Banking and football are the industries of our age. They are sectors in which the gains of globalisation have been sequestered by a tiny number of people in organisations that regularly fail to make money and are riddled with bad debt and malpractice. Practically less important than banking, football’s symbolic reach is infinitely greater, the grotesque injustice of the dual labour market more transparent.
At the top end of the Premier League, players are earning in the region of £180,000 a week before sponsorship and image rights are included. Even the most average of players in the league takes home more than £1m a year, as do the coaches; agents take 10% and do pretty well themselves. Chief executives, on an average salary of more than £200,000 a year, in an industry that consistently fails to make a profit of any kind, are earning considerably more than those in charge of comparably sized companies that do. Club directors have been helping themselves to fabulous salaries, dividends, loans, bonuses and share offers.
There is, of course, an army of low-paid labour that actually makes the show possible: cleaners, stewards and ticket takers, unpaid interns and volunteer mascots. Not merely ancillary to the real task of making money, catering staff are responsible for generating nearly 10% of Arsenal’s and Manchester United’s income.
For some clubs this work is deemed not even worth the minimum wage. This year HMRC fined an un-named club for making staff pay for uniforms and paying them less than the minimum wage, let alone the living wage; many other clubs have been warned. Even when within the law this is precarious – grinding employment with short inconvenient shifts and long journeys, not just for students and pocket money but for people trying to raise a family. Symptomatic of our economic elite, the Premier League has, so far, been able to treat the demand for the introduction of the living wage with a mixture of disdain, dissimulation and contempt.
Arsenal’s chief executive Ivan Gazidis (total remuneration package in 2013 more than £2m) waved aside the idea that the club might pay the London living wage with the words “the issue is complex and political”, when actually it is very simple. Even the most threadbare notion of economic justice demands that Premier League clubs should be paying the living wage. The problem is that all the decision-making power lies in the hands of a tiny number of unaccountable and shameless people.
Powerful they may be, but the owners of the Premier League and their factotums have not entirely colonised football’s soul.
FC United of Manchester, the breakaway club from the Glazers’ Manchester United, were the first to sign up to paying the living wage. They were recently joined by the Edinburgh side Hearts and activists at Celtic have been relentlessly pressing their board to match them. Manchester City have gone some of the way, actually agreeing to engage with the Living Wage foundation and committing to pay their interns, but there are simply no excuses for not just doing it.
Barclays, the league’s sponsors, have been love bombing us with the words “Thank you” and “You are football”. They might want to consider that “you” includes thousands of people putting in a real shift, and that what they need, and we want, is not just to thank them put to pay them the dignified wage they deserve.
David Goldblatt is author of The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football. Click here to buy it from Guardian Bookshop
