Tweet
John Barnes not alone in facing taxing issuesAlyson Rudd
Recommend?
The tax problems of John Barnes have thrown into the spotlight an issue that was supposed to be dead and buried. Footballers are rich beyond the wildest dreams of most so surely debt or insolvency must be beyond them also.
Sadly not. Only two weeks ago Bobo Baldé, the former Celtic defender, was declared bankrupt. The Guinea international said that the declaration was the result of a misunderstanding and he would be able to pay his debts.
John Arne Riise managed to be declared bankrupt at Liverpool County Court two years ago while earning £50,000 a week at Anfield.
Riise’s problems stemmed partly from poor investments and, like Barnes, Riise was too distracted by football matters to realise what was happening.
Footballers’ finances have always been regarded with fascination. The best players used to earn £20 a week until the maximum wage was abolished in 1961.
From the moment Johnny Haynes became the first player to earn £100 a week, fans’ idols have been pushing financial barriers, but the controversy only really began in the late 1990s, when eye-poppingly huge wages were the norm in the top flight.
Agents argue that there is no moral issue because players have a limited career span and have to press for the best deal possible to ensure they have income for their retirement; not all of them can become managers or TV pundits. “Players should know better,” said Danny Davis at the insolvency department of Mischcon de Reya, the solicitors.
Davis says bankruptcy petitions do not appear overnight. “You get tons of notice, documents have to be served personally or a series of letters have to be issued,” he said.
Davis does have sympathy for young players who suddenly have to decide what to do with a massive wage and may be swayed by the dressing-room banter rather than sound financial advice.
In many ways there is no excuse for a player to find himself in financial difficulty.
Financial advisers visit football clubs and the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) will offer immediate advice and put a player in touch with an adviser but the player has to want to pick up the phone.
Few young players can be bothered with investigating educational courses, provided by the PFA, when they are playing for the first team and can afford any car they choose.
Barnes has said that he does not need a financial adviser.
“There must be exceptional circumstances for someone to find themselves in that position,” John Bramhall, the deputy chief executive of the PFA, said of players reaching the bankruptcy courts. “There is help out there.”
Before the Seventies, however, help was scarce. Players paid two shillings a week into a central fund and received £750 when they retired at 35.
If a player’s career ended prematurely, he still had to wait until the official retirement age. Today the system is much more generous.
Since 1980 the PFA has paid out £90 million in lump sums to players aged between 35 and 40. And those payments are on a non-contributory basis funded by football as a wealthy industry.
The remarkable thing is how little bitterness is expressed by players who missed out on the riches.
Dave Beasant, the former Wimbledon goalkeeper, suggests that had a player gone to Dave Bassett, his manager at Wimbledon, to demand appearance fees, Bassett would have retorted: “What do you think I’m paying you a f**kin’ weekly wage for — to come here and not play?”
Additional reporting: Nick Szczepanik
1960s
Charlie Aitken (Aston Villa) Annual salary peak: £30,000
Aitken made a record 656 appearances for Aston Villa between 1961 and 1976. The left back was the club’s union representative when the players decided to go on strike for the abolition of the maximum wage.
“The most money I earned in football was when I played for New York Cosmos in America in 1976 and ’77,” he said. “I played with Pelé for two years and because of him we were the best-paid players over there.
“There wasn’t a massive jump in pay until Sky came in. Even the 1982 team that won the European Cup weren’t on massive money — maybe £1,000 bonus for the win, maybe £500 a week.”
He decided not to go into management because there was no money it. “Football was almost a hobby,” Aitken said. “I received twice as much from grouse-beating in the Scottish Highlands for a week as I did from playing football over the same period.
“I dared not tell my parents how little I was earning from football. They’d have gone mental. It had cost them almost as much to have me educated in Edinburgh as I was getting from the game. I always looked on my football income as a declining asset.”
One of the striking differences between Aitken’s era and today is that the fans and the players earned a similar wage. “George Graham and I used to get the bus from our digs to Villa Park,” he said. “If the bus had been late we’d have missed the game. You played in front of 30-40,000 people and then you got the bus back with the spectators.”
