Coronavirus: Top footballers resisting pay cuts are scoring terrible own goal – leader comment

Ally McCoist is right to urge highly paid players to take a wage cut to help lower paid members of their clubs’ staff.

Former Rangers manager Ally McCoist.

Top footballers can be seen as spoilt, over-paid and out of touch with the reality of life for the vast majority of the people who watch them play.

While this may not always be entirely fair – not all players, for example, earn huge amounts – it is a terrible own goal for players on the highest salaries to resist reasonable cuts at a time when many people who earn far less are being forced to do just that because of the coronavirus crisis. It is a stance that will tarnish not just their reputation, but that of their clubs and the game in general.

Former Rangers and Scotland striker Ally McCoist was quite right to urge players to think of clubs’ non-playing staff. He recalled that as Rangers went into administration, one member of staff was in tears because he had been told he would lose his job.

“I was thinking to myself that this absolutely cannot be right ... so we eventually got all that sorted” with players and coaching staff taking cuts instead, McCoist said.

But it is also important for society as a whole for everyone to take a share of the great burden now upon us all – something that players of a team game should already realise.