sti-04!!

After watching last nights disappointing result & explaining to my girlfriend what wages some of the players were on

What do you think the full team ie that was on the pitch & on the bench make per week ?

Totals please - I would hanker a guess at £1.5 million per week

Anyone else ?

darts_aint_sport

How many were on the bench?

I'd say of the 11 that were on the pitch, it'd be nearrer the £750k mark, since only a couple of the players earn ~£100k and the rest probably around half that at best. The ones that are on the bench I reckon would bring it up to £1m

sti-04!!

Joe Cole - 80k
Rooney - 90k
Owen - 90k
Lampard - 100k
Terry - 100k
Ferdinand - 120k
Beckham -120k
Gerrard - 120k

Thats 8 players & thats 820k

mart360

and thee all a waste of space...

for a so called civilised and reputedly clever society, the vast majority are suckers!!!! fact....

lets face it if i offerd you a service or product for 90 minutes a week, and gave you 90 miniytes of rubbish, how long would i be in a job for???


cant these people see, if you stop going to matches/ paying there extortionate wages, they will have to lower there prices... hells bell are people that slow on the uptake...

if you remove there revenue stream, they have to do somthing.... lioke reducve prices or give value for money!!!!


all they see at the moment are 250,000 cash cows waiting to be milked...

they form supporters clubs and do what?? give more money to them...

they protest at a big takeover.... and still turn up....

one day the penny will drop..


M

darts_aint_sport

Oh yeah, I forgot about Chelsea's silly wages!

darts_aint_sport

It's just supply and demand Mart. The same economics as any other profit based businesses.

TelBoy

What do sportsmen like Andy Fordham and Phil Taylor earn..?

sti-04!!

Enough to own a crib

Tiggs

if i had a person that cause thousands of suckers to give me money each week to watch them i'd pay him 100k a week as well.

Dracoro

You've got to look at it NOT as 'wages' etc. See it as a 'product' made up of 11 people who do performances (like a rock group or actors etc.) that provide enough entertainment that 30/40/50/60 thousand people are willing to pay £30/40/50 a week to witness. Business wise, it makes sense.

The ONLY way the wages will come down is if the 'fans' stop paying the money and going to the matches. It's not happening though is it? Lots of the premiership clubs play to full houses week in week out.

Ted Maul

I don't mind what they earn, it's not like they chose to become a professional football when they were 12 years old because of the money

TelBoy

Many fathers do on behalf of their sons, Ted, make NO mistake!!!

Reality

Spooky,

I did the same for the Scotland Team.

I got £450 per Week (with £250 of that made up in income support & child support agency payments)

sti-04!!

An that refers to me how ??










My team got beat 2-1

NWMark

these people earn good money because they perform consistantly very well and win, same with snooker players / golf players etc...

footballers basic wages are silly, in comparison, they can perform poorly every week yet still get the same money, or until they are removed from the team when they still get same wages for watching the match!!!.

while Sky pay the huge tv revenues and they still pack out stadiums every week its not going to stop though.

Mark

Reality

are you from Kazakhstan .

I wasn't referring to you - I was referring to Scotland - it's just spooky we were going through the same exercise .

Luan Pra bang

I most football players have salaries counted after tax so please ad 40%

sti-04!!

TelBoy

Except these are before tax numbers so please deduct 40%.

I love NSR. I should come in here more often.

Reality

nooooooooooooooooooooo

I'd be sacked

Luan Pra bang

Arsenal stars dodge millions in taxes
Robert Winnett and David Robertson, Sunday Times



ARSENAL, England’s top Premiership club, has set up a multi-million-pound tax dodge for its players and manager, The Sunday Times can reveal.
The club has established a series of secretive front companies and offshore trusts to reward its stars and save them millions in tax every year.



On average, the proportion of income paid by the players to the Inland Revenue is about half the 40% rate normally paid by high-earners.

The trusts enable foreign-born players such as Thierry Henry, the French striker, and Dennis Bergkamp, the Dutch star, as well as Arsène Wenger, the team’s manager, to avoid paying any tax on their six-figure bonuses.

British players including Ashley Cole, the England defender, and Ray Parlour are able to pay tax at a rate of just 1% on some of their bonuses.

In one season alone, some £7.6m of the club’s wage bill is estimated to have been channelled through one of the trusts, with nearly 30 players having to pay a total of just £76,000 in tax.

The sophisticated tax avoidance plan, developed by the accountants Deloitte & Touche, is legal but such schemes are widely regarded as unethical. They come as ordinary taxpayers are being hit with an array of new levies including caps on pension schemes and restrictions on middle-class inheritance plans to plug Gordon Brown’s spending shortfalls.

The chancellor has recently launched a clampdown on schemes designed purely to avoid tax. He has previously uncovered tax dodges involving people being paid with gold coins, fine wines and Turkish lira. Last night, the Revenue said it was “on to the latest arrangements”.

The disclosure provoked distaste this weekend. Norman Lamb, Liberal Democrat shadow Treasury minister, said: “It sticks in the throat that these mega-rich players are able to avoid their responsibilities to the country.

“It’s unattractive that clubs and players operate in this way, particularly when the ordinary football supporter does not have the opportunity to benefit from this sort of thing.”

Jack Charlton, the former England international and Irish national coach, said: “I am amazed they are not paying tax. I cannot understand why the tax people are not involved. Like everyone else looking in from the outside at football today, I find some of the financial figures staggering.”

