Is It Right That Professional Football Players Earn So Much More Than Doctors?
One profession is the beautiful game. It can unite a total group of strangers in the most passionate of ways and yet can also divide the closest of friendships, all within 90 minutes. Football as a spectator sport, is a pillar that supports our society’s penchant to be entertained. The other profession, on the other hand, is not a game. It consists of a group of people that work towards preventing us from illness and even death. The medical profession is the metaphorical oxygen to our societal anatomy. This question is without a doubt a loaded one. Your own personal view on the matter will most likely and ultimately, come down to your own moral beliefs and how you think society should be organised.
**Disclaimer**: Now, because I hail from an island called the United Kingdom, I’ll be using figures taken from the English Premier League (EPL) for the average yearly salary of professional football players and figures taken from the National Health Service (NHS) for the average yearly salary of doctors (aka General Practitioners (GPs)).
Average Yearly Salary: Professional Football Players v Doctors
According to a study carried out by the Daily Mail, the average yearly salary of a professional football player in the EPL is around £2.29m. On face value, this is a monstrous amount of money to receive from simply kicking a football around. Although, there is a significant drop when one looks at the lower tiered English football leagues. The average yearly salary of professional football players in the second tier English league (the Championship) is approximately £390,000 - £442,000 a year. However, this number is not by any chance bad, when one compares it to the average yearly salary of doctors. Doctors, or GPs as we call them over here, are on average, pulling in £56,525 - £85,298 a year. Now the question is, why on earth is there such a large disparity between the two professions? The medical profession is arguably more important for the functioning of society, so why is that perceived value not translating to the increased monetary benefit of medical practitioners? The answer to that question is you, the person reading this very article.
The Football Industry
In order to understand why there is such a disparity in the average yearly salary between the two professions, we have to look at the structure of the football industry. The most important driver, direct or indirect, for the yearly salary of professional football players is ourselves. Spending on tickets to see your favourite club, and even spending on official merchandise will, in some form or another, end up as a footballer’s cheque. A survey carried out by Kantar pinned Manchester United FC as having 659 million followers. The following for football clubs and football in generally is unfathomably high. With each follower having the potential to purchase tickets and official merchandise, the financial backing of these football clubs to pay their players astronomical amounts of money is certainly there. This is in contrast to the medical profession, there are no die-hard fans for your local hospital that are willing to spend their money to see a doctor do their job. The key difference is that, it is from the entertainment value that is provided by football, that we are so encouraged to willingly spend our money. This is a feature that the medical profession simply does not embody.
Conclusion: Is This Ethically Correct?
Seeing the disparity between professional footballers and doctors no doubt raises some moral questions in some of us. How can society reward so handsomely, a football player whose only job is to kick a ball about? Because of this, some argue that governments should cap the salaries of professional football players and better compensate doctors for the important role they play in society. Ultimately, this line of argumentation forces one to consider how they want their society to be structured. Should the government be more active in ensuring that perceived societal value equates to monetary value? Or should the determination of monetary value (salaries) be left up to the market economy? The answers to these questions, as I alluded to in my introduction, can most likely only be answered by you and your moral and societal persuasions. The issue is simply too shrouded in subjectivity, to be lifted by means of objectivity.
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