Gordon Taylor is paid four times sum of benevolent grants to former players | David Conn

PFA chief executive was paid £2.29m last year while grants to those ill, infirm, in poverty or with mental conditions totalled £530,000

The annual unveiling of the salary paid to Gordon Taylor has become a ritual of public bewilderment, a surfacing of dysfunctional relationships embedded in a flourishing sport. This time the gasps were for £2.29m paid last year to the 73-year-old, who is the chief executive – since 1981 – of the Professional Footballers’ Association, which is still constituted as an actual trade union.

Given the PFA’s distinguished past battling to overturn players’ oppressive pay and conditions, it is customarily noted that Taylor takes home very much more money than the chief executive of any other trade union. The Professional Cricketers’ Association paid its chief executive, David Leatherdale, £137,990 last year; the Rugby Players’ Association in England paid Damian Hopley £134,430.

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