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By Tony Attwood
The media have found a new stick to bash Arsenal with – and they are using it to have give Chelsea a bit of a bashing as well. Here’s the Telegraph’s headline:
“Chelsea and Arsenal charging more than £2,000 per week for holiday camps as Premier League clubs focus on child’s ability to pay, not play.”
There are multiple issues here, and I’ll try to pick one or two of them out. First off, holiday courses for children vary dramatically in terms of what they offer and the price they charge, and most parents who place their children on summer courses are used to such variations, and are perfectly able to make a judgement. Or in fact several judgements.
For parents must decide, “Are the people running this course able and qualified to teach my child?” and another being “are the benefits that my child will get from this course worth the amount I am paying?” Put another way, is my child capable of becoming a footballer, and are these people capable to teaching him/her how to achieve this goal?
These are complicated questions, but made all the more complicated by the fact that this article is in the Telegraph – a newspaper that will have among its readership some parents who pay for their children to attend private of “independent” schools, while others get their children’s education free of charge from the local authority.
Now according to a survey by the website Find My School “the average day school fee at £6,226 a term and the average boarding fee at £14,980 a term.” This works out at something approaching £600 a week, where the child is being taught by a regular teacher (which is to say a teacher with a BA or BSc and perhaps a one year Dip Ed post graduate qualification in teaching) and is boarding during the term time. So on this basis it looks as if the Arsenal fee is around three times that of the fee charged by a school.
However the implication of the Arsenal advertisement (and obviosuly I am not an Arsenal employee nor do I have children of a suitable age who want to go on a course at Arsenal, so implication is all it is) is that the cost is ludicrously high – or indeed exploitative.
But specialist courses always do cost a lot more than general schooling and the cost of being trained or taught by an expert in professional conditions is bound to be a lot higher than being taught in a private school in a class of maybe 20 or 25 children together.
Bearing this is mind the price at Arsenal doesn’t seem too expensive – but there is a further point here, and that is that in all matters of this sort, the market decides what is and what is not reasonable.
In the world in which I worked before retirement it was quite common to charge a company £400 or more to write a single page advertisement which could be sent to potential customers in the post. Some companies expressed outrage at such a price, and would prefer to write their adverts themselves (or have a secretary to it for them). Others thought is reasonable, especially if they had seen the difference in response rates that a covering letter written one way could make from a letter written in what one might call a more conventional style.
Indeed the pricing of issues that depend on the knowledge of the tutor and his/her ability to utilise that knowledge or pass it on, is something that many people who go into a job, and then simply do the job and then come home, can find difficult to grasp.
I have no idea what difference a training course at Arsenal will make to a decent but not stand-out teenager, but if it were sufficient to make him or her get and hold a £5000 a week job instead of a £300 a week job, then the £2000 spent on a training course would be covered in salary in no time.
Of course the key thing is for the parent to understand that there are many children who simply will not make it as professional footballers no matter what training they get – and I would put my much younger self in that category. But there are some who could, with the right preliminary training, hold their own in a league club.
Now the average salary of a League Two player at the moment is said to be around £5,000 a week (a figure that astounded me when I looked it up, but that is what it seems to be) which is a damn sight more than the average 19 year old will be learning, three years after leaving school.
But let’s take it that a youngster goes on a course and the parent pays £4000 for two weeks. Subsequently the young player gets a job and by the age of 20 is earning £5000 a week in Football League Division One. I suspect the repayment to the parent of that initial outlay could be made fairly rapidly.
So the point is not that the club is charging outrageous sums for the training, but rather, is it helping the parent see if this investment is reasonable and likely to be beneficial to the youngster, and lead to a repayment of the investment to the parent.
To my mind it is a great shame that we live in a world where newspapers seem to want to simply everything and use any issue they can find to do a shock horror anti-football story. Hopefully some parents will realise that reading newspapers that run such stories is not particularly in their interest.
But there is another point. Arsenal have been losing money for several years, (see What is to be done about Arsenal’s losses for more information). The media has attacked Arsenal for making some of the workforce redundant. Now it is attacking the club for putting on training courses in the summer.
So here’s a thought. Why doesn’t the newspaper tell us how it would solve Arsenal’s financial crisis, rather than just criticising each idea Arsenal comse up with?
