Using footballers’ wages as an example of excess is patronising and lazy | Marina Hyde


Top-flight football is one of the few engines of social mobility that still works and those who play to the gallery are too lazy or dim to formulate a proper argument

In one sense, it is not the most enormous shock to find footballers’ pay is something on which Jeremy Corbyn disagrees with himself. A subject on which the Labour leader cannot hold two diametrically opposed opinions on the same day is increasingly a rarity. The problem with the new strategy of letting Jeremy be Jeremy is that – a bit like various football sides of cliché – you never know which one is going to turn up.

Last week Corbyn declared that there should be a cap on “grotesque” salaries. And whaddayaknow – the very first example of such salaries upon which he alighted was in football. “Certainly, the salaries that are paid to some footballers are simply ridiculous,” he stated, adding: “Some of the salaries paid to very high-earning top executives of companies are utterly ridiculous.”

It’s odd how you never hear politicians banging on about movie actors getting paid too much

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