Aitken, now 67, worked in insurance and started buying property in 1969. “So at the moment I'm OK,” he said. “Because I planned ahead massively.”
1970s
Jim Steele (Southampton) Annual salary peak: £10,000
Steele was man of the match when Southampton defeated Manchester United in the 1976 FA Cup Final and moved to the United States in 1977. He worked as a foreman for an electrical firm in Washington — he trained as a mechanical engineer before becoming a professional footballer — as well as playing for the Washington Diplomats.
Steele spent 18 years in the US. “It was too long,” he said. “By the time I came back, nobody had heard of me.”
When he left Southampton the Scottish defender was earning £120 per week plus £60 as a win bonus and £20 for a draw.
He earned £3,600 for winning the FA Cup but £2,400 went in tax and the rest was swallowed up in paying for his parents to stay in a hotel for the week so they could go to the game and have a few drinks.
“I see former players and they are virtually down and outs and I think, ‘We’ve got to help this guy,’ ” he said. “The PFA should be helping these ex-players, some of them have turned to drink. It’s all right for the Paul Gascoignes of this world who have money, or seem to, but the PFA should look after the more minor players.”
These days a steady stream of former players will pop into the Black Bear pub in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, where Steele is landlord, and the likes of Bryan Robson, Steve Bruce and Jimmy Case have their photographs on the walls.
Steele says people pop in and say how much they fancy running a pub when they retire and he tells them: “They are nuts. I’ll be 60 in March and I don’t want to be doing this 24 hours a day. But I can’t afford to give it up yet.”
1980s
Dave Beasant (Wimbledon) Annual salary peak: £80,000
Beasant was goalkeeper for Wimbledon (1979-88), Newcastle United (1988-89) and Chelsea (1989-93) among others, earned two England caps in 1989 and now coaches at the Glenn Hoddle Academy in southern Spain.
Beasant will be best remembered for saving John Aldridge’s penalty in the 1988 FA Cup Final win over Liverpool but says his side were on vastly lower salaries than the Liverpool players.
“When I was at Wimbledon, the money was a pittance,” he said. “I was playing because I was doing something I wanted to. Dave Bassett [the manager] used to have an insurance business, Wally Downes [the midfielder] ran a fruit stall, and a few others were looking for outside avenues to subsidise incomes because sometimes the football money wasn’t fantastic. It was incentive-based, bonuses for clean sheets.
“We couldn’t afford the flash cars they are going around in now. There was a story that Lawrie Sanchez could only afford a beaten-up old Mini with a red nose on it for Red Nose Day. Actually his windscreen had broken and it was his nose that had gone red because it was so cold.”
Beasant, 50, added: “I kept going as long as I could, so I carried on earning decent money until I was 43, 44. It was love of the game but the income was also a big plus.
“The drop-off in wages from playing at even a low level to coaching — even to managing — can be enormous in the lower divisions. Sometimes in the lower divisions, clubs can’t afford a full-time specialist goalkeeping coach, so you do a day at this club, a day at another. And if you are out of work, as I have been at times, the hole is even bigger.”
1990s
John Barnes (Liverpool) Annual salary peak: £750,000
The England winger’s career off the pitch has been more miss than hit and culminated in him missing a bankruptcy petition within a week of being sacked as manager of Tranmere Rovers.
As Barnes was not present at the petition — he missed it because of the turmoil at Prenton Park — a bankruptcy order was granted. This was greeted with shock among football fans, leading Barnes to explain the order as a “tax oversight” and his lawyer to issue a statement to say Barnes is not insolvent.
Barnes signed for Watford in 1981 — the fee was a set of football shirts — and six years later moved to Liverpool for £900,000. He left Anfield on a free transfer in 1997 to join Newcastle United and retired from football as a Charlton Athletic player in 1999.
