash.

But that kind of money is one week’s earnings for a top Premier League player. What defies belief at a time like this is the apparent incapacity of any player in that gilded world to see how it would look if he sacrificed a small chunk of his pay. Not a wage deferral; a wage cut — that’s giving the money away.

The average weekly salary in the Premier League is around £60,000. Taking a 50 per cent pay cut, for three months, would still mean a player earning £30,000 a week.

And who, when we are all locked down listening to the daily bulletins about the drain on the nation’s resources, is going to spend anything remotely like £30,000 a week?

That £30,000 would go to people these players see almost every day: the tea lady, the groundsman, the receptionist who, like all of us, did not have the remotest notion of furloughing two weeks ago.

It would prevent a chief executive such as Daniel Levy, with his £7million remuneration, asking the Treasury for taxpayers’ money to pay his non-playing staff. Julian Knight, chair of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee, called for a windfall tax yesterday on Premier League clubs who cut the pay of non- playing staff using the Government furlough scheme while continuing to pay ‘extremely high wages’ to players.

There is a view doing the rounds that footballers are young men in need of advice and support to help them know what to do for the best; an argument which demeans those young men to a substantial degree.

Can it really be that what Borussia Monchengladbach managing director Stephan Schippers said about his club’s players, when they took a pay cut two weeks ago, does not apply to the professionals of the Premier League? ‘The players know what’s going on,’ Schippers said. ‘ They have already informed themselves and thought about it.’

The PFA hold tight to their position that they, with their handful of staff, must analyse financial data from every club which seeks to defer players’ wages until the summer. As they do so, the reputation of their top-flight members crashes through the floor. Where on earth is the awareness?

What a monumental publicity coup it would be were just one club’s players to announce today they are giving up that 50 per cent, surely triggering more to do the same.

The trickle- down effect could mean Premier League players saying, when all this over, that they were the ones who saved football.

We won’t be holding our breath.