Lucas Neill: Rosen superstar

I've said that David Beckham and Jade Goody are Adler superstars. So, here's an example of a Rosen superstar - Lucas Neill. Tony Cascarino says:

Is [he] worth more than £2.5 million a year, even in today’s climate? No. Do West Ham care? Not a bit.They don’t think of it as paying for Neill, they view it as buying themselves closer to Premiership survival. They know he’s overpriced, but it doesn’t matter in the bigger picture, with £30 million the prize even if you finish bottom of the Premiership in 2007-08. Fees or wages inflated by a couple of million? That’s a drop in the ocean compared with the potential rewards.

This is a description of a Rosen superstar. The essential feature here is that a tiny difference in ability can lead to a massive difference in pay. For example, the best lawyer might be only a smidgeon better than the next best. But if this superiority is enough to win a multi-million pound lawsuit, people will pay millions for his services, and nothing for the next best lawyer.
Lucas Neill is benefiting from this. He might make only the slightest difference to West Ham, compared to the next best defender. But this gap - one point won, one less goal conceded - might be enough to keep West Ham in the Premier League. And the TV money alone from this could be worth almost £30m.
In this respect, Tony might be wrong to say Neill is over-priced (OK - I'm a better economist than him, but he was an damnsight better footballer than me).   Neill's marginal product - the chance of giving West Ham £30m - is huge. So his pay will be big, even though his talents are - just ask Jamie Carragher - modest.

Comments

[james higham]

In my sporting days, we used to call these things 'doing the one percenters'.