Barnes was hardly idle after finishing his playing career, in which he won 79 caps for England and appeared at two World Cups. He had already exhibited some entrepreneurial flair when at Anfield; he led the Anfield Rap that reached No 3 in the charts in 1988. And he was in the charts again after featuring in the 1990 World Cup anthem World in Motion with New Order.
But his post-playing days lurched between managerial and television roles. His appointment as manager of Celtic was widely acknowledged as unfortunate, as was his stint as a television presenter with Five.
Barnes, 45, received mixed reviews for his appearances on Strictly Come Dancing two years ago, although his salsa received critical acclaim, and he then reappeared on the football scene as manager of Jamaica. In June he became manager of Tranmere but was sacked after two wins in 11 games.
2000s
Robbie Fowler (Liverpool)
Annual salary peak: £2 million
The player most famous for investing wisely is Robbie Fowler. The former Liverpool striker, known by the fans at Anfield as “God”, was named as one of the wealthiest people in Britain in the most recent Sunday Times Rich List.
The bulk of Fowler’s wealth — estimated at £31 million — has come through cleverly timed investments in property. He owns about 80 flats and houses, including a street of terrace houses in Oldham.
Fowler’s success is so well documented there was even a terrace chant inspired by it. “We all live in a Robbie Fowler house” was sung by Manchester City fans to the tune of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
Fowler, who went on to play for Leeds United and City, also made money by linking up with Steve McManaman, his team-mate at Liverpool. The pair set up a company, The Macca and Growler Partnership, to invest in racehorses including Seebald, who won the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Celebration Chase in 2003.
Possibly inspired by Fowler, plenty of the Premier League’s top earners have also invested in property but come unstuck as construction firms have gone bust and house prices have fallen.
Fowler remains untouched by the credit crunch; not least because Oldham is one of the few regions witnessing an increase in property values. His houses there cost £20,000 in the late 1990s and are worth more than £80,000 today. Fowler also turned an hotel in Airdrie into lucrative luxury apartments.
After a three-month deal with Blackburn Rovers expired last December, Fowler, 34, signed a two-year contract with the North Queensland Fury.
Recommend?
The tax problems of John Barnes have thrown into the spotlight an issue that was supposed to be dead and buried. Footballers are rich beyond the wildest dreams of most so surely debt or insolvency must be beyond them also.
Sadly not. Only two weeks ago Bobo Baldé, the former Celtic defender, was declared bankrupt. The Guinea international said that the declaration was the result of a misunderstanding and he would be able to pay his debts.
John Arne Riise managed to be declared bankrupt at Liverpool County Court two years ago while earning £50,000 a week at Anfield.
Riise’s problems stemmed partly from poor investments and, like Barnes, Riise was too distracted by football matters to realise what was happening.
Footballers’ finances have always been regarded with fascination. The best players used to earn £20 a week until the maximum wage was abolished in 1961.
From the moment Johnny Haynes became the first player to earn £100 a week, fans’ idols have been pushing financial barriers, but the controversy only really began in the late 1990s, when eye-poppingly huge wages were the norm in the top flight.
Agents argue that there is no moral issue because players have a limited career span and have to press for the best deal possible to ensure they have income for their retirement; not all of them can become managers or TV pundits. “Players should know better,” said Danny Davis at the insolvency department of Mischcon de Reya, the solicitors.
Davis says bankruptcy petitions do not appear overnight. “You get tons of notice, documents have to be served personally or a series of letters have to be issued,” he said.
Davis does have sympathy for young players who suddenly have to decide what to do with a massive wage and may be swayed by the dressing-room banter rather than sound financial advice.
In many ways there is no excuse for a player to find himself in financial difficulty.
Financial advisers visit football clubs and the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) will offer immediate advice and put a player in touch with an adviser but the player has to want to pick up the phone.
Few young players can be bothered with investigating educational courses, provided by the PFA, when they are playing for the first team and can afford any car they choose.
Barnes has said that he does not need a financial adviser.
“There must be exceptional circumstances for someone to find themselves in that position,” John Bramhall, the deputy chief executive of the PFA, said of players reaching the bankruptcy courts. “There is help out there.”
