Footba' crazy, footba' mad.........

I belong to an oppressed and endangered species.  I loathe, detest and despise  ‘the beautiful game’ and everything that goes with it.

 

Its lifeblood is greed.

 

There is something repellent about kicking a plastic ball around a field for 90 minutes and being paid obscene amounts of money. The average Premier League player pulls down £2.3 million a year. Wayne Rooney will trouser £73 million for his five-year contract, Ferdinand £44 million, Garrard £42 million, Mourinho £40 million, Lampard £39 million, Ronaldo £80 million, Messi £52 million .

 

In Britain, footballers occupy 7 of the 10 ‘rich list’ places. Time was when the boyhood heroes, Tommy Lawton, Wo’or Jackie, Stanley Matthews, got by on £12.50 a week!

 

But King of the Midden is Brand Beckham, worth a cool £500 million (to be fair, he personally donates to charities, especially these for children, including £3.4 million that he earned playing for Paris St Germaine).

 

The Premier League is said to be the richest football league in the world. Its TV rights deal nets over £5 billion. It is so awash with cash that there is possibly no need to charge for tickets, and yet Liverpool attempted to increase its ticket price over £70 but was forced into retreat when 10,000 fans walked out f a home game in protest.

 

But all this fades into relative insignificance when the massive corruption and embezzlement right at the top remains uncorrected.

 

FIFA has been a byword for fiscal crime over many years. It was only when Blatter finally overreached himself that the balloon burst. It was common knowledge for years that Blatter couldn’t lay straight in bed, but the world of football simply shrugged its shoulders and he kept getting re-admitted to the cookie jar. Meanwhile, pardon us if we ae a little cynical about  the successor’s ability to clean up the mess. One hopeful sign is that the new man is not a machine FIFA place-man; he is currently head of UEFA and uncontaminated by FIFA history.

 

And to pile on the ordure, at League and club level, match-fixing has been described as ‘endemic’. In 2013, Europol investigated 680 match-fixing allegations in 30 countries.

 

Then there is the constant invasion of our personal space. Hours of prime-time TV are taken up with matches, often between teams largely known for their obscurity. The most common sound in pubs these days is of a commentator shouting his head off as if he had no microphone and who is watching in a warm studio – not even present at the game. The accompaniment is the yells and roars and fist-waving from the customers as if they were.

 

There is a pub nearby that has been extensively and tastefully renovated and furnished. There are three comfortable bars. In each one there is a massive flat-screen TV blaring out a match often between two  foreign teams with the commentary in Italian. But perhaps all is not lost. Some pubs now advertise ‘No football’ as a major attraction, which, of course, it is.

 

Worst of all, perhaps, is  the death of conversation. In male company the talk is all about how Man United fared or whatever. They are indifferent to the louche behaviour of some players, yet scarcely a week passes without a front-page story of some sexual or other misdemeanour.

 

As to the financial scandals, they couldn’t give a damn.