http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/arsenal/article6796014.ece

Like Neville and Giggs he argues that footballers justify their wages and that they are an easy target for the press compared to the really super rich people who are invisible to most of us.
Like someone already said, it’s simple economics on the face of it. Millions upon millions watch top level football every week and the product is valuable. There is undoubtedly big money in football and something would be very wrong if the players didn’t see a large slice of it.
However surely if a football club is being being bankrolled by a super rich owner and accumulating debts that it’s revenue stream doesn’t cover then how could you ever possibly justify a huge wage bill?

I always feel that the Premiership era has also gone hand in hand in with the growth of moronic Katie and Peter style celebrity culture and that as a society we no longer produce anyone who aspires to do jobs like nursing and teaching etc. These people are not rewarded, I don’t know what it’s like in Manchester but in London hospitals pretty much all of the nursing staff will be Asian or African immigrants(a bit like Arsenal ). I have no problem with that but it just shows how unappealing a career like that is to people born in this country.

Footballers basically have their arses wiped for them, they are a bunch of over pampered cry babies = fact.

The players are entitled to be the principle beneficiaries of the money swilling around the game, no doubt. Nonetheless, the divergence between what they earn and the ‘usefulness’ of what they do (compared to say a nurse, copper, chippy, magistrate, spark, mechanic, IT guy whatever), does rankle with the common man.

My biggest problem with the money is that youngsters who make it in football now have no notion of what real life is like for the average person. Players of Giggsy and Neville’s generation would have had some notion of that, but the gilded youth coming through the ranks now, doesn’t.

Either way – given footballers propensity for all things tacky and overpriced (take a look at Stephen Ireland’s cars) – you can rest assured most of them spunk most of their money on shite anyway.

I think people are comparing apples and oranges when they compare a footballers’ salary to a teacher or a health worker. A better comparision would be to compare a footballer to another artist. Some artists get paid handsomely whereas others dwindle. It is no different for footballers – there are some mega stars whereas the rest of them are languishing in lower leagues.

Whilst to me and you the amounts may look obscene, it is unfair for that information to be even out in the public domain. £6M a year is obscene for a twat like Jonathan Ross, not a Christiano Ronaldo or a Thierry Henry.