Saturday, June 13, 2009

80 million reasons??

Ok, I'm the first to admit I don't know all that much about soccer. I do know that Cristiano Renaldo may be the best player in the world and that one soccer team has just sold him to another soccer team for a whopping 80 million pounds. What's that in Canadian dollars? 100 million? Whatever, it's lots no matter how you convert it.

I understand it's a lucrative business, but don't you think there's something deeply, fundamentally wrong here? At a certain point you might as well stop counting. Why not make it 20 million pounds and feed people with the other 60?

I'm just sayin.

5 comments:

Wandering Coyote said...

Oh, I totally agree. It's obscene. And what's with the slavery-like terminology: "he's been SOLD to another team..." It's ridiculous.

Anonymous said...

Well the sold bit happens because a team owns a contract with the player and part of the contract gives them the right to sell or trade the ownership of the contract.

The big bucks are common in pro sports because the fans are willing to pay hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars to sit through one match and the teams get away with charging this because of "the big conspiracy". The pro teams have divided up the real estate so that they get exclusive rights to their sport in an enormous area. You cant watch triple A baseball in or near a city that has a major league team. If you get an urge to go to a ball game there is only one game in town. In most cases you cant even watch a game on tv for free, the teams have deals with cable companies. Every city has sports radio and sports tv channels and sports sections in newspapers. Without exception these media outlets are nothing more than fan clubs for the pro team. None would ever man up and say ticket prices are ridiculous because if they did they would be boycotted by the team. The only way the situation will ever change is if the fans refuse to pay or if the government stops considering season tickets as a deductible expense.

S.M. Elliott said...

Good point. I feel the same way about forcing taxpayers to finance stadiums, when they're not the ones who will directly (or even indirectly) benefit from it. Can't the players and/or owners chip in a little cash?

And we wonder why ticket prices are out of reach for the average fan.

Candy Minx said...

Although I don't watch a lot of sports I am okay with stadiums being subsidized by governments or municipalities because sports are the marriage between art and war. I'd rather money be spent on sports than on war.

BUT...I agree with Mr. A that the huge salaries have jumped the shark. It's the same thing in the art world. At what point do we put art as more valuable than human life. No painiinting...no matter who made it should be 100 million bucks. Thats sick. I mea I start to get feeling nervous when paintings are more than a 1000 bucks.

Sports and art are in perverted grounds in our culture. Most people couldn't give a shit about art, so why should any painting cost more than a few hundred dollars? etc. And surely...having games and physical competition return to a grass roots spectacle would be healthy for everyone. Money instead to support music and gym courses for kids. Money to fix roads,

In a way people playing their own music, and playing in neighbourhood teams and making their own art might help rehabilitate the extreme imbalance we have to physical activity and art as a primal experience rather than only a spectacle.

sp said...

It's ridiculous. Furthermore, that is just the transfer fee, that's not even his pay that he'll get while on the team, which is yet to be negotiated.
No player is worth that much. I think soccer/football needs to think about a salary cap.