Football has lost the plot over spiralling wages
EASTER is the season for excessive gorging. This should suit Reading perfectly, as no club has gorged, binged and indulged more spectacularly during the last year.
One statistic caught my eye this week. Rather than being about chocolate consumption, it flagged up Championship football club’s spending on salaries.
How much of a percentage of your business income is reasonable to spend on wages?
Reading spent an eye-watering 243 per cent of their total revenue on wages last year.
I am no accountant, but I would predict you are going to be running at a debt, shelling that much out.
By way of comparison the figure for Cardiff, who Reading lost to last Saturday, was 61 per cent, Reading’s nearest relegation rivals Barnsley was 78 per cent and Luton
was 111 per cent.
So how much does your average Reading footballer receive for toiling away at the foot of the Championship table each week?
The average weekly wage last year was £15,000 per player, although Stoke’s more wealthy mid-table journeymen receive an average £23,000 per week.
and Norwich’s players were at least good enough to win promotion to the Premier League last season, but the average earnings at both clubs was north of £30,000 per week.
What all this shows us is football finances have lost the plot.
Good luck to the players. They are the clever ones with a valued talent – the stupid ones are those who pay such grotesque sums.
Dream for a minute. If you were fabulously wealthy where would you place your billions?
Perhaps you love football, but you might glance towards the crisis in Eastern Europe, or under-resourced hospitals here in the UK, or the thousands of children lacking opportunities and living dangerously close to poverty.
Or you might have an insatiable ego and instead buy a football club.
Sir John Madejski says his biggest achievement is the Madejski Academy – the school he built in a part of Reading that was crying out for just such a facility.
He pumped huge funds into healthcare and the arts, and had many other philanthropic ventures quietly chugging away in the background.
He was an old school local football club owner with the community at heart. Most owners nowadays are playing a different game.
Reading’s wage bill next season will need to be cut in half. The EFL are clamping down on ridiculous over-spending on player wages.
It will be a much sterner test of recruitment, coaching and management.
Finishing fourth from bottom on half the budget will be twice the achievement next season. It is not impossible. Splashing the cash can help, but it guarantees nothing.