RugbyRebels

Good read this - https://www.rugbypass.com/news/the-pers ... gby-player

"At the peak of a Premiership career a good club player might get just short of £200k before their earning start to decrease. One player told me that at 33 he was playing for less money than when he was 21, which gives you a good indication of the drop off in earnings.

There are obviously exceptions, club captains, internationals and marquee players will all get substantially more.

One of the strange quirks of the salary cap is while more money is added to wage bills, it almost all goes to top players. Squads will then add depth using cheaper, younger players from the academy or from overseas.

The pressure on mid-range players means wages are stagnating and in lots of cases they drop in real terms. To steal a phrase, rugby really does have a squeezed middle.

Even so, earning £150,000 a year for something that you love sounds pretty good, and it is. Conceivably you could earn this amount of money from about age 22 to 30. In other words – £1.2million over eight years sounds great!

Yet all that glitters is not gold – the tax bill will be £60,000 a year. A mixture of higher rate tax and losing the personal allowance means that players might be paying an eye-watering 60 per cent tax on a portion of their income"

fivepointer wrote:Good read this - https://www.rugbypass.com/news/the-pers ... gby-player

"At the peak of a Premiership career a good club player might get just short of £200k before their earning start to decrease. One player told me that at 33 he was playing for less money than when he was 21, which gives you a good indication of the drop off in earnings.

There are obviously exceptions, club captains, internationals and marquee players will all get substantially more.

One of the strange quirks of the salary cap is while more money is added to wage bills, it almost all goes to top players. Squads will then add depth using cheaper, younger players from the academy or from overseas.

The pressure on mid-range players means wages are stagnating and in lots of cases they drop in real terms. To steal a phrase, rugby really does have a squeezed middle.

Even so, earning £150,000 a year for something that you love sounds pretty good, and it is. Conceivably you could earn this amount of money from about age 22 to 30. In other words – £1.2million over eight years sounds great!

Yet all that glitters is not gold – the tax bill will be £60,000 a year. A mixture of higher rate tax and losing the personal allowance means that players might be paying an eye-watering 60 per cent tax on a portion of their income"

That would be £50,000 in tax, the first £50,000 would be paid at the 20% tax rate then 40% for the other 100k.

As far as I’m aware, it’s even less. Sportsmen and woman can put a lot more in pensions than us average folk.

fivepointer wrote:Even so, earning £150,000 a year for something that you love sounds pretty good, and it is. Conceivably you could earn this amount of money from about age 22 to 30. In other words – £1.2million over eight years sounds great!

Yet all that glitters is not gold – the tax bill will be £60,000 a year. A mixture of higher rate tax and losing the personal allowance means that players might be paying an eye-watering 60 per cent tax on a portion of their income"

So, with Numbers' point that it's actually only £50k tax, that's £100k net. That's quite a reasonable amount of money by anyone's estimation (well, maybe not that d*ckhead from Question Time), even before you get to pensions as Mells said.

It is a very hard sport and a hard career, but I'm afraid I'm not able to play anything for people who have to suffer a maximum £50k tax on their £150k salary - I've put my tiny violin down somewhere and I can't find it at all.

Puja

I read this yesterday, and didn’t find it particularly revelatory.

“If you make a lot of money you get taxed more”
“Young, wealthy sports stars can be irresponsible with their money”
“It’s a short career”

Sometimes I'm surprised hearing about players with glittering careers who are about to retire and talk of having to find work afterwards. A lot of these guys who are well capped internationals will retire at 30-odd as multi-millionaires. I'm yet to hear of one retiring and proclaiming that they'll simply spend the rest of their life on the beach because they're fucking minted. It's certainly what I would do.

I suppose that lack of drive and ambition may have something to do with why I'm not a professional sportsman.

Mikey Brown wrote:Sometimes I'm surprised hearing about players with glittering careers who are about to retire and talk of having to find work afterwards. A lot of these guys who are well capped internationals will retire at 30-odd as multi-millionaires. I'm yet to hear of one retiring and proclaiming that they'll simply spend the rest of their life on the beach because they're fucking minted. It's certainly what I would do.

I suppose that lack of drive and ambition may have something to do with why I'm not a professional sportsman.

And talent. Don’t forget lack of talent