The last Spurs match I watched, and indeed the last game Spurs played before the current global pandemic shut down football, was our last sixteen, second leg tie in The Champions League against RB Leipzig at The Red Bull arena on March 10th.
For Spurs fans unlucky enough (like me) to be there or have a BT Sports subscription to watch it on television you know it was an absolutely pitiful performance. We were thoroughly outplayed from minute one to ninety by a team that were no means a better team than us – just a team that clearly wanted it far more than us – and if I’m honest, the 3-0 loss flattered us.
For those of you that listen to our podcast, you’ll know I very rarely go to away games, let alone European away games – in fact Leipzig was only my second ever European away trip. The main reason for that is simply the cost. All-in-all the Leipzig trip cost me in the region of £500.
Now I’m genuinely not the sort of fan that comes away from defeats and feel like I should be refunded. I appreciate that you can’t win ’em all, but walking back to my hotel after watching Spurs perform so pathetically for 90 minutes, I felt the least the players could do was offer us fans some kind of remittance from their vast personal wealth, as an apology for travelling and spending all that we did to be ultimately be served up the dross that we were from them.
Which brings me on to where we are now, April 3rd, barely three weeks on, although it feels more like three months on.
COVID-19 has brought the world to it’s knees, it has also exposed the ugly side of the rich and wealthy of this world.
We have Richard Branson, forcing his Virgin Atlantic staff to take eight weeks off unpaid – yet if he paid every one of them £500 a week for those eight weeks he’d still have over £4 BILLION in the bank. Then we have Tim Martin, the Wetherspoons owner sacking all his staff and telling them “good luck in finding a job at Tesco” in a video recorded at home in his mansion.
Then we have our club. Tottenham Hotspur, A club that I was told on a tour a few years back of the old stadium that prides itself on being a “family” club.
Decisions have to made, I understand that. We are ultimately a business and the lost television revenue is really hurting all top-league clubs around the world. I understand but at the same time don’t agree with Levy taking advantage of the government’s salary furlough scheme for him and his non-playing staff (although it’ll be no hardship for him personally) because despite the lost television revenue we are still an extremely wealthy club, a club that announced a pre-tax profit of nearly £140 million last year! I can also understand why Levy can’t furlough the player’s wages though because of the contracts they are on and the fact they have their unions supporting them.
But for me, I think the silence from the players is equally as unpleasant.
Now in the coming days the players may agree a pay cut like players from top European teams like Bayern Munich and Juventus have already done, but this should have ALREADY happened.
I don’t want to particularly target one individual player but lets look at the clubs highest earner as an example.
I’d suggest as a conservative estimate that Harry Kane cleared at least half a million pounds when he opened his payslip at the end of March.
Now he would of seen the cook who prepares his pre-match meals take a pay-cut. The groundsmen who keeps the pitch he plies his trade on pristine take a pay cut. The men and women who serve us fans beer and pies before the game take a pay cut. All the while holding on to his £1,000,000 pre-tax monthly payslip and being completely silent on the matter. Knowing full well that these people still have bills, mortgages and rent to pay, who rely on a yearly salary that is still vastly dwarfed by his monthly one.
And this doesn’t just go for Harry Kane, this goes for the ENTIRE team.
They can hide behind the collective Premier League stance, but the fact of the matter is they don’t HAVE TO.
Off their own backs they could have offered to help the rest of the Spurs “family” financially from their own personal wealth, or help support the club in such an unprecedented time by offering to take a pay cut, but they have chosen to stay silent, and for me, just like the Branson’s and Martin’s of this world, I believe it comes from a place of greed.
Thankfully, most Premier League clubs are still paying all of their staff, a notable exception being an owner of a certain North-East club who tried to claim his stores needed to stay open because somehow buying footballs and sports socks was an “essential” retail store, but the fact we are behaving the way we are, from owners to players just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Admin Matt Coulson.