Before the Seventies, however, help was scarce. Players paid two shillings a week into a central fund and received £750 when they retired at 35.
If a player’s career ended prematurely, he still had to wait until the official retirement age. Today the system is much more generous.
Since 1980 the PFA has paid out £90 million in lump sums to players aged between 35 and 40. And those payments are on a non-contributory basis funded by football as a wealthy industry.
The remarkable thing is how little bitterness is expressed by players who missed out on the riches.
Dave Beasant, the former Wimbledon goalkeeper, suggests that had a player gone to Dave Bassett, his manager at Wimbledon, to demand appearance fees, Bassett would have retorted: “What do you think I’m paying you a f**kin’ weekly wage for — to come here and not play?”
Additional reporting: Nick Szczepanik
1960s
Charlie Aitken (Aston Villa) Annual salary peak: £30,000
Aitken made a record 656 appearances for Aston Villa between 1961 and 1976. The left back was the club’s union representative when the players decided to go on strike for the abolition of the maximum wage.
“The most money I earned in football was when I played for New York Cosmos in America in 1976 and ’77,” he said. “I played with Pelé for two years and because of him we were the best-paid players over there.
“There wasn’t a massive jump in pay until Sky came in. Even the 1982 team that won the European Cup weren’t on massive money — maybe £1,000 bonus for the win, maybe £500 a week.”
He decided not to go into management because there was no money it. “Football was almost a hobby,” Aitken said. “I received twice as much from grouse-beating in the Scottish Highlands for a week as I did from playing football over the same period.
“I dared not tell my parents how little I was earning from football. They’d have gone mental. It had cost them almost as much to have me educated in Edinburgh as I was getting from the game. I always looked on my football income as a declining asset.”
One of the striking differences between Aitken’s era and today is that the fans and the players earned a similar wage. “George Graham and I used to get the bus from our digs to Villa Park,” he said. “If the bus had been late we’d have missed the game. You played in front of 30-40,000 people and then you got the bus back with the spectators.”
Aitken, now 67, worked in insurance and started buying property in 1969. “So at the moment I'm OK,” he said. “Because I planned ahead massively.”
1970s
Jim Steele (Southampton) Annual salary peak: £10,000
Steele was man of the match when Southampton defeated Manchester United in the 1976 FA Cup Final and moved to the United States in 1977. He worked as a foreman for an electrical firm in Washington — he trained as a mechanical engineer before becoming a professional footballer — as well as playing for the Washington Diplomats.
Steele spent 18 years in the US. “It was too long,” he said. “By the time I came back, nobody had heard of me.”
When he left Southampton the Scottish defender was earning £120 per week plus £60 as a win bonus and £20 for a draw.
He earned £3,600 for winning the FA Cup but £2,400 went in tax and the rest was swallowed up in paying for his parents to stay in a hotel for the week so they could go to the game and have a few drinks.
“I see former players and they are virtually down and outs and I think, ‘We’ve got to help this guy,’ ” he said. “The PFA should be helping these ex-players, some of them have turned to drink. It’s all right for the Paul Gascoignes of this world who have money, or seem to, but the PFA should look after the more minor players.”
These days a steady stream of former players will pop into the Black Bear pub in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, where Steele is landlord, and the likes of Bryan Robson, Steve Bruce and Jimmy Case have their photographs on the walls.
Steele says people pop in and say how much they fancy running a pub when they retire and he tells them: “They are nuts. I’ll be 60 in March and I don’t want to be doing this 24 hours a day. But I can’t afford to give it up yet.”
1980s
Dave Beasant (Wimbledon) Annual salary peak: £80,000
Beasant was goalkeeper for Wimbledon (1979-88), Newcastle United (1988-89) and Chelsea (1989-93) among others, earned two England caps in 1989 and now coaches at the Glenn Hoddle Academy in southern Spain.
