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Sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe is refusing to withdraw comments about players' wages and ticket prices despite admitting that he got some of his figures wrong and attracting criticism from both Chelsea and Manchester United. After three months in the job, he chose a Financial Times sports industry conference to complain about clubs losing touch with economic reality and their working class roots. He singled out John Terry, the England captain who commands a salary from Chelsea of more than £130,000 a week, although the minister seemed to think that he earned around £20k more each week. Mr Sutcliffe said, 'It's obscene. To be paid [about] £150,000 a week, in relation to the ordinary man in the street - people can't understand that.' The minister said that it was unsustainable for clubs such as Chelsea to be heavily in the red. Mr Sutcliffe criticised Manchester United, the club he supports, for increasing season ticket prices by 13 per cent, accusing it of 'taking the game away from the ordinary grassroots supporter. He added, 'Ultimately, ordinary working-class people will lose out. They will be priced out.'
Chelsea is understood to have demanded that the minister retract his remarks, claiming some of the financial information he had quoted was inaccurate. They were infuriated by Sutcliffe's remarks about Terry and the club's finances. Sutcliffe told Radio 5 Live, 'I am not attacking players. This is about whether football can sustain the losses Chelsea have.' Sutcliffe said football was facing a future where most clubs could not compete with the few at the top - and raised the spectre of a salary cap. He argued, 'We are going to end up with four or five clubs competing because they are able to pay the wages. What will happen to those clubs that can't and then take a risk? It's the road to ruin if we keep going at this level.'
Sir Alex Ferguson weighed into the row, stating that the average increase in season tickets at his club was 11 not 13 per cent (although that is still way above inflation). The United supremo complained, 'What I do object to is the sports minister coming out with this stuff about ticket prices and singling out Manchester United. I thought that was unfair and inaccurate because we all know the prices at Arsenal and Chelsea are absolutely obscene if you want to talk about obscene.' Ferguson had some sympathy with Sutcliffe on the issue of wages, though the United manager thought soccer players should be compared with highly-paid figures in other sports. Ferguson commented, 'There are some tennis players and golfers earning enormous amounts of money. Is that wrong? I would agree that in some cases there are [footballers] who are paid too much, but I'm sure there are one or two tennis players getting great sponsorship deals who can't win a tournament.'
The sports minister has evidently touched a raw nerve and his views would be shared by some fans. However, in a market economy, supply and demand is going to be the main driving force behind wages. Sometimes one suspects that less fuss is made about high wages in other sports (or the disrespect that footballers show for referees compared with rugby players) because many footballers come from disadvantaged backgrounds. In other words, both snobbery and envy can come into the calculation. That is not to say that some footballers fail to perform at the level that their high wages require.
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