Have you ever wondered why footballers get paid on a weekly basis, while most other professionals get paid every month? This question always grinds the minds of fans and watchers of the sport, leading to debates concerning the justifications and logic behind such pay, especially because footballers are paid so much.
Though unconventional for anyone used to other professional spheres, this is a unique setup for very good historical, cultural, and practical reasons. This blog post looks back at how the weekly payment for footballers started and then considers how the compensation model compares to that of other professionals.
The best way to understand why this question comes up is to contrast this with different payment practices in other fields: doctors, teachers, office workers -all get a month-to-month wage they can rely on, no matter what time of year it is. And this conforms to our normal notion of work: a fixed salary in return for a fixed quantity of work.
To answer the question, indeed, historical precedent is very important for the continuance of weekly pay for footballers. Originally, this system first developed in the early days of professional football leagues when players were often employed on a part-time basis, receiving wages related to their appearances in matches. Later on, this practice altered, yet the philosophy involved in paying on a week-to-week basis still managed to keep its place in the sport.
Although it was strange in some other contexts of the present world, one could consider it not entirely uncommon in other fields and as applied in some regions of the world. For example, it is still common in some parts of Europe and Asia that laborers of many industries receive weekly wages. This normally arises from the historic cultural or economic reasons that shape the nature of the local labor market.
Football, being the sport with much deeper historical roots, merely borrowed from this well-established method of payment. What might have made sense as an expedient in a fledgling industry got enshrined as convention and endured despite radical changes in every other aspect of the sport.
Overall, weekly footballer pay reflects historical practice in the development of the sport. While such pay may seem unusual from the perspective of other occupations, it represents the peculiar nature of football due to its seasonal nature and individual performance.
Whether that makes any sense or not, many would debate. Some people do feel that it follows the trend of other sports, while others think that this is something that will only lead to instability in earnings and financial planning. Whatever the merits of the arguments, with this being such an established tradition, and therefore deeply ingrained within the culture, it’s unlikely that footballers being paid weekly will change much in the near future.