Beasant will be best remembered for saving John Aldridge’s penalty in the 1988 FA Cup Final win over Liverpool but says his side were on vastly lower salaries than the Liverpool players.
“When I was at Wimbledon, the money was a pittance,” he said. “I was playing because I was doing something I wanted to. Dave Bassett [the manager] used to have an insurance business, Wally Downes [the midfielder] ran a fruit stall, and a few others were looking for outside avenues to subsidise incomes because sometimes the football money wasn’t fantastic. It was incentive-based, bonuses for clean sheets.
“We couldn’t afford the flash cars they are going around in now. There was a story that Lawrie Sanchez could only afford a beaten-up old Mini with a red nose on it for Red Nose Day. Actually his windscreen had broken and it was his nose that had gone red because it was so cold.”
Beasant, 50, added: “I kept going as long as I could, so I carried on earning decent money until I was 43, 44. It was love of the game but the income was also a big plus.
“The drop-off in wages from playing at even a low level to coaching — even to managing — can be enormous in the lower divisions. Sometimes in the lower divisions, clubs can’t afford a full-time specialist goalkeeping coach, so you do a day at this club, a day at another. And if you are out of work, as I have been at times, the hole is even bigger.”
1990s
John Barnes (Liverpool) Annual salary peak: £750,000
The England winger’s career off the pitch has been more miss than hit and culminated in him missing a bankruptcy petition within a week of being sacked as manager of Tranmere Rovers.
As Barnes was not present at the petition — he missed it because of the turmoil at Prenton Park — a bankruptcy order was granted. This was greeted with shock among football fans, leading Barnes to explain the order as a “tax oversight” and his lawyer to issue a statement to say Barnes is not insolvent.
Barnes signed for Watford in 1981 — the fee was a set of football shirts — and six years later moved to Liverpool for £900,000. He left Anfield on a free transfer in 1997 to join Newcastle United and retired from football as a Charlton Athletic player in 1999.
Barnes was hardly idle after finishing his playing career, in which he won 79 caps for England and appeared at two World Cups. He had already exhibited some entrepreneurial flair when at Anfield; he led the Anfield Rap that reached No 3 in the charts in 1988. And he was in the charts again after featuring in the 1990 World Cup anthem World in Motion with New Order.
But his post-playing days lurched between managerial and television roles. His appointment as manager of Celtic was widely acknowledged as unfortunate, as was his stint as a television presenter with Five.
Barnes, 45, received mixed reviews for his appearances on Strictly Come Dancing two years ago, although his salsa received critical acclaim, and he then reappeared on the football scene as manager of Jamaica. In June he became manager of Tranmere but was sacked after two wins in 11 games.
2000s
Robbie Fowler (Liverpool)
Annual salary peak: £2 million
The player most famous for investing wisely is Robbie Fowler. The former Liverpool striker, known by the fans at Anfield as “God”, was named as one of the wealthiest people in Britain in the most recent Sunday Times Rich List.
The bulk of Fowler’s wealth — estimated at £31 million — has come through cleverly timed investments in property. He owns about 80 flats and houses, including a street of terrace houses in Oldham.
Fowler’s success is so well documented there was even a terrace chant inspired by it. “We all live in a Robbie Fowler house” was sung by Manchester City fans to the tune of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
Fowler, who went on to play for Leeds United and City, also made money by linking up with Steve McManaman, his team-mate at Liverpool. The pair set up a company, The Macca and Growler Partnership, to invest in racehorses including Seebald, who won the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Celebration Chase in 2003.
Possibly inspired by Fowler, plenty of the Premier League’s top earners have also invested in property but come unstuck as construction firms have gone bust and house prices have fallen.
Fowler remains untouched by the credit crunch; not least because Oldham is one of the few regions witnessing an increase in property values. His houses there cost £20,000 in the late 1990s and are worth more than £80,000 today. Fowler also turned an hotel in Airdrie into lucrative luxury apartments.
After a three-month deal with Blackburn Rovers expired last December, Fowler, 34, signed a two-year contract with the North Queensland Fury.