Barca was paying Messi £200 million a year apparently.
The annual pay of FTSE 100 chief executives fell during the pandemic but still equates to what a key worker would earn in a lifetime, according to a report that highlights the UK’s wage divide and the taxpayer support that has kept some companies afloat.
The bosses of companies in the blue-chip share index were paid £2.69m on average in 2020, the High Pay Centre said, with vaccine-maker AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, taking top spot thanks to a £15.45m deal.
CEOs should not get one hundredth of Messi’s pay because reasons.
That is absolutely insane, however good he is 🙁
@Rupert
If Barca were making more than that out of him (merchandise sales, attracting sponsorship, attracting crowds, TV channel subscriptions, winning things and so on) it makes perfect sense.
Whether they were or not, I don’t know. The world-wide popularity of football + the reach of the internet makes such things potentially possible. Top football teams no longer rely on live attendance at matches for their finances.
The real payout is in the LTIP shares and that’s uncertain. It gets treated as cash by journalists and campaigning P3 types.
I was surprised how little, relatively speaking, our CEO gets paid. Working 2 levels down I see what he has to do and decide and I wouldn’t do his job for the money.
Where are you getting the £200m number from?
Reports indicate about 70M EUR or about £60m per year or a bit over £1m a week.
If they are doing a competent job not too worried by high pay. But insane levels a of pay=robbing shareholders. And if the company is one that oozes woke shite 7/6d a day is too high.
Andrew C,
“If Barca were making more than that out of him (merchandise sales, attracting sponsorship, attracting crowds, TV channel subscriptions, winning things and so on) it makes perfect sense.
Whether they were or not, I don’t know. The world-wide popularity of football + the reach of the internet makes such things potentially possible. Top football teams no longer rely on live attendance at matches for their finances.”
It’s not so much about him selling sponsors, it’s that the club winning brings in more fans. And paying for players is an arms race.
But it also should be noted that a lot of football isn’t people maximising investment. It’s like owning racehorses. Sheikh Mansour isn’t making money from Man City. The dope thinks he’s investing and will be richer from it one day, when really, he’s just burning money.
Probably better not to mix economics with football. The most intelligent organism in any football ground is the grass. Might as well discuss appropriate rates of pay with an earthworm.
It would have made more financial sense to make him co-owner of the merchandising franchise for the length of his career plus five years.
Reduced bankruptcy risk, indirectly performance-related pay.
He was paid £98m a year at Barcelona. Not sure what his other earnings would be but it seems unlikely that they’d get him to £200m.
An average of £2.7m for a FTSE 100 boss doesn’t seem like that much; there must be a few earning under a million.
You don’t need to know a lot about football to see that he’s awfully good at it.
The merits of CEOs are often obscure. Some, however, are undoubtedly good at pillaging the shareholders while ruining the company, and they seem to get paid plenty too. True, the ruin often becomes manifest only after they’ve done a runner.
I’m always amazed at what US CEOs get paid.I don’t mean those at the massive companies where you’d expect huge salaries or the hedge fund types who get billion if the fund does well, but the CEOs of mid-sized, pretty mundane and not always successful listed companies. Loads of perks too: private jets etc.
This is a fun bit. The 1986 tax changes – and it’s carried on getting stricter since then – insists that all perks are reported as income. Also, that all perks get taxed as income too. Sp, private jet to go to the football game – that’s part of the CEOs reported income, as reported to the IRS and shareholders and taxed as such. I’ve had several conversations with Jamie Galbraith on the point and he was the economist driving that tax bill. A significant part of the seeming rise in CEO pay has come from this. In two ways.
1) What they used to get unknown and untaxed is now known and taxed.
2) Lots of them say bugger the perks and give me the cash.
This isn’t all the story but it’s a good chunk of it.
Wot’s a ‘key worker’? Asking for a friend.
“Wot’s a ‘key worker’?”
Someone who’s been to Yale.
Or someone who’s a bit of chubby.
“all perks are reported as income. Also, that all perks get taxed as income too.”
This has been a change for a lot of companies, not just in the US and UK. I live in Canada. I can barely remember my father having a company car in the 70s, as an engineer. His later jobs, much higher in the hierarchy (admittedly at other companies) did not include a car – they tended to be more intangible perks, like the ability to park in the lot behind the downtown head office building (although he did not have an allocated spot).
My pops had a company car plus petrol on a/c at service station outside the office. He would drive 15 miles out of the way on weekends to fill up.Plus when he got married he asked for a pay rise. Got one. when he had kids, he tried the same trick, they said nope, he said but my wife says we need a bigger house. They gave him a cheap mortgage.
Bloke on M4, except that Sheik Mansour isn’t all about Manchester City. It is City Football Group where the money’s at. CFG includes Manchester City, New York City, Melbourne City, Yokohama F. Marinos, Montevideo City Torque, Girona FC, Sichuan Jiuniu, Mumbai City, Lommel SK and Esperance Sportive Troyes Aube Champagne. Under Sheik Mansour and the management team headed by Khaldoon Al Mubarak city were brought back from the brink to being one of the few clubs that has no outstanding debt. Contrast and compare with the likes of Manchester United, Barcelona and Real Madrid who are all up to their eyeballs and beyond in bank loans and interest payments. Much has been made of the GBP100m transfer fee paid for Jack Grealish. However net spend is in the region of 40m.
Tell me, Henry, which side do you support?
The reason why perks used to be very much more popular is that not only were they not taxed as income, but income was very heavily taxed. And by “very heavily” I mean the top rate was 97.5% up to 1971 when it went down to 75%, up again in 1974 to 83% until Thatcher reduced it to 60% in 1979 from where it has fallen several times. While the top rate only applied to high incomes, as always with tax, if rich people find a way to reduce tax everyone else will copy it unless it’s quite onerous in some other way.
A major driver to the growth was in perks, especially the company car, was tho get round the pay freezes that the idiots thought were a good way to manage the economy. They were probably apocryphal, but there were stories of post boys being offered Minis.
No pun intended
“He was paid £98m a year at Barcelona. Not sure what his other earnings would be but it seems unlikely that they’d get him to £200m.”
The extra 100mn comes from image rights, sign on fees and loyalty bonuses and the reason why Messi got so much is that he was 28, the best footballer in the world and the President of Barca would have to face the anger of the fans if he had not retained Messi.
@Charles
I think the highest rate of tax for earned income was 83.3% (16/8 in the £), but investment (‘unearned’) income was subject to a further 15% surcharge, taking it up to 98.3% – you were allowed to keep 4d (1.7p) from every £ of income. Try telling that to t’youth of today etc.
@ Charles and Chris Miller
Wilson/Healey did increase income tax on unearned income to 102% – I remember disagreeing with my father because when I said that it was immoral he replied that he (suffering as he was under Wilson/Healey) had little sympathy for those rich enough to pay the top rate.
And never forget that when Geoffrey Howe reduced the top rate to 60% he collected *more* in tax from the top-rate taxpayers.