Quibans 30: Footballers' salaries

This could be a brief task, or a longer one.  Beware - there are answers throughout the post.  Teachers might want to extract the images to display rather than projecting from the web.

The initial article comes from the Daily Telegraph:

Chelsea transfer news: 18-year-old Dominic Solanke demands £50,000 per week

Chelsea's inability to bring through a home-grown player since John Terry has left them in a difficult position over the future of teenage striker Dominic Solanke, whose list of demands is understood to include first-team guarantees and a contract worth over £50,000-a-week.

Solanke is one of the most highly-rated young forwards in the country, but the 18-year-old’s Chelsea contract is due to expire in 12 months and talks over a new deal have hit an impasse.

Solanke has made one senior appearance for Chelsea, in the Champions League. The club value him as a highly promising player with the potential to break through, which was reflected in a first professional contract worth £7,000-a-week that was signed in September 2014.

To put Solanke’s alleged demands into perspective, Harry Kane currently earns around £50,000-a-week at Tottenham Hotspur and was collecting £20,000-a-week as recently as January 2015.

Questions:

1. What is Solanke’s annual salary at the moment?
2. What does he want it to be?
3. What percentage pay rise would that be?
4. What percentage pay rise did Kane receive? 

Answers:

1. £7,000 x 52 = £364,000
2. £50,000 x 52 = £ 2.6 million
3. Rise is (50 – 7) thousand = 43,000. 43/7 x 100% = 614% 
4. 30/20 is a pay rise of 150%

This can be extended further by using the brilliant website http://www.whatfootballersearn.com

Here is a comparison between arguably the two best players in the world:

What questions could we ask/answer here? Here are some examples:

• What is their salary per year?
• How much tax do they pay? (Will need to look up Spanish tax rates)
• What is the percentage by which Messi out-earns Ronaldo?
• How much do they each earn per second?

And here are the answers given by the website:

Messi out-earns Ronaldo by (336 – 274) / 274 = 23%

Martin Odegaard was signed by Real Madrid as a 16-year-old. Here is his salary compared with Wayne Rooney’s:

To save us lots of calculator work, it would make sense to create a spreadsheet (optional). It might look something like this, so we could type the weekly salary into a yellow cell:

Now we need to consider rounding issues.

Can we extend it so we can work out how long it will take each of them to afford particular things (such as an iPhone, or a new car)?

Also on the website is a comparison page. The UK average salary is £26,500 per year, so I have typed that in:

I left the website up for about 2 minutes before I took the image. Can you work out the values?

Here is the answer:

Can you work out exactly how long the page was up before I took the image?

(Answer: 124.6 seconds)

I let the page run for a while. When it said this how much had someone on the average wage earned?

Answer:

Final thought: the values given here are the footballers’ basic salaries, as paid by their clubs. They get extra for endorsing and advertising other products too. It is an irony that if I want a pair of top-of-the-range football boots then I need to pay several hundred pounds for them, whereas Rooney et al are not only given boots but are paid to wear them!

Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2016/04/25/chelseas-dominic-solanke-demands-50000-per-week/
http://www.whatfootballersearn.com/compare/cristiano-ronaldo/vs/lionel-messi/
http://www.whatfootballersearn.com/matcher/?salary=26500&match=false&player_id=852