Taking pay cut to help FA a no-brainer, says England boss Southgate

(Reuters) - England manager Gareth Southgate has said it was an easy decision to accept a 30% wage cut to help the Football Association (FA) mitigate the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Football was suspended in March due to the coronavirus outbreak and England's friendlies against Italy, Denmark, Romania and Austria were cancelled. Euro 2020 was also pushed back by a year.

The FA said the lack of international matches and domestic cup games would cost it 100 million pounds ($125.42 million) and Southgate was among the senior figures to take wage cuts for three months starting in April.

"Firstly, I can’t fulfil the whole part of my job at the moment," the 49-year-old told the Times. "Although I have taken up other responsibilities in this period that didn’t feel quite right.

"The second part is we are different to a club — I would be the highest earner in the organisation and when the organisation is in financial difficulty ... it didn’t feel right to me that I wasn’t contributing to the bigger picture.

"We have a lot of people who do brilliant work in different areas and they are not as fortunate to earn what I earn. It wasn’t something I was looking to make public but I felt it was a no-brainer.”

(Reporting by Arvind Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter Rutherford)