German Politician Speaks Some Logic

By: chris | December 27th, 2007

It’s not so much promoted as it is accepted: athletes and coaches make buckets and buckets of unjustifiable money. For something so blatantly obvious and waved before our faces, it doesn’t get brought up much in the mainstream media. More often it’s an off-hand remark rather than a full subject line. But the speaker of the lower house of parliament in Germany, Norbert Lammert, has brought the subject up, and seems thoroughly disgusted with the amount of money athletes get paid to be children and coaches get to babysit them.

Apparently the straw that broke the camel’s back was Bayern Munich’s recent acquisition of Breno from Sao Paolo, an 18 year old defender who cost the Bavarian giants only €14m. A sum which Lammert sees as excessive, but more important is the income going to a Brazilian teenagers when men at home will make a mere fraction in their entire lives what Breno will make over the course of his entire contract.

“The excessive salaries that we have seen for years in sports, especially football, upsets me considerably,” Lammert was quoted as saying by weekly Bild am Sonntag on Sunday. “It’s almost beyond my ability to comprehend anymore.”

“If the wealthiest German football club buys a Brazilian teenager for 14 million euros and gives him an income which most family men can not gain after years of hard work, something is wrong.”

Before going into the whole work permit/immigration thing, the man has a very good point, albeit one which is highly unlikely to change anything anytime soon. And while it may appear he’s looking at this from the angle of foreigners v citizens and work issues, he isn’t, and he has some strong feelings about subjects including Germans drifting beyond sport.

Specifically, the amount bosses get paid in relation to employers, whether they’re football coaches or not, and whether they’re German, Brazilian, Martian, or Casper the Ghost.

Norbert Lammert said in an interview to be published Sunday that he was also concerned that the gap between bosses’ salaries and average pay had become out of proportion.

He recommended businesses to “show more tact” in rewarding directors, while opposing legislation.

I’m no expert on the German economy, but it’s possible the man has a very good point here as well. As far as the gaffers in Germany go, we’d probably need to take a look into their salaries as compared to their players, but I suspect we’ll see a wide disparity all across the board, and that this is on more of a team-by-team case than anything else.

But I think everyone is in agreement: athletes make way too much money. Money which could be better served furthering the human experience.