Personally, I don’t find it extremely shocking that football players get paid what they do, even though those are astronomical sums of money. In the end, I see it as a ‘supply & demand’ situation. Why is there so much money involved in the football business? Why do Oprah, Judge Judy, and Dr. Phil get those ridiculously high paychecks for the ‘service’ they provide? My answer: because that’s what people want to watch. The higher the demand, the more expensive the supply.

I have to agree with DBeech’s last paragraph though: there seems to be a vicious circle which has the direct effect of balloning wages to ridiculous heights year to year. But again, we can’t discount the ‘supply & demand’ factor: media coverage has grown immensely these past 20 years. We went from watching games on TV and VHS tapes to High-quality live streams via internet and HD-TV Premium Pay-Per-View matches. Coverage quality has increased, so has the demand, and therefore the supply’s gotten more expensive. It’s just the reality of mass media coverage.

By the way, about the religion, I read somewhere (wikipedia) that there are a billion Catholics in the world which is also coincidentally, similar to the number of people which have watched some part of the world cup in 2002. Not guaranteeing these facts, bu definetely read them somewhere and really caught my attention

Quite frankly, no one is ‘justified’ in earning the kind of money that football players do. There is no such thing as being ‘deserving’ of 100,000+ pounds a week whether you’re Oprah or Frank Lampard (ironically both being in a rather similar shape).

But as you yourself note, the thing about the EPL – or any form of mass media – is that it concentrates the money of millions of people into a relatively small area. Of course footballers are going to demand and command huge pay checks as a result of this.

I have no problem with footballers earning large sums of money. The problem is that the thing keeps ballooning as a result of a vicious capitalistic circle – the more money that is poured into football the more money the footballers will demand and the more money football clubs need to pay to their talent, the more money they will require to be poured into football clubs. The ridiculous result of this, when you take a step back from the circle, is that ticket prices are going up for no reason other than so the rich can get richer.