Salary Story

Typically in a German election campaign, there's some top ten areas where people want the political figures to talk about or hype.  2017 is an odd year where there are certain topics that none of the political talk much about (immigration and diesel), and odd topics which do get hyped but folks don't care much.

Yesterday, for some campaign stop, the SPD's Martin Schulz hyped the terrible woes of the German soccer league and thinks that it can be solved by legislation within the Bundestag to control player's salaries.

If you observe the business from the distance....over the past decade, there's been a gradual escalation of player salaries....but it's largely something occurring across all of Europe.  Soccer clubs have found various ways to improve the profit margin of their organizations....using product sales, TV contracts, and larger stadiums to make money.

FC Bayern from Munich....has probably five world-class players on the team and they are pretty much locked in for the coming decade to finish somewhere in the top three slots of the league every single year.  Their salary structure?  Outrageous.   But they get full stadiums and sell tons of t-shirts and fan-gear.

So you gaze back at Schulz's idea and wonder how in the world this would work?  Just by picking one single sport....you'd create a guaranteed court episode where the law would either be struck down or you'd have to have pay-limits across all of society.

If you were a big-name soccer player.....why would you want to play in Germany, with a limit on salary?  If a law like this went into effect.....players would ask to be transferred and prefer to play outside of Germany.

Finally, you come to the real issue here.  If there was a topic list of the top ten or top one-hundred issues facing Germans, this problem doesn't appear.  Maybe somewhere between 900 and 1,500....this problem might pop up.  Oddly, dumping daylight-savings time would actually make it into the top twenty issues and easily find 90-percent of the nation favoring a dump of the concept.  This is another topic which never gets discussed by political figures.