SPL wages too high?

You want to know why so many Scottish Premier League clubs have debts the size of a small country's GDP?

Sportingintelligence have published their annual survey of first-team player pay in the world's major sporting leagues.  Thankfully for us, no-one's told them that football in Scotland hasn't been 'major' for rather a while, which means the report includes the likes of Dunfermline and Inverness (at the bottom) along with the likes of Manchester City and the Los Angeles Dodgers (at the top).

The figures for the 12 clubs who were in the SPL in 2011-12 make for curious reading - as stated above, this is the average wage for a first-team squad member.  For simplicity, I've stated the weekly wage here, rather than the annual salary.  I've also put, in brackets, that club's figure in Sportingintelligence's survey from a year ago.

1. Celtic £21,253 (£20.487)
2. Rangers £11,501* (£15,798)
3. Hearts £5,305 (£6,310)
4. Aberdeen £2,906 (£3,002)
5. Hibernian £2,804 (£3,322)
6. Dundee United £2,503 (£2,513)
7. Motherwell £2,296 (£2,319)
8. Kilmarnock £2,274 (£2,404)
9. St. Mirren £2,007 (£2,046)
10. St. Johnstone £1,920 (£1,960)
11. Dunfermline £989
12. Inverness £954 (£1,222)

* (note the report states "Rangers were melting down financially and the sums they were due to pay in wages and actually paid in 2012 were quite different")

What can we take away from this?

No wonder there is so little competition
The average wage of a Celtic player was greater than the average wage of the 10 non-Old Firm SPL clubs combined.  It's reasonable to extrapolate that, with Ross County and Dundee having replaced Rangers and Dunfermline for 2012-13, the average wage of a Celtic player in the season just finished will have been greater than the average wage of all the other 11 SPL clubs combined.  How can any sort of contest be possible with this discrepancy?

No wonder Hearts are in such a mess
For the last couple of seasons, the Tynecastle side have been offering wages that have been double, or nearly double, those of the other sides that have been competing for the 'best of the rest' tag.  And that's even though costs had already been cut drastically compared to the reckless spending of the Romanov years.

Wages higher than expected?
I'm amazed to see only two clubs averaging less than £1,000 a week to first team players.  Given there will be plenty of young players earning less than that, it must mean that clubs like Aberdeen, Kilmarnock and St. Mirren had some players on bumper contracts.  How many of them have been worth it?  I wouldn't be surprised if the figures for 2012-13 show a significant drop in average wage at most of the clubs.

ICT deserve more plaudits
It's very unlikely that Inverness paid bigger salaries in 2012-13, and so they almost certainly had one of the lowest - if not the lowest - wage budgets in the SPL again.  If you weren't already impressed by their fourth place league finish, you should be now.

Where would Ross County and Dundee rank?
That's hard to predict, but it's certainly possible that the Staggies paid their players more than their local rivals in 2012-13, especially after they made several signings in January.  Dundee will certainly have been at the lower end.

L.