There has been a lot of anger this week about the obscene wages that Manchester City Football Club is allegedly about to pay Erling Haaland. The figure being chucked around by angry people on social media is around 500k a week. That indeed is more money than anyone could ever hope for, or need.

PAYE Footballers

Let us look at this from another angle. Erling Haaland will be contracted to Manchester City FC as a PAYE employee of the club. That is the law. This means that he will be subject to around 50% in deductions. I’m no accountant but by my calculation, that is around £250k a week the inland revenue will get just for a bloke kicking a football around.

A bit of research shows that Manchester City’s annual wage bill is around £150 million. So, about £75 million in revenue from one club alone. City’s bill in 2021 was not as much as Manchester United (£210 million) or Chelsea (£162 million). However, the City figure is before Erling Haaland signing and Phil Foden’s new contract being sorted. The lowest annual wage bill is at Brentford at around £11 million.

This means that a rough estimate of Premier League wages is around £1.4 Billion. That is £750 million in tax and NI off the players and, at a guess, about £100 million in employers NI. All these figures are before the salaries of managers. Football managers are also subject to PAYE and are now valued as highly as players. It is a gold mine for the taxman.

Hancock’s Blame Game

Despite this, during the pandemic, according to Matt Hancock, footballers were not doing enough to aid the national cause. He said this all the while he was handing out Covid contracts to companies with all the credibility of Trotters Independent Trading. Of course, if we had sniffed something dodgy, we could have reported Hancock to the Conservative Anti-Corruption Champion, John Penrose. Penrose could have then had a strong word with the head of Test & Trace, Dido Harding, who by coincidence, is his wife.

I’m not qualified to say how much a footballer should earn but if I was offered that kind of money, I would take it. I would also accept that by earning fantastic amounts of money, I would be subject to high taxation. A footballer paying a couple of hundred grand a week in tax will be paying more into public services than the directors of companies who took taxpayers money and lined their own pockets. If I paid £250k a week in tax, I’d be gunning for those thieving bastards who exploited the pandemic.

The truth is, Britain is a country with far too many rabid dogs barking up at empty trees.