Soccer Wages

Reinhard Rauball, president of the Deutsche Fussball-Liga (DFL), told Kicker sports magazine on Monday that a solution on the issue should involve the European football body UEFA.

Rauball said maximum payments for players should be a fixed percentage of a club's budget.

"You could, for instance, say that a maximum 50 percent of the (club's) budget could be spent on personnel," Rauball told Kicker.

"I would like to tackle this issue. It must be dealt with on a European level, UEFA must be involved," he said.

Sky's the limit

Ever since the professionalization of soccer, wages have been on a constant increase.

By 2006, the average annual earnings of a professional soccer player in the English Premier League stood at 676,000 pounds (692,000 euros, $980,000), a survey conducted by the Professional Footballers' Association showed.

That figure can rise by between 60 percent and 100 percent when performance-related bonuses are taken into consideration.

Strikers earned the most of any team member with 806,000 pounds, and goal keepers earned the least on average with 533,000 pounds.

In recent years, transfer fees for some of Europe's elite soccer stars have reached 50 million euros, with the record fee of 76 million euros being paid by Spanish club Real Madrid to Italy's Juventus for Zinedine Zidane in 2001.