BACK IN 2004 steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal spent in and around €37 million on his daughter’s wedding in Paris, a budget, you’d have to assume, would cover an awful lot of bouquets, beef or salmon and Baked Alaskas.
In the same year the Indian bought a house from Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone in London, the price quoted at anywhere between €60 million and €76 million – either way, costly enough.
It’s a wonder, then, the 59-year-old has any money left at all, but in the Football Rich List Top 100, unveiled yesterday by FourFourTwo.com, he’s at the summit, worth €1.5 billion more than his closest rival, Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nayan.
While Sheikh Mansour’s investment in City has left them so flush manager Mark Hughes probably has €11,000 curtains on his office window, Queens Park Rangers’ supporters might wonder why they’re stuck mid-table in the Championship when they’re co-owned by Mittal, Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore. The Italian was manager of Formula One team Renault until he had to resign last month because of his involvement in race fixing at the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.
It was Briatore who persuaded Mittal to invest in QPR in 2007, €217,000 (chicken feed) buying him a 20 per cent stake in the club. Mittal, whose son-in-law Amit Bhatia is vice chairman at Loftus Road (he’s the fella who married Mittal’s daughter in Paris), is said to be considering buying out Briatore’s 54 per cent stake, a process that could be speeded up by the Football League if they choose to ban the Italian from holding a majority interest in the club.
So, if Mittal becomes the main man at QPR and chooses to treat them as generously as his daughter’s nuptials, they could soon be laughing.
Languishing in third place, a pauper by comparison to the top two, is Roman Abramovich, the wage bill at Chelsea leaving him having to get by on €8.5 billion. In sixth is one of our own, Denis O’Brien. True, he owns just 2.82 per cent of Celtic, roughly Aiden McGeady’s left leg, but owning any of it at all is enough to earn him a place on the list. And he has, after all, demonstrated his devotion to the game by helping the Football Association of Ireland pay some of Giovanni Trapattoni’s salary.
Dermot Desmond, the largest shareholder at Celtic (he owns a 37 per cent stake in the club, estimated to be worth €15 million), has to make do with 12th spot on the list, but that’s still some distance ahead of the first player to appear, predictably enough: David Beckham.
Beckham’s career earnings to date are €135 million, a quarter of that sum coming from Asia where his celebrity has had many a young man and woman stampeding to buy just about any product he has endorsed.
Michael Owen is second on the players’ list, hefty wages and signing-on fees at Liverpool, Real Madrid, Newcastle and Manchester United, along with strings of endorsements and investments, putting him on €41 million. Three United team-mates – Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand and Ryan Giggs – are next on the list, with Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard and four Chelsea players completing the top 10.
Damien Duff, at 15th, is the highest placed Irish player, the Dubliner’s worth estimated at €13 million. Bulky wages at Chelsea and Newcastle (where he was earning €76,000-a-week), signing on fees, property investments in Ireland (granted, we could now be looking at negative equity), homes in London, Newcastle and the Caribbean, as well as his contract with Lucozade make up the figure.
Roy Keane might be struggling with Ipswich these days but only Fabio Capello tops him in the managers’ rich list – with Alex Ferguson, of all people, worth less than his former captain. Keane was on wages of close to €110,000-a-week in his final years at United – add to that the earnings from his autobiography (which included an advance of over €1 million) and the €6.5 million he collected in his three years as Sunderland manager and, well, Triggs won’t go hungry.
