Utter shite would have been an improvement

I'm the first to admit I don't know anything about football. I don't follow a league (is it even called the league any more? Premiership? Whatever) team, I'm terminally bored by office football pundits, TV football pundits, footballers, footballers' wives, football hooligans and... well... you get the picture.

But come on. It's the World Cup. Once every four years even I can try to get a bit excited about the beautiful game. Except there wasn't much beautiful about it last night.

In one of those rare minutes of the 90 where I found my attention wandering from the pitch (*cough*), I began wondering exactly how much money there was running around aimlessly, failing to make, or receive, the simplest of passes, constantly passing back, waiting for other players (including Algerian ones) to catch up, not shooting, not tackling, not really doing much of anything apart from collecting their vastly inflated salaries.

So I've done some research. Ignoring substitutions and going with the starting lineup, here's what I found.

01 James. Signed for Portsmouth in 2006 for £1.2m. Salary said to be £65,000 per week.
02 G Johnson. Signed for Liverpool in 2009 for £18m. £139k per week
03 Ashley Cole. Chelsea paid £25m for him in 2006. £120kpw
06 Terry. Never moved from Chelsea but Man City offered £50m in 2009. £135kpw
18 Carragher. Never moved from Liverpool and no transfer value or offers found. Using his salary (£75kpw) as a comparator, he'd probably fetch something like £4m on the market.
04 Gerrard. Never moved from Liverpool but Real Madrid rumoured to have bid £85m. £125kpw+
07 Lennon. Signed for Spurs in 2005 for £1m. His last posted salary of £20kpw was improved in 2009 but no figure given.
08 Lampard. Chelsea bought him for £11m in 2001 but there is a more recent Real Madrid rumour of £30m. One of the highest paid in the premiership at £151kpw
14 Barry. A Man City signing in 2009 for £12m. £120kpw
10 Rooney. Signed for Man U in 2004 for £25.6m. His £115kpw is due for review, some say it's set to rise to at least 140kpw, and his transfer value is estimated to be on a par with Ronaldo (£80m)
21 Heskey. Bought by Aston Villa in 2009 for £3.5m (less than his previous two transfers, which probably explains his relatively low salary of around £50kpw).

So there you have it. At conservative estimates, given that many of these numbers are years out of date, the England players on the field yesterday are worth almost THREE HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION POUNDS and between them they earn £1.14 million per week.

Now I know that footballing isn't a 40-hour per week job, and that rates of pay for playing for England differ from "the day job" but assuming it was, and it didn't, then for the 90 minute total shambles we witnessed on Friday 18 June 2010, these "professional" "footballers" earned a total of £42,750. That's about one-and-a-half times the average UK ANNUAL salary.

Worth every penny, I'd say. If you paid me to say it, that is.