NOT TOO LATE FOR KANE AND CO TO DO RIGHT THING
HARRY KANE and Dele Alli must see how awful this looks now. Spurs using the government’s furlough job retention scheme to hand 550 non-playing staff a 20-per-cent wage cut for the next two months, while multi-millionaire footballers bank huge pay cheques, is obscene. It’s not on. Tottenham players didn’t create a situation where Daniel Levy trousered £7m, while simultaneously announcing plans to fleece taxpayers of hard-earned cash. But they have the financial comfort to fix it. No one can make a wealthy, high-profile footballer take a pay cut. A contract is handed out and he’s no more obliged to give up a chunk of pay than a hedge-fund manager or Richard Branson. That frontline NHS staff earn a tiny fraction of the £76,000 a week average wage of a firstteam player at Spurs is clearly a societal abomination. But moral indignation has never been a good enough reason to impose a pay cut on anyone. And chopping a tenner off Kane’s £200k a week without proper consultation would allow him to walk away. The solution has to come from the players themselves. Someone worked out that if Tottenham’s 550 non-playing employees earned £30,000 each, a tax on playing staff salaries of 2.77 per cent would cover the full 20 per cent of earnings lost. That’s roughly £5,000 off Kane’s gargantuan weekly wage to make sure the laundry staff and cleaners are taken care of. Listen, no one wants to lose a penny from their wage. But an affordable sacrifice by every Spurs player can’t be too much to ask. During times of crisis people show their true colours — and Levy and the reprehensible Newcastle owner Mike Ashley have exposed corporate hearts so black two coats of Dulux emulsion couldn’t lighten them. It’s not too late for the players. They can do nothing to make football come back sooner. But they can make its absence feel a little easier for colleagues who suffer more than most when it’s gone.