Oxygen thief midfielder is still raking it in

The frequency with which Newcastle Utd give the rest of the country a new reason to point and laugh at them is increasing at an alarming rate. The Sunday Telegraph provide the latest ammunition against the Toon club, with the revelation that since June 2007, they have been paying £675,000 a year for the image rights of Joey Barton. Yes, that’s the image rights of a vile criminal who uses other players’ faces as ashtrays:

Barton’s image rights payments - which work out at roughly £13,000 a week - are believed to be at least £200,000 higher than those of his best paid team-mates. While most high profile players receive just over 10 per cent of their basic salary, Barton, whose contract runs until 2012, is paid just over 20 per cent.

When a player signs for a club he has two options. Either he seeks to profit from selling his own image rights, or he lets the club use his image in exch­ange for an annual payment. This payment goes into the player’s ‘image company’, many of which are based offshore. Almost all players opt for the latter.

In news that is even more depressing than the fact that Guy Ritchie is still allowed to make films after Revolver, it has emerged that Barton earned £143,000 in image rights while serving a six month stint in prison for an abhorrent attack on a teenager outside McDonalds. Happy Monday morning everyone!

[Sunday Telegraph via Dirty Tackle]

Flame-haired midfielder was cut a slim slice of the profit cake

Following his transfer to Chelsea in July 2007, Steve Sidwell insisted he was not at the club to ‘make up the numbers’. Despite this, he only ended up playing fifteen times for the Blues, and was shipped off to the Midlands a few weeks ago.

Sidwell’s lack of first team football, however, may not have been the only motivation for his departure from West London. According to a friend of The Spoiler, each Chelsea player is given a quarterly cheque to remunerate them for image rights of merchandise sold in the club shop (each time an item is sold featuring a particular player’s name, said player receives a small amount of the profit). Most players’ cheques ran into the thousands, provoking much jubilation as the envelopes were opened. Sidwell, however, was less bothered about punching the air - one of his was for the princely sum of £16.80.