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| The paupers and princes of the sporting world Are Britain's football stars under-paid? It is not the first reaction any of us would give to a report that appeared in The Mirror on Friday, claiming the average Manchester United player takes home £2m a year in club salary alone. But a comparison with sports stars across the world illustrates that the likes of Roy Keane, Michael Owen and David Beckham are mere also-rans in the cash-trousering stakes. Michael Schumacher is estimated to have hauled in something in the region of £42m in the last complete financial year, dwarfing Beckham's £6.5m (£1.3m in salary plus endorsement deals). Tiger Woods made just £4m less than Schumi, with Mike Tyson and Michael Jordan not far behind. Even the men tied for 19th in the earnings table, New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza and Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning, picked up £10.6m apiece. So why the discrepancy between the stars of the Premiership and heroes from other parts of the sporting cosmos? In purely financial terms, you're better off if your sporting success depends entirely on your own efforts. When Tiger wins a Major, the credit is almost entirely his. Sure, coach Butch Harmon and caddie Steve Williams make a difference - but to the public at large, Tiger's the man. It's the same with Michael Schumacher. He wouldn't be world champion without Ferrari, but who wants to buy a t-shirt with Jean Todt's face on it? NBA stars may operate in a starting line-up of seven, but a big name can exert far more of an influence on a team's success than a single individual at a football club. Grant Hill earns the money he does at Detroit because he is a franchise player; the same with Kevin Garnett and the Minnesota Timberwolves. Beckham is important to United. But when he's unavailable, the team is not left stricken, as their recent run of eight successive victories illustrated. Liverpool are better with Michael Owen in the side, but they can survive without him. The only player in Premiership history who can really claim to have singlehandedly transformed a team's fortunes is Eric Cantona - and even his eventual departure from Old Trafford was absorbed without fuss. Forbes Magazine's annual list of the world's most powerful celebrities takes account not just of earnings but also media profile - the number of web hits the individual received, the times they were featured on magazine covers and their appearances on television and radio. This rating system pushes Tiger Woods into the lead among sportsmen, with only Tom Cruise ahead of him in the overall list. Michael Jordan comes in sixth, behind the Beatles, Britney Spears and Bruce Willis, while Mike Tyson lies in 11th. Schumacher is the first European sportsman on the list (15th), just ahead of Shaq O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. There's no mention of Premiership footballers. Icons around the world Forbes' system goes some way to explaining why the issue of image rights has become so important in contract negotiations. The more high profile the athlete, the more the team they play for can expect to make through merchandising. Take the example of David Beckham. His advisors want any new deal with Manchester United to reflect the fact that his name - and face - sell everything from replica shirts to videos, duvet covers and wallpaper. All of the sportsmen in the Forbes list could rightly lay claim to being icons around the world. This isn't to say that they necessarily deserve to be placed in the same pantheon as Muhammad Ali and Pele, merely that their faces are recognised from Hong Kong to Harlem. They also pass the age-old celebrity test of being instantly recognisable from a single moniker or nickname. Tiger. Jordan. Shaq. There's no mistaking those three for anyone else, in the same way that we need not expand on Oprah, Britney or Bruce. Yet how many footballers would fall into this category? Certainly not Roy Keane, the biggest earner at United, nor Juan Veron, and definitely not Paul Scholes or Laurent Blanc. When the day comes that 'Becks' is as powerful a global brand as 'Jordan', expect footballers' wages to approach parity with their counterparts in the US. Until that moment, the Premiership elite will simply have to learn to scrape by on a mere £50,000 a week. Report by BBC Sport Online's Tom Fordyce 1st February 2002 |
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