Damocles said:
Ticket For Schalke said:
kippax_blueboy said:
Best of luck to Micheal over the next few months on the road to complete recovery.
This young lad has had a tough 12 months with injury, is a City player and deserves our support.
real tough, must be real tough pickin up 50 grand and gettin lashed infront of the public eye all the time. feel for the lad i do.
Firstly, MJ isn't on a 50 grand a week contract, nothing even close to that. Due to the way football contracts work, he pulls around £6-8k a week while injured. Whilst this may not seem like a tiny amount (and it isn't), you can knock 50-odd percent off of that from tax and NI contributions. Then with the various pensions and contribution to investment funds set up for him, you can half that again. So, lets call that £1.5-2k a week, still nothing to get worried about.
Of course, MJ has far greater expenses than we do, as he has a mortgage on a large house, tax/insurance for his car (not only is he a young male, he is a footballer too, which means his insurance premiums are about £50 bloody thousand a year), plus other heavy expenses.
He's fucking skint, or as close to it as you can be when you are a footballer.
Whilst I agree that some comments regarding Johnson are sometimes a bit over the top on here and would concur that , if he evers reads them (which is obviously a possibility), they would only be to the detrement of his mental state (although if he hasn't got a thick enough skin to shrug them off that's another worry), I cannot believe what I have just read there.
Yes, people are all too quick to trot out the "fuck them, footballers earn £Xk per week" line, but behind all the bluster there is a fair point.
What you have basically done above is point out that Michael Johnson has expenses that he has to pay for and that he doesn't get to spend £50k every week.
Just like virtually every other person in the world. Everyone gets taxed. Everyone pays NI. Everyone who drives pays insurance. Everyone who owns a home pays a mortgage and those who don't pay rent.
And I would bet that everyone who contributed to this thread before you feels the pinch a bit more than a twenty year old single lad who has a basic wage that probably dwarfs what they are earning in the next decade.
What point exactly are you trying to make?
If it is that money is irrelevant (which, in terms of his fitness, I could go along with, yet not agree completely) then why quote his expenses in detail?
If it is that people should cut him a bit of slack because his disposible income is a lot less than reported (which you seem to be doing) then I reckon you are barking up the wrong tree there.
Why should any City fan have any sympathy whatsoever if a City player is paying a huge amount of car insurance and mortgage payments every month? There's a simple way to reduce that - don't have such a powerful car and don't have such an expensive property.
I just can't see how you can expect to generate any sympathy with that info. His expenses relate to the very nice trappings of being a footballer (tax and NI aside) and his disposible income will still be a very nice figure compared to other lads of his age and people who are older with proper responsibilities.
If you had said that people should leave his wages out of it as it's a matter of mental and physical health then it may have been a fair point (even though his 'troubles' would still pale into insignificance compared to those of many without the trappings and support that a 20 year old footballer gets).
But to list his expenses, state that his disposible income is a lot lower than people might expect and therefore suggest that he should be cut a bit more slack by people who talk about his commitment/wages and that this has some sort of relevance to his ability to cope with being injured is pushing it in the extreme imo.
