It's not irrelevant in a thread discussing how the PL and money it brings has helped ruin the game. Plus Rooney gets paid image rights on top of his £300k a week salary.
He's also only rated the 25th best player in the world according to this
http://app.caughtoffside.com/?referrer=https://www.google.co.uk/#article/caughtoffside-180426
30th best according to this
http://m.bleacherreport.com/article...-best-50-players-in-wc2014-qualifying/page/24
And 23rd according to this
http://www.fourfourtwo.com/features/fourfourtwos-top-100-players-world-2013-30-21
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - so please excuse any spelling or grammar errors
My point is that it's not Rooney's wages per se (or indeed his ability) that are the problem. Man Utd can afford to pay those wages. CCFC couldn't afford to pay David Bell or his ilk.
Beckham wasn't the best player, but he was the most marketable. Rooney is the same until another player with the same hype and media attention comes through. That in itself is a commercial product that is worth buying into, hence it should add to his market value. David Bell has no media hype, and makes us little on the pitch (partly due to the skewed payments between leagues and for league position).
Either smaller clubs need more money, or players need to accept that the media perception and the stakes available for the club (i.e. we can't win the Champions League, Man Utd can) affect the pay scale far more than the ability of the player. It's more like movies to be honest. You might be a better actor than Adam Sandler, but you're not worth as much commercially. So much so that a majority should probably be doing it part time or on an amateur basis.
EDIT: another thought is that payments between leagues should be less "stepped" than they are so the difference between top in the Championship and bottom in the Prem isn't measured in 10s of millions. That would reduce the incentive to gamble large amounts on promotion, which not only ruins clubs if it doesn't come off, but distorts the wage market in that division. It would also mean that it's possible to grow a team in a league, getting progressively better and similarly slowly shrink a team as it becomes less successful. If we'd had that we'd have been used to a near L1 budget by the time we went down.
All payments should be based on league position, evenly spaced between the 92, with no bonus payments for winning the league or playoffs and no parachute payments.