Basic Average Wage Of England's Footballers Since 1984

Paully D

From Sporting Intelligence:

The amount of money paid to English professional footballers each season since 1984-85 is revealed in detail for the first time today.

Sportingintelligence has obtained an official PFA document showing the average basic weekly wages, division by division, for the past 25 years, with the exception of the top division in the Premier League era. We have those numbers in any case.

The document in its original format can be seen at this link.
A separate story elsewhere on this site takes the data and considers the widening gap between the top division and the rest.

And in the table below we’ve converted the weekly figures to annual pay packets, and in the right-hand section of the table show the annual rate of growth (and more rarely, rate of fall) in footballers’ pay.

The numbers represent basic pay; wages typically increase by 50 to 100 per cent with appearance money and bonuses.

This is the first time ever that detailed official numbers from the players’ union in the English game have entered the public domain.

In 1984-85, according to the PFA’s data, the average basic wage in the First Division – as the top division was then called – was £24,934 a year, or about two and a half times the average working man’s salary. With bonuses, it would have been around £36,000, perhaps more.

In 2009-10, the average basic Premier League wage was £1.16m and the average take-home pay was £1.76m. (Average top-flight take-home pay was the subject of an article on this site earlier this year to mark 50 years since the end of the maximum wage).
The numbers below and the astonishing growth speak for themselves. In the Premier League, double-digit annual growth has been the norm in most years of the competition’s history. The biggest single leap was the 28.52 per cent year-on-year growth between 1996-97 and 1997-98. This was due to a new TV deal kicking in.

TV cash has fueled players’ pay rises in the Premier League era. The first Premier League deal was over five years (1992-97), then next over four years (1997-2001), and the deals have been three years each since then (2001-04, 2004-07, 2007-10 and 2010-13 currently).

According to the PFA document, the average annual basic salary in the Championship in 2009-10 was £211,068, in League One it was £73,320 and in League Two it was £38,844.

Top division footballers now earn 46 times as much as they did in 1984-85
Those in the Championship earn only 14 times as much as their counterparts.
In League One the figure is six and a half times as much. In League Two the figure is 4.6 times as much.

The average working man earns about three times as much.

When Everton won the First Division title in 1984-85, a typical XI would have been Southall, Stevens, Van Den Hauwe, Ratcliffe, Mountfield, Reid, Steven, Heath, Sharp, Bracewell and Sheedy, with plenty of appearances as well for some bloke called Andy Gray.

The top scorer in domestic football was a Leciester City striker called Gary Lineker, in his final season with the Foxes before a big money move to Everton. He got 24 First Division goals that season, the same as Chelsea’s Kerry Dixon.

Liverpool were runners-up in the league, followed by Tottenham, Manchester United and those other mid-80s big-punchers, Southampton, with Chelsea and Arsenal tucked in behind in sixth and seventh.

The rewards on offer to top players were obviously decent. Figures published for the first time today show that top division players in England earned a basic average of £480 per week (£25,000 a year), which was more than double what the average worker earned, and which was three times as much as players earned in the Fourth Division.

It should be stressed: the gap between the top division and the fourth was only three times as much. Today the difference is 30 times as much.

As we report elsewhere Sportingintelligence has obtained an official PFA document showing the average basic weekly wages, division by division, for the past 25 years.

geeky

What I found most interesting was the fact that third division/league 2 wages only overtook the national average in 97-8.

Neil3030

Median income should be reported instead of average. Averages are too easily inflated by outliers and lend themselves to sensationalising trends.