West Ham lead the way as Premiership salaries soar
Premiership players' wages have increased more than 65% in seven years, thanks to nimble agents and munificent chairmen.
Michael Walker
June 14, 2007 1:51 AM
It will be dismissed as anecdotal but within English football, and specifically among agents, the following story is circulating and generating huge excitement. A player from a third-tier club who moved recently to a Championship club - one not so long ago in the Premiership - has seen his basic £1,500-a-week salary increase not five times, nor 10, but 15 times. The player's agent did not demand this sum; it was the club's opening gambit.
The belief that wages in football are soaring uncontrollably is understandable. In April a Professional Footballers' Association survey found that the average annual salary of a Premiership player is now £676,000 - £13,000 a week - a rise of 65% on 2000. The accountancy firm Deloitte puts the figure much higher.
It is repeated continually that agents are driving this inflation, and numerous chairmen and directors will support that theory. What is acknowledged less often by these chairmen is that clubs have long contributed to the situation.
Behind the scenes now, however, some Premiership chief executives are very anxious about wage escalation. "There's a little bit of fear out there at the moment," Nicky Hammond, Reading's director of football, said yesterday. "Everyone seems to be keeping their powder dry. The numbers being talked about this season are well in excess of last year in terms of both wages and transfers."
Although no one has gone public - yet - the club many are pointing the finger at is West Ham United. Their chairman, Eggert Magnusson, is now being branded "Father Christmas" by some rivals and, perhaps more worryingly, "Ridsdale" by others. "There's no doubt in my mind that West Ham has had an effect," says a senior figure at another Premiership club.
Annoyance stems from an open-wallet approach to the market, demonstrated on January 22 when Blackburn's Lucas Neill walked into Upton Park on a free transfer. Sources close to the deal have confirmed that Neill, by no means a star player, earns £72,000 a week in east London. He had the option to go to Liverpool but his wage there would have been "a fraction" of what he gets at West Ham.
Within boardrooms the Neill deal is being regarded as a landmark transfer. When asked on Tuesday about the Australian, the Middlesbrough chairman, Steve Gibson, said: "I don't know the details of Lucas Neill other than what I read. What I can comment on are the demands we have suffered from in the last three or four weeks. That would suggest agents are trying to push the barriers again. But that's the business and I am a businessman. But I have seen some of the deals that have gone through in recent weeks and I'm glad we haven't been involved in them."
Gibson is in a slightly tricky position. Middlesbrough, because of fashion and location, have had to pay sometimes exorbitant wages and Tuncay Sanli, whose signing was confirmed yesterday, is believed to be on £60,000 a week after his free transfer from Fenerbahce. One Istanbul sports daily printed pictures of his head on £20 notes to illustrate one reason why he is moving to Teesside. But he may be Middlesbrough's big glamour signing, whereas at West Ham and elsewhere the water-carriers are also being lavishly rewarded. One agent recounted a tale of another West Ham player - who is less regarded generally than Neill - having his wages trebled a few weeks ago.
Harry Redknapp knows the market better than most and the Portsmouth manager - formerly at West Ham - lamented: "Craig Bellamy would do for us. But West Ham want him and would double his wages to £100,000 a week. How do you compete with that? We've got no chance of getting Bellamy. We're all looking for strikers but the market's gone crazy."
A new television deal is one explanation of the sharp rise in wages but new owners are also a factor. The Icelandic owners' fortune underwrites West Ham but even so the comparison is being made with Peter Ridsdale's Leeds.
It was only this January that Ken Bates revealed that Gary Kelly's weekly wage at Leeds since 2001 has been £46,000 a week. "Twelve million pounds over five years," said the chairman. "I worked out that all the money that Leeds earned getting to the semi-finals of the Champions League was handed to Kelly with his new contract." Five years on, Leeds are in the third division. By 2012 they may still not have recovered. But Gary Kelly will still be a multimillionaire. As will Lucas Neill.
