The Wage Gap: What Do Premier League Footballers Earn?
From £460 a week to £4.3m for a career that never was! How a Manchester United starlet became a record-breaking legal precedent and laid the groundwork for future cases.
Words: Nick Harris
What began as a simple idea for a feature in the sports pages of The Independent newspaper in 1999 directly led, nine years later, to a young English footballer being awarded a record £4.3m in damages for the injury that ended his career. He had never played a first-team match and his wage at the time of his injury was £460 per week.
Almost 25 years on from the same simple idea, the work it produced has become a contributory factor in the building of a unique salary tool, now commercially available to help clubs, recruitment departments, agents, insurers and other industry specialists to assess levels of pay – by position and age – at hundreds of clubs across Europe.
The simple idea back then was ‘What do footballers really earn?”. In the interests of full disclosure, it was my idea, and it was one question among many that I proposed we should ask professional players at the 92 clubs across the Premier League and Football League.
Teaming up with the Professional Footballers Association (The PFA), we questioned the players on a dozen subjects as varied as whether there should be a quota on foreign players; which referees they thought were the best; and how much voluntary work they did as part of club community schemes. The final question was: “What is your basic weekly salary?”
The PFA wanted to collect information too, on things as varied as their members’ plans for their post-playing days, and attitudes towards the PFA pension scheme. A set of questions, across two sides of one sheet of A4 paper, were posted to the home addresses of more than 2,500 footballers, with a covering letter from the PFA endorsing our survey.
The process was lengthy and the data analysis had to be meticulous, and cross-checked with the PFA. But by April 2000, The ‘Indie’ ran a full week of features about the realities of life as a pro in England, including a detailed look at how much players earned. The response rate had been high, from more than 600 players across a wide age spectrum and all four divisions.
One headline finding was that the average basic wage in the Premier League in 1999-2000 was £409,000 per year, while in the Championship it was £128,000, in League One it was £54,600 and in League Two it was £38,800. When we repeated the survey in 2005-06, these figures had grown to £676,000 in the Premier League, £195,750 in the Championship, £67,850 in League One and £49,600 in League Two. All these figures were before signing-on fees, bonuses and benefits.
By 2006, our data was more granular still. We established that, by then, around 29.5 per cent of Premier League players had basic pay of more than £1m per year, and that the highest-earning age group was 28-year-olds (on an average basic of £1.16m per year), and that, by position, goalkeepers earned the least on average, followed by defenders, then midfielders, then strikers.
In between the two surveys, in May 2003, an 18-year-old star of Manchester United’s youth team, Ben Collett, had his leg broken in two places by an ‘over the top’ tackle in a reserve game against Middlesbrough. Following lengthy rehabilitation and an attempt to play at a lowly level in New Zealand and the Netherlands, Collett retired because of his injury then took legal action against Boro and their insurers.
Collett’s solicitor, Jan Levinson, had become aware of The Independent surveys, and asked if I could summarise the methodology and findings and explain how the PFA – as a body with access to all contracts – had validated the data. The case reached the High Court in 2008. Witnesses including Sir Alex Ferguson testified that Collett was a major prospect at the time of his injury.
The judge in the case, Mrs Justice Swift, ruled that Collett, without that injury, would have had a decent career as a professional at Championship level or above. “It seems to me that the [2005-06] Independent survey provides the best evidence available about average earnings in professional football and I shall therefore use it as the starting point for my calculation of the claimant’s loss of earnings,” she wrote in her ruling. She awarded a basic £4.3m and said the final sum payable to Collett, was “unlikely to be less than £4.5m.”
It was the biggest pay-out ever received in the UK by a professional sportsman for such an injury, and the case garnered significant publicity. Collett went off to study English literature at Leeds University and, now 39, has lived a life away from the limelight ever since.
It wasn’t long before other lawyers, informed by word of mouth, sought the unique – and now High Court-approved – data on wages for cases they were working on. I dived deeper into the subject, and over subsequent years obtained much more information – from clubs, and unions, and official league sources – not just on basic pay but bonuses and benefits.
In the past 15 years, numerous judgments have been assisted by this this information, with awards from tens of thousands to millions of pounds, either in public or in Football Association Rule K Arbitration proceedings, which are typically private, so even the existence of the cases are secret, let alone the outcomes.
By the time I launched a sports business website, www.sportingintelligence.com, in 2010, I’d expanded my interest in, and knowledge of, player salaries in sports leagues as varied as North America’s NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS as well as Australia’s AFL (Aussie Rules football) and Japan’s NPB (that country’s top baseball league), as well as other major football leagues in Europe besides the Premier League: Serie A, La Liga, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1.
Italy’s Serie A was the best-paying football division in the world during the 1990s, until the 2001-02 season, but after than, from 2002-03 onwards, the Premier League paid the highest average wages, and has done ever since, by an increasingly considerable margin.
In the 2017-18 Premier League season, the head of analytics at a big club wanted access to pan-European salary data to build an internal wage model to inform recruitment decisions. Or in other words, to put an objective number on what that club should offer a potential new recruit in wages, as opposed to what was being requested. The logic was that nobody in football could trust anyone else when it comes to figures.
That club built their salary tool, and it helped to save many millions of pounds, to the point that the club’s wage bill became, and remains, significantly lower than other clubs of a similar size with the same performance objectives and results.
Would a similar tool be useful to a wider professional audience? Partnering with the Denmark-based football data company, Off The Pitch, we spent a year building and tweaking one. It’s already being used by some clubs, as one device among a suite of tools they already use to make the best business decisions.
And it came about because almost 25 years ago we wondered: “What do footballers really earn?”
Best-in-class English football wage data from the 1980s to the current day. Endorsed over 15 years by multiple High Court judges and Rule K
arbitration panels
– Authoritative numbers to help assess compensation in loss-of-earnings cases
– Underpinned by internal league and player union intelligence
– Used in settlements paying £5m+ for career-ending incidents
For more information, contact: Nick Harris at nick@sportingintelligence.com
On The Pitch
For a guide to current football wages across the continent, consider testing the ground-breaking football player salary tool.
– Granular average base salary data for 225 European clubs in the current season
– Salary information categorised by age and position
– All figures from reputable and authoritative sources
For more information or request a demo of the salary tool, email: contact@offthepitch.com
Image: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images
