Herald Sun soccer writer David Davutovic says the chasm in pay between Australian soccer and AFL players is startling and believes such figures show the AFL stars deserve a bigger piece of the pie from the league.
Davutovic and Michael Warner revealed on the back page of today’s paper that 25 players, based in the A-League or overseas earn more than the AFL’s highest paid stars.
Socceroos defender Trent Sainsbury is currently Australian soccer’s highest earner, on $5.2million a year at Chinese club Jiangsu Suning.
“I guess what really piqued our interest was the fact that it wasn’t just the top earners who were well ahead of the AFL earners, it was in excess of 20 players,” he told SEN Breakfast.
“We got to a list of 25 Australian soccer players home and abroad, primarily abroad, who are earning more than the highest paid AFL players in Buddy Franklin and co.
“There’s guys there who are sort of average A-League players, and even some fringe players who have gone overseas and signed life-changing contracts.
“I found it quite extraordinary obviously the AFL players what they earn, they clearly deserve more money and a bigger slice of the pie when you look at something like this.”
He found the task to be quite an interesting exercise and says the market is constantly being thrown out.
“It was quite an interesting exercise, if you throw in cricket, the Twenty20 has thrown the market out, and that’s sort of what’s happened in soccer,” Davutovic said.
“There’s a lot of boys based in Asia, most of the Asian contracts are negotiated in net terms, so after tax.”
“The thing with the AFL contracts they can be front ended, back ended, so whilst in one year they might earn $1.2 million, the next year it might drop off.’’
Davutovic doesn’t buy any potential argument from the AFL comparing soccer players’ receiving massive amounts of money in non-salary cap leagues, to its own stars.
“I completely disagree with that because that’s as far as you can go in the AFL, in soccer you can go overseas…and play in Spain, in the English Premier League and whatnot,” he said.
“When you look at it and I’ve quoted Mark Bosnich in there. In his pomp Bozza at Chelsea in 2002 was earning 50,000 pounds a week.
“Mark Viduka got up to 60,000 pounds a week, Harry Kewell blew them out of the water, he got up to 100,000 pounds at Liverpool, that was all 10 to 15 years ago.
“The point of the article as well is, imagine if these guys were playing now they would be earning four or five times more than that.”