Andrew Allum, chairman of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “People who earn the most can go and look for schemes to cut their tax bill. But it is all those people in the middle, many of whom fill football stands at the weekend, who get squeezed.”

An investigation by The Sunday Times has established that top Arsenal players usually sign two contracts.

The first pays them an annual basic wage which is mostly taxed in the normal way at the higher rate of 40% plus national insurance.

However, players also have a second “shadow” contract that pays performance-related bonuses, which reward success in the Premiership, FA Cup and European competitions. The bonuses can account for up to half the total pay package for players and are paid via two front companies.

In 2001 Arsenal discreetly set up a firm called Sevco 1270 in which its first-team players are shareholders.

Its existence has never been revealed in the club’s published accounts. Its only role is to pay players their bonuses in the form of dividends.

The last official company returns filed by Sevco show that the payments were made to a Jersey-based trust, Fidus, on behalf of the players. According to leading accountants, paying foreign players in this way means they can legally avoid virtually all tax and national insurance.

As a result, Henry is estimated to have saved nearly £70,000 a year through Sevco 1270, Wenger about £118,000 a year, N****wo Kanu, who left the club this summer, more than £60,000 and Bergkamp more than £45,000.

British players are able to cut the tax they pay from 40% (plus 1% national insurance) to 25% by receiving their bonuses from Sevco 1270.

Parlour has saved £22,192 a year and Ashley Cole more than £20,000. Alongside Sevco 1270, Arsenal has also set up another even more tax-efficient scheme to pay players’ bonuses known as an employee benefit trust. The trust “loans” players their bonuses although, in reality, the loans are never repaid.

The tax on such “loans” is about 1% of the value of the bonus each year, rather than 41% had the bonus been paid directly. A player receiving a £500,000 bonus would therefore pay annual tax of £5,000 rather than the £205,000 that would normally be surrendered.

Arsenal are calculated to have paid out £7.6m in bonuses through this loan operation during the 2001/02 season, the last for which accounts are available. The tax dodge is estimated to have saved players a total of more than £3m.

One leading accountant, who asked to remain anonymous but has studied the Arsenal scheme for The Sunday Times, said: “It is at the forefront of tax avoidance — a very aggressive attempt to stay ahead of the Inland Revenue.”

The details have come to light as a result of a divorce case involving Parlour, who was forced to disclose details of his salary package to the courts. He initially failed to provide details of the bonuses or second contract, a move condemned by the judge, and the information was also withheld from his mortgage company.

However, Parlour finally admitted that for the 2001/02 football season he was paid an annual wage of £775,008 plus a signing-on instalment of £93,750. Other bonuses brought his total pre-tax package to £1,557,267. He paid just over £350,000 in tax — a rate of 22%. Had he paid income tax and national insurance at the normal rate he would have handed over £630,000.

The court was also told of lavish spending by Arsenal footballers. Parlour, who has five properties, revealed he was a regular gambler and the court was shown copies of his betting account at IG Index which stretched to more than 200 pages.

Arsenal are not the only English club to adopt tax-saving systems: Middlesbrough and Leeds United have also used employee-benefit trusts to reward players. Arsenal’s latest accounts reveal it has increased the amount it spends on tax-planning advice by 15-fold to set up its various schemes.

The use of such sophisticated tax-dodging methods has traditionally been the preserve of financial firms, particularly City investment banks and hedge funds.

The Revenue has taken steps to clamp down on employers who use the schemes by removing valuable tax reliefs. However, as Arsenal does not make significant profits it is currently beyond the Revenue’s grasp.

Mike Warburton, of the accountants Grant Thornton, said: “The Inland Revenue is taking a very active interest in these types of arrangements and it will be much more difficult for Arsenal to make these tax savings in the future.”

The Treasury estimates it loses about £1 billion a year from bonus schemes explicitly designed to avoid tax.

Accountancy firms will soon have to inform the Revenue of all tax-avoidance plans once they are implemented. The Treasury is expected to introduce new rules barring the schemes once they come to light and Arsenal players may soon be saddled with far higher bills.

Deloitte & Touche declined to comment. Arsenal said: “Salaries paid to any player and the arrangements of any specific employee contract are strictly confidential

Luan Pra bang

Add on goal bonus' win bonus' general performace bonus' plus all the other extras benefits and I think I am not far wrong.

TelBoy

Good article, LPB

I'll amend my statement - those numbers are wages before the deduction of the minimum possible rate the players can get away with using whichever dubious means they can.

Can't say i blame them though. If people are stupid enough to pay them so much, they owe it upon themselves to take the **** to the nth degree.

Luan Pra bang

As friend once said only poor people pay tax the rest can't afford good accountants

sti-04!!

Ted Maul

they do this where I work, put your bonus in this offshore fake company, sit on it for a year and then pay 20% rather than 40%, take a dividend etc etc..
fair enough I say, why should Ray parlour pay £660K a year to use the roads, library, services etc when most pay a tiny fraction.

ps - love the first line....

ARSENAL, England’s top Premiership club,

Reality

Cos he earns £1.5 million a year.

40% is pretty fair - 30 odd years ago he'd be paying 98% tax on his highest band of earnings - that would be a little steep.

pauld37

Errr according to that list Chelsea are not the highest payers

pauld37

With only one England international, who wants to play for someone else

Reality

Wigan 0 - Chelski 1

Good win