Car accident claims and the super-rich footballer

I've always found there to be something slightly distasteful in the amount of money the modern day top-level footballer earns. For simply being very good at a seemingly senseless and completely ephemeral pursuit, in a single week they can earn more than most of their mundane contemporaries can hope to earn in a year. Yet one thing I had not considered was the cost of the outgoings incurred by the average footballer. Perhaps these in some way justify their astronomical salaries?

Extravagant bad taste, vacuous girls with vacuous handbags waiting to be filled and competitive "status buying" all add up to dent the bank balance of most footballers. Then there are the more prosaic costs. I have a friend who works near the top of the hierarchy for a leading insurance firm. He recently told me about one of their policyholders; a first tier international footballer with several years of experience playing in the European Champions League and a passion for fast cars.

While renewing the footballer's policy last year, my friend became privy to a foreign and flashy lifestyle.

At the time, the footballer had six cars two of which were worth nearly £300,000 and wanted to insure himself and his girlfriend to drive them all. It was the cost that shocked me, and for a usually staunch and incorrigible capitalist to be shocked by excess says much. This footballer was willing to spend, apparently, a high-end six-figure sum on insuring his vehicles. Dear reader, I even felt myself seized by my first ever few socialist revolutionary twinges.

My eyes glazed over with incredulity as my friend tried to explain the reasons for this cost to me. Millionaire footballers are high-risk, partly because they have a reputation for being dangerous drivers, partly because are liable to ferry passengers whose mere metatarsals have a market values of millions of pounds. And his customer's predicament was exaggerated by his allegedly appalling driving record.

So, to put it simply: insurance companies charge footballers a fortune because any car accident claim made by a footballer has a high probability of costing an awful lot of money.

Take the example of Brazilian international Adriano. Just last week the Internazionale player suffered a car accident while on holiday. Fortunately, the former Serie A top scorer was not seriously injured, but if he had suffered some kind of permanent personal injury, you can only imagine what kind of car accident claim someone earning £60,000 a week might make.

Any compensation award he would receive would be worth millions of pounds in lost earnings alone. And as his career would be over, the insurance company would have to compensate him for that too. Which, I suppose, says much about the value of insurance for footballers no matter how extortionately priced it seems.

Now that I've come round to the idea and there's no longer any danger of me putting on a beret, growing a beard and calling for the revolution, I think I'll go out and make a "reward purchase" to celebrate my reaffirmed belief in capitalism. How about two tickets to see Arsenal play at the Emirates on the weekend...?

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