Sportsmail has seen a confidential document circulated to all League Two clubs in February this year breaking down the amount each will spend on their playing budget in the 2016-17 season.
Super agent Mino Raiola will earn more from fixing the deal that took Paul Pogba to Manchester United than the entire playing budget of every League Two club.
Sportsmail’s revelations on Tuesday about the mind boggling figures paid to Pogba and United team mate Zlatan Ibrahimovic were further proof of the gulf between the haves and have-nots of modern professional football.
But it was the eye-watering £41.39m fee due to the Italian transfer fixer that really raised eyebrows among managers and players in the bottom tiers of English professional football.
As Carlisle manager Keith Curle told us: ‘For anybody to take that much from an individual transaction is embarrassing. How much advice can one player get?’
Sportsmail has seen a confidential document circulated to all League Two clubs in February this year breaking down the amount each will spend on their playing budget in the 2016-17 season.
It shows the total spent on player costs including all contract, non-contract and loan players by the 24 clubs in League Two was £39,982,000 – around £1.4m less than Raiola’s slice of the Pogba deal.
The biggest spending club in the division – believed to be champions Portsmouth – spent a total of £2.662m, fractionally more than two others thought to be Doncaster and Luton.
Meanwhile the lowest payers in the league, thought to be Morecambe, had a budget of just £852,000 – only slightly more than two weeks wages for Old Trafford’s iconic star Ibrahimovic.
Curle, whose team face Exeter in the play-offs for promotion this week, said: ‘We have got four or five players in our squad who are full time professionals, striving for an opportunity to be successful, who get paid between £250 and £500 a week.
‘It makes you think it is just completely and utterly wrong that so much money can be going out of the game to an advisor.
‘Please don’t misunderstand me. I have not got a problem over players getting paid their market value, or about advisors or professionals making money for providing their services.
‘But you are talking about millions going out of the game and there has to be a way for the FA to ensure a percentage of that can be returned to help the welfare of players at lower levels.
‘Players come to the end of their careers aged 35 or less who have been earning no more than £700 or £800 a week and there should be help with funding for their education so they can begin a new chapter of their lives.
‘How much advice can you give? The FA or Premier League should cap the payment made to the agent on any deal to say £50,000 so as to keep money within the game.’
One League Two director who preferred not to be named said: ‘League Two has had a salary cap in place based on turnover for longer than any other division and it is very strictly policed.
‘There are a lot of good players and coaches working at this level who don’t earn fortunes and you wonder what they must think when they see what an agent, who doesn’t even kick a ball, can take from the game.’
The Football League’s figures show that the average wage at 16 clubs is less than £1,000 a week, while even the most generous have an average pay packet of no more than £78,000 a year.
