Who do you think should earn one of the highest wages in the country? Probably you’ll think of somebody essential to our country as a whole: the Prime Minister; or somebody who saves lives every day, a fireman maybe, or a doctor. But there are people all over the world who earn more in a week than some of these people earn every year. Footballers. Can this really be fair? Is this just me, or is it horrifically unjust that athletes like Messi get paid so much just for kicking a ball around for a few hours every week?!

Let’s look at how much footballers get paid compared to other jobs. Top footballers like Wayne Rooney and David Beckham can be paid up to a whopping 1048 times more than an average fire-fighter (who is paid £25,000 per year). Lionel Messi, the world’s highest paid footballer, is paid over 193 times more money every year than David Cameron, who manages the whole of the UK! I love a bit of football, but by doing this, we are saying that we value these sportspeople more than other people that we simply could not do without. Messi gets paid a mammoth £27.5 million a year, and the UK’s top paid footballing star, Rooney, gets paid 70p every second! While you have been reading this editorial, he has probably been paid almost £100! You must admit, the value of footballers today is bordering on ridiculous.

Watching football is a great way to relax, and it is an exhilarating game to play, but if you are seriously injured, are you more likely to appreciate a hospital (and medical staff to help you) or a game of football to watch as you lie in agony?

I’m sure that we all, at some point, have wished that things were not so tight, that we had a bit more cash, even that we were rich! Money is the centre of many peoples’ lives, but if you got £30 million every year, what would you do with it? After a while, rooms filled of stuff can be depressing, so do footballers simply let the sums in their bank accounts stack up?

Lionel Messi has a large car collection, featuring cars such as Ferraris and other supercar models. But how many of these cars will the star actually drive? And how many will he buy, just for the buzz of getting something new – like a 4-year-old every time he gets a new toy. I am sure that if these stars got paid a few million less every year, it would make very little impact on their lives, but for families in developing countries who survive on less than 10p a day, it could mean the difference between life and death.

Charities that support families like these are often desperately in need of funds – and I’m talking about thousands. But if top football clubs were to give charities just a million pounds a year, it could mean a life-changing transformation to so many peoples’ lives - while the footballers themselves would be relatively unaffected. The charity WaterAid could use

£1 million to help over 66,000 people have access to a clean water source, improved sanitation and better hygiene, while the RSPCA could buy 20,000 inspectors’ vans, complete with animal first aid kits. Surely hundreds of charities all over the world could find a better use for the massive amounts which footballers are paid than buying hundreds of cars?!

So should footballers be getting paid these mammoth sums? To me, it seems obvious. While there are still people dying of starvation in this world, it’s a no-brainer.