Come fly with me on Inter-galactic Travel Services to the Planet Insanity, home, this week, to some new and exotic citizenry.
Come meet Senor Fernando Torres, travelling from the north-west of England to the south-east in exchange for a mere £50 million. Meet Andy Carroll, also known as a striker, and not just on match days, who left the north-east for the north-west for £35m.
And, returning to Earth, drop by Inverness whose transfer window signing came from Hibs for the price of a train ticket, or pop into Falkirk whose entire team almost left the field of play in respect of an unpaid tax bill which would hardly cover the annual grocery outlay at Rooney Towers.
The gulf between the top echelons of soccer and reality has never been wider. Uefa’s attempt to level the financial playing field already looks a busted flush with Chelsea managing to double their debt in a single day – now north of £140m since you ask. It helps to have a Russian billionaire holding the kitty, just as Manchester City can let their oil rich Arabian owner fret about their £120m shortfall. This is craziness on several different levels. Crazy in the first instance to allow the transfer market to balloon into tens of millions being an acceptable price tag for a bloke who sticks a football in the net slightly more often than other blokes.
Utter madness in an already ill divided world to then pay the bloke in question wealth beyond the dreams of the serially avaricious. The day that Senor Torres was able to advise his bank to expect £700,000 a month for plying his hardly arduous trade, there was an advert for intensive care nurses in the same London manor. The pay scale, provided you were fully qualified, was in the range of £25-£34K depending on experience. In other words, a nurse at one of the sharpest ends of the health service would have to work five years to earn what the Spanish dribbler does in a week.
I said insane. For which please read obscene. We disparage the greed of those in the financial services who earn colossal sums of money and then demand bonuses for turning up at work and exercising those perceived skills for which they were hired. But the hall of infamy stretches beyond pinstriped rapacity. Talented young footballers and percentage conscious agents now routinely hold would be employers to ransom.
Fifty years ago precisely, the chair of the Professional Footballers Association in England, one Jimmy Hill, erstwhile player, manager, pundit and star of Tartan Army websites, won what was deemed a famous victory: he got the maximum weekly wage abolished. It was £20. Little could the sage of Seville have realised the staying power of the genie he freed from the footballing bottle. Or the capacity of that genie to transform the salary landscape from tied worker to spoiled brat.
For most of these young men, and their attendant courtiers, have no more of a toe hold on real life than a young city trader whooping it up in the financial fast lane. That few of them are troubled with anything resembling a social conscience is self evident. But too many of them catch that morally debilitating disease of imagining their riches and fame put them beyond the bounds of acceptable behaviour. (Copyright Berlusconi.) The tabloids abound with tales of drunken debauchery, casual drug misuse and serial adultery. They have their way at will with daft lassies in the army of groupies, often in what, in other spheres, would be known by its weekday name of a gang bang, the unsavoury soccer slang for which is roasting.
And firmly in the dock as an accessory before these crimes is the fact that they are paid ludicrous sums and, literally, earn more money than they know what to do with.
And do you know the final irony of this? Whilst the premiership in England is routinely touted as the best league in the world, it has done zero for the health of its national team. Think of the price tag on the team that went to South Africa. And weep.