There is often a censorious element to the world’s reaction when another footballer signs a contract that will make him a multimillionaire. Isn’t there a point at which the young fellow must ask himself if he will live long enough to spend even a quarter of it? In a world where the gap between the richest and the poorest continues to widen, it seems irresponsible, obscene even, that football clubs, which are still largely supported by working-class people, pay hundreds of millions of pounds in fees and wages to a single player.
Last month, Oxfam reported that runaway inequality “has created a world where 62 people own as much as the poorest half of the world’s population”. At the same time, football, the people’s sport, is building its own table of inequality by making a tiny number of gifted players richer than the entire annual earnings of those who pay each week to watch them.
However, there is a difference between the global inequality among nations and that which operates in the world’s most popular game. For, in football, most of the big money is accruing to those who deserve it: the players. Indeed, the emergence of the Chinese Super League is a guaranteed, gilt-edged pension plan for the world’s best footballers. Not long ago, China would have been regarded as the last chance for an ageing legend to secure one final payday before falling on his property portfolio. Now it is challenging the hegemony of the top European leagues by enticing players in their prime. Last month, Chelsea agreed a fee with Shanghai SIPG for the signature of brilliant midfielder Oscar. The Brazilian 25-year-old will reportedly earn more than £400,000 a week.
Like all the other gifted young players turned into multimillionaires by football, Oscar’s wealth and status will be greeted with some disdain and jealousy. “He’ll be too thick to spend it properly”; “he’d be stacking shelves in a supermarket if he wasn’t any good at football.” The beanpole England striker Peter Crouch, memorably alluded to this when asked what he would have been if he hadn’t been a footballer. “A virgin,” he replied.
Curiously, we are happy to accept that the royal family, many political and business leaders and generals in the armed forces gained their hallowed places in society from the deep reserves of privilege and entitlement that had fallen to their families. Unlike thick aristos and politicians, thick footballers don’t wreak havoc on the nation’s economy and wellbeing.
Football has granted fortunes to myriad businessmen, entrepreneurs and global entities almost since the modern game was invented a century and a half ago. Only in the last 20 years or so have the best players begun to share in these riches. The dedication, sacrifice and hard work expected of these players from childhood, when they were first identified, means very few will have any other means of earning a living when a board of directors deems them surplus to requirements. Injuries permitting, they have a small window of opportunity to exploit their earning potential.
And how many of them will have seen their fortunes eroded by unprincipled agents, dodgy accounting and investment schemes built on sand? Football has always provided opportunities for working-class boys to lift themselves out of poverty and chaos, giving them a lifestyle well beyond the means of previous generations of their families. However, the game can prey on these children and exploit them as they become young adults. For every Zidane, Ronaldinho, Messi and Gerrard, there are thousands who never earned enough to secure their futures after their careers ended. Many others sustained life-altering injuries or became trapped in a spiral of mental illness and addiction.
Every month, it seems that a red-top tabloid gleefully carries another set of pictures of poor Paul Gascoigne drinking himself to death. Gascoigne was the most naturally gifted footballer England had produced since the war. He played football with a smile on his face and played it to be loved. But depression was never far away and, with it, alcohol. Gascoigne is the wretched exemplar for thousands of unknown other professionals who simply couldn’t cope when the roars of adulation abated to a sigh.
Last week, a study of dead players’ brains revealed the first scientific evidence of a link between heading a football and a form of early-onset dementia. The study identified chronic traumatic encephalopathy in players whose families had permitted the use of their brains for analysis after death. Even before this, there had been the usual siren calls for young footballers to be prevented from heading a football. Several years ago, the family of the former Celtic striker Billy McPhail had begun speaking of their suspicions about this. More recently, the former Dundee United player Frank Kopel and former Scotland manager Ally MacLeod, who had a fine playing career in England with Blackburn Rovers, have succumbed to dementia, both at a relatively young age.
These men and others of their generation brought colour into lives all over Britain. They also contributed to the folklore and romanticism that these clubs use to keep the money rolling in. It will please some to prevent children heading a football, but that should not have been the first response to the incidence of dementia among ex-footballers.
Many of these players and their dependants will be forced to sacrifice savings and pensions to be looked after in what passes for Scotland and the UK’s social care programme for the elderly and infirm. It could not be beyond the means of Britain’s richest clubs to establish a fund that would provide free care for their old heroes, build some care homes and finance research into brain conditions. That, though, would seem suspiciously to resemble socialism and, as such, would be a step too far for the avaricious capitalists who run the people’s game.
