The first reaction on hearing that Shaun Wright-Phillips feels under-appreciated to be offered a new contract worth £70,000 a week is one of weary acceptance. This is England, after all – a country where football enjoys excess in all areas. Or at least at clubs such as Manchester City, where the rich get richer and the players might like to imagine that what they ask for is what they get.
Wright-Phillips is so upset not to get a weekly £100,000 his father, that eternal voice of reason Ian Wright, went on radio this week, without any apparent sense of irony, to denounce City's chief executive, Garry Cook, and the football administrator, Brian Marwood, for "just being a bit full of themselves".
Wright got himself awfully worked up delivering his sense of perspective to the negotiation process. "I'm not sure they know exactly what they are doing deep down," he said of Cook and Marwood. "They [City] called him in and he wanted to sign his deal, sign for the rest of his career so he can be settled and get ready to go [to the World Cup]. But there's these people like Marwood and Cook mugging him off, treating him like a youth team player and not someone who actually wants to be there because of what he thinks Manchester City can do."
It would be too easy to ridicule Wright and much better to ignore him but suffice to say that, for a man of nearly 50, it really is time he learned that saying things extra loud does not necessarily make them sound any better.
The real sense of disappointment from what is threatening to become a grubby little saga emanates from the fact that Wright-Phillips, a man regarded by City supporters as "one of the good guys", seems to believe City's offer to be so far beneath him. The mind strays back to Ashley Cole's infamous derision of Arsenal's £55,000-a-week offer before his defection to Chelsea in 2006 and one of the more infamous quotes of football's W-for-Whatever generation. "I was so incensed," Cole wrote in the brilliantly ghastly My Defence, "I was trembling with anger. I couldn't believe what I'd heard. I nearly swerved off the road."
Except we all knew Cole was a bit of a twerp back then. Wright-Phillips always seemed a bit more sensible, not so showy – less vulgar, if you like. The first time I met him he was stood outside Manchester City's old training ground in Platt Lane waiting for a lift, muddy boots over his shoulder, a thick plume of green snot coming from both nostrils. He was 16 at the time and looked like he came from Lilliput. There was nothing particularly streetwise about him. Platt Lane is in one of Manchester's more unloved districts. Wright-Phillips looked like a little lost kid.
He is 28 now and earns £60,000 a week, with bonuses on top. Or to put in an annual context, as most of us operate anyway, £3.1m a year. That contract will still have two years to run at the end of the season and, ordinarily, City would not start negotiating a renewal until a player was about 18 months from the end of his deal.
His problem is that when he rejoined City from Chelsea in August 2008, it was a few days before the Abu Dhabi United Group's takeover. Bad timing, in other words. To quote Ian Wright: "He signed before all the money came." City are now owned by Abu Dhabi's ruling Nahyan family, the richest men on earth (sitting on 9% of the planet's oil reserves), and Wright-Phillips feels like he has missed out. When Wayne Bridge followed him from Chelsea to City it was on £90,000 a week. Other players have arrived on six-figure weekly salaries. One, Carlos Tevez, has been City's player of the season, but Robinho, Joleon Lescott and Kolo Touré have been erratic at best.
So, incidentally, has Wright-Phillips, despite the goal-scoring substitute's display for England in Wednesday's 3-1 defeat of Egypt. He will also be 30 when his current contract expires and, as Cook and Marwood have pointed out, that is the age when insecurity starts to appear on a footballer's horizon, particularly one who has built his career on his speed.
City have offered a pay rise to £70,000 and a year-long extension, but it has been turned down flat. The argument now put forward by Wright-Phillips's camp is that City seem more willing to reward new signings than players with an affinity to the club – ignoring, of course, that he has already left Manchester once before. Indeed, that might be part of the problem. Moving to Chelsea can have a funny effect on a footballer's ego. There seems to be something about Stamford Bridge that inflates a player's sense of self-importance.
Over at Manchester United, meanwhile, a high-ranking source reports that it will "probably take two minutes" for Paul Scholes to agree the terms of a new contract, without the help or otherwise of any agent, when he gets round to discussing it with the club's board. Scholes, you could say, has a genuine affinity to his club. Wright-Phillips? He is just another on the long list of football's multi-millionaires who thinks he deserves better.
