No. Football is one of the few professions where the players actually get paid close to the true value of their labour.

As basically best players = best results = maximised revenue, the best players hold the negotiating power to capture all the profit from football. Clubs are very unprofitable in general for their revenue and I think it’s better that players get this share than owners and shareholders.

You can’t compare to public sector, so don’t. Compare to bankers, lawyers and other private sector professions.

For those that don’t know, loads of counties were created in the 60s/70s (can’t remember exactly) to better represent the growth of cities. So we saw West Midlands (basically Birmingham + Wolverhampton), Tyne and Wear (Newcastle + Sunderland), Greater Manchester, Merseyside (Liverpool and The Wirral) and Greater London all get carved out of the historic counties (Middlesex actually just got almost entirely consumed by London).

Obligatory Map Men link