what social impacts on the public are cause by footballers wages being too high?

[Georgiaa]

im doing research for a debate on footballers wages being too high and im for it. but i would like to know what impacts on the PUBLIC and other social things are.
this could be like bad role models etc.

thanks

[Click Click Derk]

they would get hurt and think its funny and laugh about it like a retard all cause they got high while playing football.

[Faz]

In a free market economic sense, the wage can never be too high - it is determined by the forces of demand and supply. The demand for footballers is a derived demand, driven by the price votes from fans and spectators, who buy tickets to watch their heroes in action.

In the long run, this acts as an incentive for kids and others to become footballers, and as the supply of footballers increase (assuming demand remains constant), then naturally the wages of footballers would fall.

There are huge differences in the wage of top class world footballers and mediocre ones. The demand for a particular footballer depends on his prospective performance, as predicted by previous accomplishments and results.

[jerry w]

Since the question concerns social costs, and is asked in the economics section, I'll try to answer from the standpoint of an economist.

You can make a point about a correlation between social costs and high salaries of footballers. But you are making one of the common errors of economic thinking when you assume a cause and effect from such a correlation. It seems like more evidence exists that the high salaries are a symptom of social problems, not a cause of them.

Negative social impacts that you can include in your argument: You already mentioned the one about role models. Misguided idol worship would be another way to describe that. Also, you could mention the fact that many youngsters will be influenced by the high salaries to focus their efforts too much on becoming footballers instead of more socially beneficial pursuits. This results in a less qualified pool of potential teachers, scientists, any other field that you may consider to be socially beneficial. Another negative social impact: lost productivity because workers spend time discussing the latest game, missed work due to fans partying too hard while watching the games, etc.

Football is in the entertainment industry. In free markets, people are free to spend as much of their incomes on entertainment as they wish. If salaries that are paid for by consumer incomes are too high, then that means that consumers are not making the socially optimal choices with their limited incomes. Blame the consumers, not the footballers.

Economists will tell you that the demand for footballers is a derived demand (derived from the demand for entertainment) and that the salaries are determined by the market forces of supply and demand. But at the same time, they will tell you that fundamental differences exist that make market forces different in this industry than in other industries.

One difference: supply and demand. Many people are willing and able to play at the high salaries. From the standpoint of those who hire them (demand for labor) the number who are actually qualified is quite small: they only want to hire the very best. No matter the skill level, only the same number will be considered "the very best". This means that the team owners will always compete for the same few players, driving up salaries as the owners compete with each other.

But football has another important difference from other occupations: The competition among owners is not always based on the profit motive. Most of economics assumes that business goals are always based on maximizing profits. But often, football team owners are motivated by other considerations. They might be rich football fans that are motivated by seeing the team win, and profits are a secondary motivation. This might cause them to bid up the salaries much higher to compete with each other: salaries won't necessarily be based on supply and demand as in other types of businesses. To the extent that the owners pass along the higher salaries with higher ticket prices, the fans who are more willing to pay for higher prices will be the ones paying the higher salaries. This means that the team may be able to make more money with higher ticket prices (in economics lingo, it depends on the elasticity of demand for tickets), but more fans will not be able to afford the tickets. This could hurt the fan base for the teams in the long run, although there is not very much evidence to support this.

If the supply of supposedly qualified footballers is relatively fixed, so is the demand. Only a limited number of teams exist, and each team is limited by league rules to a specific number of players. Leagues are associations of teams that act together to set rules for the benefit of the whole league. Entry into the market is not free. New teams must be approved, and most of the time new teams are not allowed. The only way to increase the demand is to form new teams in new leagues. This would seem to violate the law of demand: more teams would mean more players; more players would mean players viewed by the public as being "less qualified". The public would not be willing to pay as much to watch these "less qualified" players, so more teams would mean lower, not higher, salaries. But because the public is usually only interested in watching the best, adding new leagues and new teams is generally not successful; people simply are not as interested in watching second-rate players, even if ticket prices are cheaper. Again, this would be a symptom of consumers making poor social choices, not a result of salaries being considered "too high".

I realize that most of this information doesn't directly answer your question, but I hope that you can learn something from it that will help you form your arguments.