Hold the back page – a £107m bid for Kaká by Manchester City is out of order because it is just ‘ridiculous’. Just as their £32.5m capture of Robinho was. And just how Chelsea’s £30.8m Shevchenko deal and Manchester United’s £30.75m transfer of Berbatov wasn’t. You know, I can understand that people think £107m is a bit much, but certainly not £32.5m, when others have paid slightly less – and one of them was for a total flop.
But, first off, the transfer fee for Kaká (and he’s not even signed a contract yet, so it may never go through) is coming out of Sheikh Mansour’s pocket. It is his money and his right to spend it how he wishes, so if he decides he wants to allow Mark Hughes to spend a nine-figure sum on a Brazilian player – who’s not half bad, in fairness – then he can do, just as you have the right to spend your own money on football shirts, items on eBay, newspapers, DVDs that you never take out of the cellophane, Sky TV or internet porn.
Saying that you could build x number of hospitals or y number of schools is irrelevant. It’s privately owned money – your savings don’t go towards local amenities and so neither does Sheikh Mansour’s. Your tax does. And so does Sheik Mansour’s.
The fact that he has decided to do it in such a crunchy credit world seems to have upset a lot of people. But I don’t see their problem – he’s spending his money how he chooses, just as everybody else is. He’s just got the good fortune to have more money than most of the people on the planet. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t buy who or what he wants for a price he deems to be reasonable.
The real question is, why should City curb their spending, when no such limits have been placed on any other football club? The top four have been spending what they have liked for years, but now it’s somebody else’s turn, they don’t seem to like it.
Moving on to Kaká’s proposed wage: Reports have estimated it to be either £100,000 p/w or £500,000 p/w, depending on who you believe. And this has sent the majority of non-City supporting members of the public into outrage – how can he earn such a wage while people who do much more important jobs and save lives earn less? It’s a sentiment I agree with, but it’s the way of football. It’s not City’s fault football as a whole spends so much on wages and it’s certainly not Kaká’s fault, either. If you want to stop City paying him up to £500,000 p/w, then you have to stop Manchester United paying Ronaldo £119,000 p/w – unless it’s ok for them to do that because they’re in the top four?
The problem is that every footballer earns too much, just as film stars and pop singers do. Actors generally get paid more than footballers and they just pretend to be a character doing something else. But they’re only human, and if somebody offered you £500,000 p/w to do a job you loved doing, would you turn it down? Did anybody complain when it was reported David Beckham would be earning something in the region of £500,000 p/w at LA Galaxy?
And bear in mind here that if Kaká does sign for such a weekly wage, he would have to live in England to play for City. He would, therefore, have to pay tax on his earnings. Lewis Hamilton has earned a hell of a lot of money from his Formula One career thus far, yet there’s been no criticism of him for moving to Switzerland – where he claimed he’d be less hounded by the press, but, oddly, he’d be able to reap numerous tax benefits (to the tune of roughly £4m p/a). Kaká would pay up to £10.3m tax p/a, just to put that into perspective.
And that’s on money that currently isn’t being taxed.
Keanu Reaves earned roughly £22.3m for the final Matrix film (15% of the gross plus $12m). That film will have been less work for him that it would be for Kaká (assuming he’s not facing any long injuries and plays most, if not all, of City’s matches for 2009), who would earn roughly £16m for the year, minus tax.
Blaming City for the current state of footballers’ wages is wrong. If the owner has the money, he can offer those wages; if he doesn’t, he can’t – it’s as simple as that. It’s the way football was working before City and the way it will work after City. All they have done is raise the bar, that so many others, mainly the top four as far as Britain is concerned, had dominated.
And now they can’t have their own way, they’ve gone for a little sulk.
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