Something for everyone here: A relegation battler from Birmingham meets a Champions League hopeful from London. And it wasn’t long ago that we were honestly debating the merits of the two sides.
What happened? Well, Spurs picked themselves up from the Ramos blip and pushed back on to where they’d been under Martin Jol. Villa stumbled after the O’Neill profligacy, fell from similar heights, and haven’t been structurally able to pick themselves up. So one soars, and the other embarrasses. Why? One side has been a lot smarter with the money it’s spent.
Overly simplistic? Perhaps. But I don’t think it’s too wide of the mark. We can talk Harry and Houllier/McLeish, as we’ve done for two years now. We can blithely consign O’Neill to the distant past for the sake of convenience. We can blame Lerner for backing his managers.
The simple fact, though, is that when you look at the two squads, you’d really never believe that the average wage at Villa Park is £3000 per player higher than it is at Tottenham. The Sporting Intelligence “Global Sports Salaries Survey 2012” says that our Aston Villa are the 41st highest spending team in the world when it comes to the wage bill.
And that’s not just world football. That includes the National Basketball Association (NBA), the Indian Premier League (IPL), Major League Baseball (MLB), La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, the NFL, and, of course, the Canadian Football League (CFL), and Major League Soccer (MLS).
Read it and weep:
41 Aston Villa £2,464,831 (£47,401) $4,067,464 ($78,220)
51 Tottenham £2,308,494 (£44,394) $3,809,476 ($73,259)
Our average wage is £2.46m/year, or £47,401/week. Spurs are spending an average of £44,394/week.
Which team would you rather have? After Spurs, you have to go all the way to number 104 to get to the next-highest spending EPL side. Fulham: £1,481,698 (£28,494). Everton come in at 108, spending: £1,437,370 (£27,642).
Yes, we can talk about the charms of London vs Birmingham. We can talk about the smooth-talking ways of Mr. Redknapp, or the tragedy of McLeish/Houllier. But what really hurts is that we were paying virtually £20k more per player than both Fulham and Everton.
The only the teams spending more than us last year (the latest year for which data are available) were City, Chelsea, United, Arsenal, and Liverpool. And we were not much safer after 36 games.
(The wage bill is likely better this year with Young and Downing gone, but still too much for what we’ve got.)
Simple fact remains, we’ve got 3-4 players who are worth those sort of wages, or higher (remember, these are averages), while Tottenham have an entire side who are probably worth that average or more. And our four, Bent, Ireland, N’Zogbia and Given…Well, who would be pushing out his counterpart at White Hart Lane?
So, let’s pray we get a result tomorrow and can finally exhale…in the meantime, let’s try and remember that we’ve been paying an awful lot of money for what?
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