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Sympathy for Pogba and the overpaid?
Quick question in response to Toby Sprigings' interesting article on money, support, and the position of the modern footballer. Why is there so much focus on money and salary among the general football-watching public in Britain and elsewhere? Why are salaries quoted on a weekly basis and why do fans place so much stock in their amount? I am a long-time fan of British football but have never lived in the UK and find the obsession somewhat hard to understand. You have concerns over paying someone (a certain Alexis Sanchez) more than 100,000 GBP a week more than their next-highest-paid teammate? Totally understand. Concerns over paying an elite athlete roughly fifteen million pounds a year, though? My worries begin to evaporate.
In the USA, Pogba's salary would place him outside the top 35 highest paid baseball players and outside the top 50 highest-paid NBA players. He is compensated at roughly the level of the Charlotte Hornets' Terry Rozier, a solid NBA player who has never made an All-Star team or won any titles or awards. This is all before the vast differences in tax structures are considered as well. The Premier League is far more popular internationally than Major League Baseball and is likely still superior to the NBA. Tax differences make these numbers less comparable, of course.
Athletic careers are cruelly short, and I don't entirely understand why fans begrudge players their salaries, considering that, you know, they produce the product on the field. Lack of investment in Old Trafford, for one, is not entirely due to Pogba's compensation. If fans still owned the clubs playing at the highest level in Britain, I could understand concerns over this
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