Legal battle dishes dirt on footballer’s ridiculous spending habits…
A court battle between ex-Newcastle striker Obafemi Martins and his former management company has revealed he was regularly skint … despite earning £75,000 a week.
NVA Management, who are suing for £300,000, have accused the “25-year-old” of regularly drawing out £40k on the weekends then taking another £25k on Monday mornings — leaving himself continually overdrawn.
According to the Daily Mail, a lawyer representing NVA claims Martins was also too lazy to bother chasing up sponsorship deals, meaning his name and image were being used without him receiving any coin:
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:
Greedy Cameroonian demands 15 per cent share of transfer fee
Barcelona may have hoped they had seen the last of Samuel Eto’o when they offloaded him to Inter Milan in exchange for a massively-overrated-yet-currently-free-scoring Swede, but the Cameroonian striker is causing more headaches in Catalonialand.
Sportthis morning report that Eto’o is demanding fifteen per cent of his transfer fee to the Serie A giants, which works out at around €3m of a reported €20m fee.
The fifteen per cent fee is a standard term set out by the Association of Spanish Footballers (AFE) when players transfer between Spanish clubs, but Barca have quite rightly pointed out that Inter Milan are not a Spanish team.
Despite this startling geographical evidence, the Spanish paper say the Cameroonian has made a request for his share of a deal that he effectively forced via his abhorrent personality, and has now lodged a formal complaint. If Barcelona fail to stuff the extra cash into his bulging mattress, the matter will be settled in court.
It’s FC Bunyodkor’s Gene Hackman look-alike Luiz Felipe Scolari!
Since arriving in Italy, Jose Mourinho’s €11m salary has cemented his status as the best paid manager in the world. This morning, however, it has been revealed that The Special One’s huge remuneration package has been eclipsed by that of another Chelsea alumnus. After signing an eighteen-month contract with Uzbekistani side FC Bunyodkor, Big Phil Scolari will now take home an annual pay packet of €13m.
Bunyodkur - who recently changed their name from PFC Kuruvchi to “reflect their success” - first came to international prominence last summer, when they claimed to have secured the services of Samuel Eto’o. Despite the Cameroonian’s passionate love for clubs who are willing to pay him more money than he is worth, the deal never went through.
Since the Eto’o spectacle, Bunyodkur have introduced several Brazilians to their side,
The Spanish capital’s escort agencies won’t know what hit them
C-Ron is now so wealthy that he employs someone to ‘flip him from six to midnight’
According to our Spanish friends at Marca, Real Madrid are all set to make Cristiano Ronaldo the highest paid footballer of all time, by remunerating him with an annual salary of €13m. That works out at €250,000 every week, or in proper money, around £212,000 every seven days. Going even further, that’s nearly £1,300 per day, and £21 for every single minute.
C-Ron’s new deal will eclipse that of of Inter Milan’s big-stage-bottler Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who earns a paltry €12m per year. Also, it is nearly double the pay packet taken home by Madrid legend Raul.
In addition to his stupendous wage, the Portuguese star will also rake it in from image rights. In a similar deal to that which Florentino Perez struck with David Beckham, Ronaldo will receive a proportion of sales of all the official tat with his name on it. If fans buy enough Cristiano Ronaldo shirts, posters, action figures, radon detctors and eye wash stations etc., he could potentially double his income.
As the Tesco Value teabags and “one square of loo roll per visit rule” at Spoiler towers demonstrates, the nation remains in the grip of a financial apocalypse.
Throughout the crunchy credit crisis, the Premier League has tried its best to remain impervious to global economics, by continuing to spend big, charge extortionate amounts for tickets and encourage potentially destabilising foreign investment. This week, however, cracks are starting to show in the supposedly invulnerable entity, whose members seem to believe they can buck the trend of a recession.
On Tuesday, The Guardian revealed that the Premier League is cumulatively £3.1bn in debt. Just over £2bn of those outstanding bank overdrafts, loans and other borrowings are attributable to the Big Four alone.
We have also learned that wages have spiralled to over £1bn for the first time, suggesting one too many clubs are operating with an unstable business model. Such a unevenly balanced ratio of wages to turnover could become a club’s undoing, particularly in light of the fact that ‘guaranteed’ income from ailing broadcaster Setanta may be about to dry up.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the fool’s paradise that is the Premiership, however, is the news that reached us this morning concerning Liverpool’s financial crisis.
Yesterday, the European Club Association (the latest incarnation of the G-14 super happy fun club) sat down to discuss capping the amount clubs can spend on wages and transfers.
In order to put a stop to the sort of insane transfers threaten to destabilise the game, the organisation proposed that clubs should only be allowed to spend around 51 per cent of their income (gate receipts, TV deals, sponsorship, player sales, over-priced hot dogs, etc).
This would mean clubs like Manchester City would have to build another three tiers of seats and at Eastlands and ensure everyone in Asia is drinking Garry Cook’s range of magical energy drinks if they wished to bankroll an astronomical Kaka bid.
It would also encourage better business models - many clubs spend a dangerously high proportion of their income on wages, which is a completely unsustainable method of running a business. Isn’t that so, Leeds Utd?
However, the proposal is a double-edged sword. If clubs were to rely solely on their earnings (and not the deep pockets of their sugar daddies) the temptation to charge even higher amounts for tickets, replica shirts and the aforementioned hot dogs would be huge.
And, at the end of the day, football is meant to be entertaining escape for us regular folks - capping outrageous player bids and ridiculous salaries would detract from the excitement and the incredulous circus that we call top flight European football.
So, should clubs be limited on their spending, or should we carry on the way things are? Let us know your thoughts with a vote and comment below…
It’s the one who did it on the pitch yesterday, of course!
While his team mates were busy conceding three points at Upton Park yesterday, Stoke striker Ricardo Fuller went on a mission to make himself the least popular man in Tony Pulis’ side. The Jamaican felt that Stoke captain Andy Griffin was at fault for Carlton Cole’s equaliser, and made his feelings clear via the medium of face slapping.
For his temporary moment of insanity, Fuller is expected to receive a fine of two weeks wages, making his wallet around £20,000 lighter during this year’s January sales.
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