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| May 30, 2002 | Thursday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 17,1423 |
Big bonuses beckon at World Cup
SEOUL, May 29: It used to be enough to play for your country and win. Not these days.
In a big bucks business like professional soccer, no one at the World Cup is playing for free and winning the game’s most prestigious prize comes with a lucrative bonus attached.
Spain’s squad could be the biggest money winners if they lift the trophy, with each player standing to reap a $445,000 bonus from their national federation if they go all the way. Coach Jose Antonio Camacho would get double that amount if Spain win the tournament.
France are offering their players $290,000 each if they retain the title, one third more than they earned in 1998 for winning the tournament.
They will get $190,000 if they finish runners-up and, like many of the other teams at the month-long tournament beginning on Friday, nothing if they bow out in the first round.
Germany will reward their players with a more modest $85,000 each if they win the World Cup, while Italy’s cash-strapped federation has actually cut the bonus on offer for victory from the sum it dangled in front of the squad in France four years ago.
The Italians still stand to pocket $160,000 each if they bring the World Cup home for a record-equalling fourth time.
“It’s not a problem that it is less than it was four years ago,” midfielder Angelo Di Livio said earlier this month after helping to negotiate the prospective payout.
“Personally, I would pay out of my own pocket to win the World Cup.”
Brazil, the only country to win the World Cup four times, have offered their players $175,000 each for a fifth title.
Russia, apart from their bonuses, have an added incentive from a private benefactor who has offered a $70,000 Porsche to the team’s man-of-the-match in every game the side win.
Bonus payments to internationals have soared in the past decade, with even smaller nations playing at the World Cup digging deep to come up with monetary morale boosters — sometimes under duress.
Cameroon agreed to fork out a reported $42,000 to each member of the squad after the players refused to board a plane in Paris en route to Japan in a dispute over bonuses for qualifying that delayed their arrival by four days.
“We just wanted to rectify things so that from now on greater respect would be given to us,” Cameroon captain Rigobert Song told the newspaper Mutations after the row was resolved.
Nigeria were forced to call off a friendly against Egypt in January after the players refused to travel to Cairo, saying they had not been paid a promised $70,000 team bonus for reaching the World Cup.
Co-hosts South Korea, who have never progressed beyond the first round of a World Cup, are promising big money for any measure of success for their team.
Each member of the squad will get $175,000 for making the last 16, with the team’s Dutch coach Guus Hiddink standing to pocket a reported $1.8 million if he defies all the odds and takes the side to World Cup triumph.
Another foreign coach, Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson, will add $730,000 to his #3.6 million annual pay cheque if England win the World Cup for the first time since 1966.
The England players are on a promise from their football association of $360,000 each for victory, aside from what they stand to gain from personal sponsorship deals.
The vast sums involved — one British newspaper said Eriksson alone would earn $14.5 million this summer from private endorsement contracts — have led to charges that the World Cup has become as much a tale of greed as glory.—Reuters
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