Navratilova v McEnroe: according to their grand slams, who is really worth more to the BBC?

Martina Navratilova is unhappy, and it seems as if she might have a point: she has revealed that while she was paid around £15,000 for her work providing commentary on the BBC’s Olympic coverage, she thinks her fellow pundit John McEnroe received much more: around £150,000.

Looking at their track records playing the game, it’s clear that there might be good reasons for paying them differently. After all, since Wimbledon decided in 2007 that the men and women’s championship should offer the same prize money – becoming the last major tournament to do so – we can say men and women’s grand slam titles are more-or-less equally comparable.

And the figures speak clearly. Out of Navratilova and McEnroe, one has 18 grand slam titles, and the other has just seven. Sadly for the BBC, it is Navratilova who has the greater number of titles, suggesting either that she should be paid around £385,000 for her punditry services, or that McEnroe should take a pay cut and drop to around £5,800 for his.

This is a system that could be extended – the BBC pays both Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer to talk about football, paying the former £1.75m and the latter £450,000 – but their playing records suggest that difference is too big. Going by, say, the number of England caps each received, we should either be upping Shearer to £1.4m or so, or asking Lineker to cut his wage down to a more modest £550,000.

It’s possible to suggest, of course, that such a system would be ridiculous: it would be completely arbitrary to judge someone’s skill and value as a pundit and presenter on their talent in an entirely different field. Anyone suggesting that would be right – that system might be nearly as silly as paying people differently based on something as arbitrary as whether they owned a penis or not. And you’d never catch the BBC doing that, would you?