Taking pay cuts is tricky choice for clubs to make during Covid-19 chaos

Should top professional football players take a pay cut during this coronavirus pandemic that has spectacularly upended our way of life, and wreaked economic damage around the world?

I wouldn’t want to talk about the Kenyan scene. What would be there to say?

Cutting the pay of professional football players in Kenya is tantamount to removing a patient from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a hospital to its general ward to save on costs.

Quite simply, our local football clubs are empty business shells. They do not follow a viable economic model. Clubs cannot rely on gate collection to fund their activities as spectator numbers paying to attend matches is pitifully insignificant.

Even Kenya’s biggest club football match – AFC Leopards versus Gor Mahia – could hardly attract 10,000 paying spectators the last time this fixture was held.

Official gate collection figures given for that particular fixture played in March was a paltry Sh3 million. This is not even enough to cover the monthly wage bill of either club, Gor’s at Sh5.5 million or Leopards’ at Sh4.5 million.

There is no television money, no league title sponsorship, no noteworthy commercialisation of the clubs – merchandizing, sale of stadium rights, advertisement, name it.

In fact, apart from the institutional clubs that are funded by their mother companies such as Bandari, Tusker, Chemelil Sugar, Ulinzi Stars for example, that they can however fold at any time depending on the whims of their respectively company managers, the rest of the teams in our top leagues solely rely on the goodwill of the owner and hard up supporters.

How owners of these self-supporting Kenyan clubs make revenue, let alone profits, is a mystery. Tales of players going weeks and months on end without salaries is more the norm than the exception that asking the long-suffering players to take a pay cut would be laughable. I mean, why would you throw a dry bone to a hungry dog and then proceed to kick that bone away?

But for the rich, big-spending clubs playing in the affluent, widely-watched, well-attended leagues in Europe it is a different matter altogether.

Covid-19 has seriously affected the revenue flow of the world’s leading football clubs, with matches suspended due to the lockdown, television stations holding back on remitting broadcast rights money as there are no live matches being televised. Consequently, several clubs have implemented pay cuts on their players.

Just to give a few examples, Barcelona players agreed to a 70 per cent pay cut, Arsenal agreed to a 12.5 per cent reduction in wages, while Southampton, West Ham, Sheffield United and Watford players are to defer a part of their salary during the pandemic period.

In France, Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al-Khelaifi urged his players to accept a pay cut amid the virus disruption.

“I wouldn't take a pay cut from anybody if I was at one of the bigger clubs," former Manchester United star Roy Keane was quoted saying by the media.
I can't agree more.

These bigger clubs rake in billions of shillings in income. Total revenue last year for Barcelona was £741.1m (Sh98.7 billion), Manchester United £627.1m (Sh83.5 billion) and Paris Saint-Germain £560.5m (Sh74.7 billion), just to pick on a few. Several of these big clubs are owned by billionaires.

The clubs agreed to pay these players huge salaries, regularly dish out obscene amounts of money in transfers fees, and will most certainly revert to factory settings when the pandemic dies down.

As Keane's former United teammate, Gary Neville, said, their future revenues will be in tens of billions. In the absence of cash reserves, they can afford to take loans and ensure everybody is paid.

I would rather the clubs implore their players to contribute from their pay cheque towards helping fight the viral outbreak, and cushioning the less fortunate. Several are already doing so, Ronaldo, Neimar, Wilfried Zaha, Paul Pogba et al.

For the Kenyan clubs, they are just adding salt to injury when they tell their players to take a pay cut yet they are not even paying them regularly if at all.

Was it Health CS Mutahi Kagwe who talked about being treated abnormally by some pesky biological entity if you act normally?

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