Sports earnings - are they sporting?

Salaries of footballers is an obscenity when compared with the survival levels of many of our top athletes.  It’s all about physical competition, which comes down to the unpleasant basics of human nature or the human condition.  It’s so difficult to unpick this once it is established – the same is true for Grand Prix drivers.  A significant factor is sponsorship, which of course is directly connected to the extent of media coverage.  It’s also a question of how much money the fans are prepared to pay.

Numerous Grand Prix drivers have been heard to say that they don’t do it for the money, they do it to compete, to win.  Well, fine – to be at the top of their sport they must be highly driven people  (yes, I know, they always do the driving), prepared to take considerable risks when they already have more money than they need.  Yet I don’t hear any of them saying “it’s ok, spend my salary on the car so we can go faster for longer”.  Being a driven person usually goes hand in hand with a large ego, and one of the many factors that feeds an ego is how much money you earn.

So how to re-balance and provide funding for the less physically competitive, less glamorous, less televisual sports?  I suggest a levy on racing car drivers and footballers who earn more than a certain amount, the money going to their country’s national sporting body to be added to the current meagre central funds.