The adage “honest bunch of lads” has historically been heard in abundance during football, with many saying that it is now an outmoded and outdated term often derogatorily used by managers who try hard but produce very little. However, at the core of the statement is something that is the antithesis of the public image of footballers. For me it, initially evokes images of David O’Leary explaining why we lost the last match against “Average United”. In this instance O’Leary was, of course, talking about the efforts of footballers.

Yes, footballers. Often as equally reported on for who’s wife they are screwing, or their drunken antics, as they are for scoring goals and winning trophies. Of course this sort of behaviour goes on outside of football as many young (and old) people make foolish decisions. However, the average young person getting done for fighting isn’t going to be seen as a role model by kids on a grand scale. The same can not be said for footballers – a group that many young people look up to.

Football – running out of money, running out of morals

Football has been morally bankrupt for quite some time due to an abundance of money, but it has also shown in sporadic intervals that it can be financially bankrupt too. The headline “Football club goes into administration” has been one that has recurred in recent years with increasing frequency. Nobody can doubt that at the very bottom end, i.e. semi-professional and below, running a football club can prove to be a costly business. It isn’t therefore any surprise when local minnow clubs shut down as a result of crowds of fifteen men and a dog failing to provide the funds for “continued development of the football club.” However, when clubs are receiving £50m per year from Sky alone in TV rights, one has to question what is going wrong when a club experiences financial difficulties. To make a Premier League club bankrupt takes a hell of a lot of paying on the never never (Man United/Portsmouth), having your rich playboy owner decide your club is no longer interesting as a play thing (future Chelsea/Manchester City), or paying too many poor players “star” wages (what would have been future Aston Villa).

Which all brings me back to the title of this article – the “star” player. I use the term “star” both in quotation marks, and as opposed to superlatives such as “good”, “great”, or “talented”, as I want to illustrate a particular demographic of player. This player believes in himself, or is made to believe by his agent/manager/family/anyone, that he is “better” than the club he plays for. At this point the foot stomping, table banging and whatever methods required begin. Suddenly we’ve got an “unhappy” player. In today’s game, an “unhappy” player is the morale bomb waiting to go off.

He is often seen to be unhappy at the possibility of playing for a Premier League club that “doesn’t win anything”, “is only mid table”, “doesn’t pay me what I am worth”, or in some other way besmirches his paymasters. In short, this player has ideas above his station, and he will do anything he can to get out of where he feels “undervalued”.

Anatomy of the game

The underpinning reason for this behaviour in sport is that this type of player is fed by greed, who are fed by an agent structure which, in turn, is fed by greed. They are also fed by family members who over-hype their kin the same way as the family members of deluded singers on X Factor. Plenty of hype, but very little end product. For that, think how Ian Wright talks about Shaun Wright-Phillips’ not getting another £20k pay rise at Man City. I’m sure without even explicitly mentioning names, you can fill your own gaps in with regard to people who are at, or have been at, our club.

The other aspect of what creates such greed is that the sport is constantly rated highly by the people of this country. For as long as fans will continue to pay for tickets, merchandise, Sky TV subscriptions, and other assorted sports related paraphernalia, so the sport will be full of cash. It would be very easy of me to say “Stop spending your money at our club” but there is an innate Mexican standoff situation involved whereby if we stopped spending it wouldn’t make the sport better off, merely lead to Aston Villa folding. Either way, there are players in the sport who are legitimately over-paid and under-paid.

Just like every other living creature, footballers have varying degrees of ability. For every stupendously talented individual like Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, there is a journeyman player who does just enough to carve out a living from the game. However, in these strange politically correct times of “equality”, we are force fed the belief that we are no better or no worse than any of our peers. I remember being told years ago by a politically correct bureaucrat that “There is no failure, merely delayed sucess”. Whilst one applauds the morale building, overtly saccharine, nature of such a concept, it frankly deludes individuals that they can be good at everything, and/or that continued effort always brings rewards. This couldn’t be further from the truth. One can waste a life following a dream that is unachievable due to limitation, and end up filled with regret looking back at all that time wasted on the wrong choices as a result.

Sadly the original concept of equality, i.e. that you or I have no more a divine right to be alive than any other, has been bastardised by nanny state pseudo do-gooders to make people believe that they might be entitled to the wages of Messi or Ronaldo purely for the fact that they happen to play the same sport.

Of course I would appear idiotic if I didn’t believe that some players are of a higher financial earning potential than the club they start at, or have moved to. Take Joe Hart for example. He would hardly be best placed at Shrewsbury for his long term career, but then he hardly moved for a wad of cash. Gareth Barry, whether we want to hear this or not, wanted to leave Villa to get his shot at the Champions League. Had he gone to Liverpool, then people might not have reviled him so much, but going to Manchester City smacked of a big money move. That said, this year the move might have finally paid off for him. However the people I am talking about are either average players who assume they are great players, or good players who think they are stars.

In terms of sheer opportunism, it is a tad harsh for me to single out the footballer as something of an unusual entity amongst other human beings. Those that shook their fists when James Milner left us to go to Manchester City for a wad of cash probably did so in a rather hypocritical manner. After all, if a competitor had offered to vastly increase their wages to move company, a lot would find any possible way to reduce their notice period and disappear off as fast as they can.

Does a short career justify high wages?

