Punters pay for Taylor’s obscene salary – so, why is no one tackling it?
Game’s power-brokers must hold PFA to account over chief’s £2.3m income because much of it could be put to better use
You give it to the television companies, who hand it on to the football leagues, who pass £27million of it to the Professional Footballers’ Association, which pays its chief executive Gordon Taylor £2.3million-a-year, including a “bonus” of £777,000.
When you join the dots like this, Taylor’s extravagant remuneration package of £44,000 a week (higher than the average wage at many Premier League clubs) ceases to be a random example of fat-catism in a society with runaway executive pay and starts to look like yet another hefty bill picked up by the football-loving punter.
Taylor, remember, is a trade union leader, whose organisation collects only £547,000 of its income from 4,930 members – and the bulk, £26.6million, from TV fees.
Thus the PFA is a rare example of a union being funded by customers, and then the bosses, the employers, the people who own the industry: the clubs and the leagues. For £27million, those leagues would probably hope for a lot of compliance, or at least not too much kicking and screaming from the shop floor.
In this loop of mutual interest, Premier League players are hardly the miners of the Eighties, or today’s “flexible” army of zero-hours low-paid workers.
There is not much for many of Taylor’s best-paid members to complain about, which leaves their 73-year-old chief executive to beaver away at welfare programmes or go on Radio Four’s Today programme when one of his players offends public sensibilities or threatens to go on strike. Football’s ability to look the other way on Taylor’s pay is one of the more baffling blind spots.
Even newspaper allegations that he gambled £4 million in 30 months as the head of an organisation with avowed zero tolerance for players betting caused no great disturbance at PFA headquarters, where much good work is done, but not enough, judging from the accounts, in the field of concussion and head injury research, to which the PFA allocated £100,000 last year – a figure 22 times less than Taylor’s income.
This juxtaposition has broken the widespread silence on the head honcho’s pay. It often takes an outrageous contrast – a telling single detail – to make people see the thing right in front of them.
In mitigation, growing evidence of dementia among ex-players is not solely the PFA’S responsibility, morally, financially, or in the field of research, any more than the National Union of Mineworkers should carry the can for lung disease among people who worked underground.
The burden should fall mainly on the Football Association, the leagues and the clubs who employed them, with a duty of care; but there is no escaping the paltry nature of that £100,000 commitment in the context of Taylor’s £41,246 vehicle allowance and a “bonus” more than seven times greater than the contribution to research demanded by Jeff Astle’s family and others.
In the PFA accounts we see a £400,000 payment to Sporting Chance, which Kieron Dyer has thanked for helping him deal with the trauma of child sex abuse, and £1.79million for “educational and vocational grants.”
This is a charitable organisation tasked with much of the work football should be doing for itself, not expecting the union to do. But then you realise those “educational and vocational grants” cost around the same as Taylor’s salary and bonus – and the whole thing justifies Graeme Le Saux’s description of it as “absolutely scandalous”.
This pork-barrel culture has long been the norm in a game so awash with money that it needs snorkels to move around. The vast engulfing wave of television money has made multimillionaires of some great players and plain old millionaires of some fairly average ones. Pennies from heaven has become gold bullion from the skies, and so Taylor now earns as if he were the chief executive of Arsenal or another Premier League giant.
As one of the most senior people in the game, he may go to bed feeling his astronomical pay packet reflects the market rate, and is true to society’s wildly unequal pay culture. He said as much in 2010, when he claimed his income “pales into insignificance compared to bankers”. For too long, football has allowed him to wallow in that delusion, which conflates working for a charity, or a trade union, with moving money around in the City, where he ought to have tried his luck if he thinks £2.3million a year is what he should be earning (it was £3.4 million in 2014).
Around the game, people have a curious mental block about what Taylor’s income actually means for the PFA and the people who need its help. Simply, money given to Taylor cannot be given to Sporting Chance, concussion and head injury research or any of the other good causes it pursues. A £777,000 “bonus” comes from that pot.
The members never object because the most powerful of them are earning similar sums themselves, or perhaps never think much about the PFA until they need it, post-career. The Premier League in particular display no great urge to take him on, certainly over his income, in part, you suspect, because Taylor is not confrontational with them.
Against that backdrop, Taylor’s colossal income is just another surreal detail in a game where the money tree never ceases to respond to a shake: another thing we all seem happy to pay for, when we part with our “TV fees”.