Active observer @Primesadiq001 - Twitter Profile

I think there’s a lot of confusion about what “wages” mean for top-level football players - so I thought I’d break it down… 1) Basic wage. £000s per week. Typically either flat or increasing over time. 2) Bonuses. These can be for so many different levers. Individual targets, team targets, club targets. For example: goals, assists, appearances, playing in a given competition, trophies, loyalty (not requesting to leave after x years), etc. Often there’s a sign-on bonus (especially with free agents), sometimes paid upfront or sometimes added to the basic wage (but separately categorised for the purposes of future negotiations). Without naming the fanbases, some (wrongly) think they pay low wages with massive bonuses - it’s not true. The basic wage element is by far the largest. 3) Image rights payments. Most top-level players create a company that owns the rights to use of their image. An image rights company (IRC). When his image is used to make money, that is paid to the IRC and not the player. The player will own a percentage of the company (along with other parties). Cubs get a licence to use the player’s image rights for its own commercial needs as part of the employment agreement. Sometimes, a club will pay the player’s IRC for a licence to use that player’s image. In the PL, there are limits to the amount that can be paid for tax purposes. Normally, HMRC permits a maximum of 20% of a player’s total compensation to be in the form of an IR payment to their IRC. It has tax advantages this way. There are also limits on how much a club can pay that way across all of its employees. Some clubs (like Real Madrid) insist they receive a 50% stake in the player’s IRC. They make money off his own personal endorsements. This is why their commercial revenues are so large and why they have to pay massive wages to compensate sometimes. 4) Pension & benefits Normally a small amount in comparison to basic wage. 5) Profit sharing Very rare but sometimes players get a % of revenue or profit from certain club commercial revenue streams (e.g., shirt sales). When you see a wage on a site like Capology (generally known as Crapology by those in the sector), it normally has no bearing at all on any of the above. @BlueCityBrain and @KieranMaguire ‘s Valuball is probably the best publicly available estimate of total player compensation. Not perfect by any means. But a very good proxy if you’re trying to make sense of all the conflicting reports.

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