In contrast to the usual man or woman who works till a retirement in their 60s, nobody will argue against the statement that footballers do not have the longest careers in the world. However barring some massive degree of idiocy (or psychological addiction), then earning £20-30k a week (an average Premier League player’s wage) and blowing it is unlikely. After all, could you spend £1m (ok about £600-700k post tax) a year, year on year, on practical items? One would imagine not as after you’ve got your home, holiday home, flash car, or whatever you want to make you “happy”, the day to day isn’t going to cost extraordinary amounts. On top of that, there is the not too outlandish concept that maybe footballers might want to turn their hand to something else after the age of 35 or so. After all, you’re hardly dead and buried at that age.

Moving on to the problem with our club at present, it is that we have fringe players who are, or have been, on money that some clubs would struggle to pay their main players. Take for example Habib Beye. Blackpool don’t pay Charlie Adam the amount of money that we pay Beye to not even sit on the bench for us. Of course we are a bigger club, but one has to worry about players becoming lackadaisical, or moving for the wrong reasons when offered a chance to move to Aston Villa. We have people of several categories at our club:

We have those like Steve Sidwell, Richard Dunne, Habib Beye, and James Collins to name but a few. These players are paid way more than any other club in the country would be willing to pay for them. We’ve sold Steve Sidwell now, but the remaining people are still there to cost us a lot of money without any long term future at the club. However, our ability to sell these players is severely hampered by the realistic lack of clubs who would match their wages. Therefore, in the views of these players, they will think it is well within their rights to demand they stay on a drip of money until their three, four, or five year contract runs out. After all, why cut your nose off to spite your face?

We have Stephen Ireland. A man who has no motivation at all when it comes to playing for the club. Angry fans will point to the massive wages that he is on, but his problems go a lot deeper than paying him money. Ok, I have the invaluable insight of psychology to view players as more than life blood sucking parasites on our club, but there is clearly an ongoing personality trait issue that taints his ability. More money isn’t going to do him more good, but he is so stuck in an obsessive materialistic lifestyle that he sincerely (although in a somewhat deluded manner) believes it is. His personality is a product of a somewhat tumultuous mind set and, in my opinion, he really needs to get that resolved before he will ever evolve as a footballer.

We have Gabby. Few will doubt Gabby’s commitment to the club in terms of being a fan. However, this alone is far from sufficient to justify his position amidst the ranks of Premier League earners. By comparison, few would invariably doubt my commitment to the club as a fan, but I wouldn’t expect to be paid thousands of pounds a week to turn out for a team that I am just not good enough for. Therefore we have to question if we can afford, as an enterprise, to keep players on who are only average.

Finally, we have players such as Ashley Young. Ashley has had some good games for us, although most would agree that these came at the early part of his career with Villa. He was given a lot of support by our former manager, and therefore has had his confidence boosted massively to the point of over-estimation. Whilst few people would say Ashley is a poor player, quite a lot of Villa fans would say he seems to have got a different view of himself in his head than the Ashley Young that plays for the club.

In terms of psychological evolution, the whole “superstar” lifestyle has followed the Sky money cash injection and illustrates an even bigger picture of the human psyche. We are, after all, a race that has evolved based upon a fractious and selfish genetic process. So to see that in an already “dog eat dog” world, people starting to get selfish isn’t overly surprising to even the most casual anthropologist.

Footballers really aren’t much different to the rest of us – just better paid

The erratic migration of player from club to club also evokes a base issue in society in that we have, as a species, been brought closer and closer to as years have gone by. The issue comes from a lack of desire to want to work for success, and merely have it dropped in your lap with gift wrapping. Whether the motivation for doing less is one of life being made easier for us because of technology, medicine, or some other advancement, one can scan a TV schedule nowadays and see numerous “talent” shows that attract people who want to go from zero to hero (or heroine) in the space of a series of TV programmes. Whatever happened to the idea of graft, sweat, blood, and tears? Are we really that obsessed with instant culture? Sociological analysis would certainly say so. Natural selection would have killed reams of us in one way or another hundreds of years ago, but our creature comforts mean that we feel whatever we have is a “right” rather than a “privilege”. In short, we’ve never had it so good.

One can look at the wider societal view of the human race, and things really aren’t much different. In every walk of life, in every country, in every creed, in every job, there are people who have aspiration. On the flip side, there will always be plodders so, to that end, football is only really a reflection of the general societal picture. We all know footballers are massively well paid, but once you are in the culture of earning an amount of money that your job dictates you are “worth”, it is very easy to accept that as the de facto standard. Is a footballer worth £50k a week? If he brings in crowds, and crowds are willing to pay to see him, then yes. We can find people in any walk of life who are over-paid, as well as those who are under-paid.

I have had periods in my life where I have earned very well, and could have been viewed by others as being over-paid had the general population known my salary. However, I have always brought something to the table that clients want and, in that regard, I am no different as a person to a footballer. If I can save a client millions of pounds in a year, then I am worth a decent wage. If David Beckham can sell shirts and make a club money, he is worth the same. I’m not saying for a second that we are in any level the same in terms of wage parity, but the concept is the same. People who make an organisation money (or save them it) will always be valued relatively higher than those in their peer group, and that is why they get paid well (for the most part). Should I get paid £20-30k just because the average might be that? I would say not as I think there are better ways to reward others than a Stalin-esque Communistic “equality”.

The fact of the matter is the belief inside the individual as to whether they are under-paid or over-paid is one of ego. However, ego is a very powerful thing, and it will rarely acknowledge error. So will we ever see the end of the egocentric footballer? Sadly, not until his industry or, at the very least, one of the top four clubs in the country collapses.

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