According to John Cross of the Daily Mirror, Manchester United skipper Harry Maguire has asked the entire Manchester United squad to donate 30% of their wage to charity.
Maguire asks for players to donate wages to charity
The report says that Maguire wants the United squad to forfeit some of their hefty paycheque to the hospitals in and around the city of Manchester.
The squad are reportedly on board with the idea and want to be seen to be doing their bit in the wake of comments from Health Minister Matt Hancock saying that Premier League players weren’t chipping in.
The Professional Footballers Association put out a statement yesterday criticising the reaction and to say that players will take deferrals, but not pay cuts.
Meanwhile, the Mirror have reported that many players from across the Premier League have already made donations of “five or six sum” figures to charity, but opted not to publicise it.
Reportedly, lots of players have donated to the charity Heroes to help out the NHS. The Mirror say the players are considering putting out a joint statement to show support after the amount of criticism the PFA received.
Criticism of Premier League stars is unjust – the owners are the ones at fault
The criticism of the Premier League players has been a little uncalled for in my personal opinion. They’ve been massively scapegoated when, in all honesty, it’s the owners we should be looking at to pull their weight.
Mike Ashley and Daniel Levy both opted to place non-playing staff on furlough leave this week, with the latter even making some staff take a 20% pay cut. Meanwhile, the players and hierarchy remained on full pay – that’s not quite right.
Before they looked to the government furlough scheme, to use tax payer money, to pay their staff they should have looked to strike up some sort of deal with the players union.
In other countries we’ve seen the players take wage cuts happily when asked to by their clubs. Meanwhile in Italy, the players have deferred their wages entirely for the next three months saving the club somewhere around £90m and allowing them to properly pay ALL of their staff.
The PFA have already said that the Premier League players are more than willing to do that – yet they received backlash for that too. A wage deferral could save the clubs millions, allowing them to fully pay their staff during this crisis.
The players have simply been doing what they’ve been advised to be doing. To be perfectly honest, these are teams who earn well over £100m per season – there should be no problem in them paying their staff fully during this period.
Jordan Henderson calls for COVID-19 relief fund
As I’m writing this, I’ve just seen a breaking news update saying that Liverpool captain Jordan Henderson has contracted the captains of other Premier League clubs to create a COVID-19 fund which will collects ‘millions of pounds’.
Jordan Henderson and Harry Maguire have both stepped up to the plate today in a major way for the COVID-19 relief efforts. Despite that, I’m still seeing tweets criticising that it’s “not enough” – totally ludicrous.
Focus your criticism at the Premier League owners. They have a combined worth of near £80 billion – yet have done nothing other than cut wages of vital staff and claim money from the tax-payer.
It’s good to see the players stepping up to the mark in the way their owners have failed to. Now that we’re seeing some action from the players, I hope to see less criticism of them and more criticism of the penny-pinching owners.
They’re the ones who should have been taking the flack from the outset.
**UPDATE
Since the time of publishing, the Premier League have announced that the league will NOT start up again at the beginning of May. As a result, all teams have asked their players to take a 30% wage cut.
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