Even modestly skilled Premier League players are paid fortunes. The average wage in the Premier League is a whopping £2,438,275-a-year while the average salary in the Scottish Premiership, for comparison is £146,899. I believe the SPL TV was a £31m per year deal over 5 years. However, Sky don't pay the footballers. They pay the premier league for media rights, the premier league pay the clubs on a sliding scale relative to performance ( with the bottom club picking up a gazillion with the top club picking up a squillion) and the clubs pay the players. The product as a whole rather than the footballers as a part of that business is what matters to Sky.
The value is not in the player but in their registration. That is what is technically transferred. Obviously if a club wants to buy that registration and the player is skilled it costs more. The good chaps at Sky contribute to that market by giving the Premier league clubs lots of money to spend. Sky & BT paid the Premier League alone £5.14bn for a 3 year (2016-19) TV rights deal. Sky also paid the Football Leagues ( Championship,1 &2) £180m a year over a recently signed 5 year deal. Most of that money goes to the championship clubs with the rest shared between leagues 1 & 2.
PS - that money doesn't include radio or overseas media rights, gambling partners, official beers, online steaming or any other corporate partners that seem to be needed in football these days.
PPS - not sure what virtue signalling is................................
Well that kind of clears things up, but it kind of shows how complicated things are with football for someone who hasn't yet wrapped their head around it. I'm not particularly fussed given I don't take interest in football, but not everyone is like me of course. If everyone was like me the human race wouldn't survive...
PS - The best way I can describe virtue signalling is where someone might make a post on a social media page to show what a good person they are, rather than whether they think it's a good idea. It's kind of a way of seeming morally superior in a lot of cases. In a political context, it is often made out by some to be something exclusive to the regressive left, but this isn't true at all and I'll give examples of both sides.
Someone might make a post on social media attending an Antifa (so called 'anti-fascists') protest to show that they are politically active and engaged, but in fact they don't strictly know much about what they're attending and therefore aren't attending because they genuinely think it's right. In fact, Antifa protests have been known to turn violent, and the group has even been deemed as domestic terrorists by New Jersey because of their use of violence and intimidation against some members of the public, even spraying things like 'liberals get the bullet too'.
By contrast, many nationalists groups will often make lots, and I mean LOTS, of posts coming up to Remembrance Day regarding poppies and support for our troops and sharing pictures of poppies and everything, but often times they are just trying to look like they are patriotic and are stirring up posts to get themselves likes. Britain First are especially guilty of this, and in fact they even went as far as to have 'Remember Lee Rigby' on their section of a ballot paper at a local election one time. It's sheer exploitation for them to gain power, and they've ignored requests from Rigby's family to stop it several times.
