My last three WhatsApp messages: from the family group, excited tidings of a new card game for Christmas; me, reporting on traffic to the teacher of my evening class; from a different part of the family, a photograph of a jumble sale. Not featured: discussions about whether my super-extraordinary, high-end football boots were pinching my toes and therefore contributing to a less-than-perfect performance and – because, hey, it’s all about fun – “a loss of enjoyment”.
Frankly, I’d skip around the centre circle in a pair of mock-croc platforms three sizes too small for the £80,000 a week that Manchester United midfielder Marouane Fellaini is reported to be paid every week. I’d even consider doing the same at Paris Saint-Germain, the club that football’s rumour mill has suggested might be Fellaini’s destination when his contract expires next June.
Footballers – even 30-year-olds who’ve found themselves on the receiving end of supporters’ frustration, as Fellaini has when struggling for form – rarely take a pay cut when they move club. Nonetheless, he might well find use for the £2m he’s seeking from New Balance, the manufacturer of the boots in question.
New Balance terminated Fellaini’s sponsorship deal because he played without the brand’s logo on his boots; he counters that the boots were so sub-par that the logos peeled off. The brouhaha involved grown men swapping messages in the dead of night about ill-fitting footwear, with one New Balance team member informing Fellaini that the problem could be fixed because “we have the big dogs working on this”. Who are these mysterious dogs and just how big are they? We can only hope the court case will reveal their identities and, with any luck, their tips for making uncomfy shoes comfy, a surefire hit in the party season.
(All the points if you can name the last dog to turn up in a high-profile football-related court case. See answer below.)
If I were head honcho of shifting units at Adidas, I’d be all over this like a rash; last week, it relaunched the “classic”, possibly even “iconic”, Predator, with the help of David Beckham and Fellaini’s Old Trafford team-mate, Paul Pogba. If they persuade us the boots are like walking on angels’ wings, we might even overlook the £279.95 price tag (cheaper model available at a mere £199.95).
Ian Herbert’s recent biography of Bob Paisley, Quiet Genius, reveals that Kenny Dalglish used to provide the biscuits for the weekly team talk because he had a pal at McVitie’s, although even then, there were glimmerings of player power: Dalglish, Alan Hansen and Graeme Souness used to get the chocolate ones, therefore known as “the Jock biscuits”, while the others made do with plain.
Clearly, we’ll never get back to Kansas; the gravy train of global football is headed in quite a different direction. It’s not fair to single out Fellaini for wanting to profit from his talent and his hard work – nor for listening to his no doubt highly paid advisers. But we must, surely, turn away from the idea that compensation might be owed to a person whose already enviable situation has not worked out precisely to his or her satisfaction.
Another court case to come to light in the last few days concerns an Oxford graduate suing the university because he didn’t get the first-class degree to which he felt, in some ill-defined way, entitled. Instead, Faiz Siddiqui had to settle for a 2:1 and, consequently, feels that he has not had the career and, indeed, the income he might have done.
The story – in fact, someone’s real life, though it has something so sadly fable-like about it – provokes an ebb and flow of emotions. One reading: we have assigned so great a value to something – a first-class degree from Oxford – that a young man cannot cope with falling marginally short of it and seeks recourse from authorities who cannot possibly compensate for what he has really lost, which is his sense of potential, of specialness, of success. Another: years after the fact – the student in question left Oxford 17 years ago – a man’s life has not gone as he wished and he seeks redress.
That redress takes a particular form: money. His counsel, alleging inadequate teaching and failure to deal appropriately with his medical conditions, which the university denies, points to a subsequent “frankly poor” employment history; the student, now 39, is currently unemployed.
Whether his case has any chance of success remains to be seen. But whether or not the plaintiff triumphs, the last two decades of his life, whatever has caused it to unfold as it has, cannot be returned to him. How much worse might have things gone for him if he hadn’t felt that a first-class degree was the ne plus ultra of achievement?
Dickens, as usual, has the answer to everything. Proceed at once to Bleak House, and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which years of legal proceedings eventually demolish the entirety of the fortune being contested. In Dickens’s hands, it becomes impossible to understand precisely the origins or nature of the matter, simply that it is destructive and entropic. “But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat.”
It’s a long way from your feet hurting to accepting that, in Larkin’s words, “An only life can take so long to climb / Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never”. As for “a loss of enjoyment”, though, once you accept that goes with the territory of being alive, you might be a little further from having to call in m’learned friends.
(Answer: Rosie, the pet bulldog after whom Harry Redknapp named his Monaco bank account.)
