Manchester Utd star justifies professional footballers’ inflated remuneration packages

Those who watched last week’s episode of Mock The Week may have noticed David Mitchell’s angry diatribe on the concept of a society that gives footballers hugely disproportionate salaries for doing a job that essentially “doesn’t matter”. It’s a puzzling sentiment from someone who has carved out a career in professional comedy, but The Spoiler can see the validity of his point: in a logical world, nurses, teachers and scientists would all bring home more bacon than those who endlessly strive to become the best at kicking a spherical piece of leather around a field.

When posed with the question of whether £100,000+-a-week salaries are justified, Gary Neville has defended men of his ilk:

“Others earn billions selling rights and 75,000 come to watch us every week.

“There’s a product there that people love. Fans are crucial but without the player you have nothing.”

Even though he has shown dogged loyalty to his club, Neville continued by suggesting the likes of Ashley Cole and Emmanuel Adebayor are perfectly entitled to leave their employer if another employer offers even bigger piles of money:

They’d have to get to the European competitions first!

Michel Platini’s continued his love affair with British clubs yesterday by proclaiming that Manchester City would be banned from competing in Europe if they failed to “respect their budget”. It seems the Kaka saga didn’t impress the UEFA President:

“How can a guy cost €150 million? For me it’s ridiculous — from a football, social and financial point of view.

“If you want to buy a plane for €150m or a boat, you can do. But for a man? For me it’s bad. It’s not possible. But it’s why we have to do something.

“I’m finding a system where you can spend what you have. If one Sheikh brings €150m for Kaka then you have to put his salary on top of the transfer fee.

“If the club go over their income with the player’s salary plus fee, they can be banned from our competitions because

As net pay decreases, so will top European talent

In order to pull the UK back from the brink of financial apocalypse, Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has revealed some risky plans in his pre-budget report. One bail out strategy is to introduce a new tax band of 45 per cent on earnings over £150,000 from 2011. This seems like a perfectly reasonable method of keeping the economy afloat, but it could have an adverse effect on the Premiership.

Cristiano Ronaldo currently earns a gross of £6.24m per year, on which he pays 40 per cent on earnings after £37,400 (which is only around two days work for him!). Under the new plans, he will pay an extra £304,500, roughly the cost of

Wow, that’s surprising

Sports Illustrated - whose dedication to fiscal issues is almost as great as their dedication to taking pictures of pretty ladies on the beach - have published a list of the twenty highest earning non-American sportsmen. They did this back in February, when David Beckham sat in fifth place with his paltry $29.7m annual fortune. Now, Mr B stands atop the pile with a much more befitting sum:

1. David Beckham (LA Galaxy) $48.2m
2. Kimi Räikkönen (Formula One) $46m
3. Ronaldinho (Barcelona) $37.5m

Midfielder devises cunning plan to waste more of Newcastle’s money

Joey Barton’s post-Christmas ‘leave of absence’ has cost his club over £200k in wages, and now he has found another way of depriving his club of liquidity.

Barton was given bail on the condition that he remain under the supervision of the Sporting Chance clinic in Hampshire, and to curb his behavioural problems, he must observe a curfew between

Joey Barton’s special Christmas breakfast is breaking the Newcastle bank

According to his therapist at the Sporting Chance clinic in Hampshire, Joey Barton will not be playing in ‘the near future’.

The therapist, the brilliantly-named Peter Kay, says Joey will remain with him ’24 hours a day’ until his next court appearance on January 16. While Mr Kay will undergo irreparable emotional and physical damage during