Over the years, the astronomical earnings of top-flight footballers have been widely talked about. Considering, on average, a Premier League footballer earns more than £300,000 a week – it’s easy to see why there is an underlying controversy. In fact, recent research by ‘Sporting Intelligence’ has found that the average weekly income for a Premier League player is now £50,817. Considering, the average weekly wage for a UK employee currently stands at £510.00 – this equates to a Premier League footballer making 100 times more in a week.
Methodology
This debate inspired TicketGum.com to identify 25 England players who are in contention for the World Cup 2018 squad and see how long it would take for their namesake in the professional working world would take to earn their weekly wage.
To achieve this, TicketGum.com utilised Adzuna’s ‘ValueMyName’ tool, which analysed over 500,000 CV’s to reveal the average salary for 1,200 first names. Since Adzuna’s system provided the annual salary for each of the searched names – we divided the annual salary figure by 52 (as that’s how many weeks there are in a year) to show the amount a regular person with an England players first name would earn per week (on average).
Once the weekly wages were found, we calculated how long a regular person would have to work to earn their footballing namesakes weekly wage – this information was broken down into years, months, weeks and days where possible.
The Findings
The research fascinatingly revealed experienced goalkeeper Joe Hart has the highest weekly wage out of all the considered footballers. This ironically translates to a regular Joe working the longest amount of time at an exact 4 years, 7 months, 1 week and 3 days to earn the £175,000 made by the shot stopper. Thereafter, a ‘normal Kyle’ would have to work the second longest period at 4 years, 3 months and 5 days to achieve the £130,000 weekly income of high-flying right-back Kyle Walker.
Putting the spotlight on England’s star player Harry Kane – he not only earns 163 times more in a week than an average Harry but it would the average Harry 3 years, 1 month, 2 weeks and 2 days of work to reach the hefty £100,000 made by the free scoring talisman on a weekly basis.
On the other end of the scale, goalkeeper Tom Heaton has the lowest weekly wage (£15,000) from the included English players. Therefore, a working Tom would have to work the shortest duration of time at 4 months, 2 weeks and 2 days to attain the same sum. Slightly above Tom is Marcus, who would need to work 8 months and 3 weeks to get the weekly £30,000 received by their footballing counterpart (Marcus Rashford) in the England team.
