Well, here we go again – football is back and footie fans everywhere are revving up for a new season hoping to see their team win something in the seasonal chase for success and glory. In reality of course we all know that for the overwhelming majority of football clubs success on the pitch is simply not going to happen at the level which the fans all dream. But they can be forgiven – for this is the dream business. Often, very expensive dreams at that.
Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, so it is claimed, has offered £86 million pounds for the footballing sensation that is Gareth Bale, a true Welsh Wizard if ever there was one. Tottenham’s chairman, Daniel Levy, apparently values the player at over £100m and it is said that he wants at least £104million before he will let his prize asset leave White Hart Lane. The current world record transfer fee paid for a professional football player is £80million which was paid by Real Madrid to my old club Manchester United for Cristiano Ronaldo in 2009. When Bale is sold, and I reckon that he will be gone very soon, the deal is certain to smash through that current £80m record barrier.
These are mind-boggling figures to many – but not to those involved in the real-life casino game that is the modern day world of high-powered professional football. The game has become the plaything of egotistical, bulging-pocketed multi-billionaires. An international game whereby not even the very well to do common-or-garden everyday multi-millionaires can keep up and gain a seat at the high table where the highest prizes are to be played for and paid for.
In this unreal yet real world the superstar player of genuine world-class talent finds himself to be the bit-part player (albeit for his bank balance a lucky pawn) on a dizzyingly cash-drenched chessboard where the golden idol pieces are lifted and moved by the hand of those with the deepest pockets. This is the superstar football transfer market today. This is how it now works. With the likes of Manchester City’s owner Sheikh Mansour and his family’s reported £100bn fortune at his immediate disposal or Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich, to steer Chelsea into the sloshing sea of big money numbers which now dominates the transfer stakes for the superstar players – then the game has changed forever in this respect of the sums for which top flight players change clubs. This situation will only ever revert to something like half sensible when the whole pack of billionaire rich man’s cards come tumbling down as one day it surely must. I doubt that Uefa’s ( the game’s European governing body ) new initiative of introducing The Financial Fair Play regulations will arrest the trend of big spending by the biggest hitters – these clubs always find a way of attracting the best talent whatever regulations are introduced to kerb their activities.
Bale of course, the straightforward simple boy from Wales, will soon be showered with the riches beyond the dreams of avarice simply for plying his trade of kicking a football about. I only hope this sort of transfer value does not turn the boy into yet another obnoxious footballing prima donna that we see all too many times nowadays strutting their stuff in peacock mode complete with weird hairdos and multi-coloured ink drenched tattoos which scream ego and vanity on a par with the egos of the billionaires that employ them.
Modern-day football has long since left the zone of the ordinary working people that the ‘beautiful game’ used to represent. Few fans under 50 years of age will remember when you could touch your heroes or even chat with them on the bus as they made their way to the training ground with their sandwiches in their kit bag and whose wages were about the same as the fans that shouted their support (together with the often hilarious comments) from the concrete or even wooden railway sleepers and coal ash terraces on which we fans used to stand to watch our team.
No, the game, or shall I say those that play it and those that own our clubs, are certainly different from the time of my own boyhood. A time for me when football watching left such indelible and nostalgic memories that remain as clear in my mind as the day they were made. Today’s billionaire owners and multi-millionaire players live in a completely rarefied and unreal world and one which, if the club is in the top flight, is light years away from the majority of football fans that pay to see their team play every week.
Many of our big teams in big cities will perhaps not field even one local player, perhaps not even one Englishman because this is now a sport about winning and only winning at all costs – it is no longer about keeping things as local as possible or even English. It has little to do with community or anything else for that matter. For today’s big time owners coming second in the frantic race for honours is simply not good enough. Today’s golden game is only about the hunting of the golden baubles and of players chasing the biggest wages whose mercenary agents will hawk their players’ talent anywhere to get another fat payday for themselves and their greedy charges. Owners of clubs only seek to get their hands on the golden trinkets – the gilded idols to be delivered to their pharaoh-like table and they will pay whatever its costs in their unrelenting pursuit of this goal.This is all that matters. This is the name of the game for the new-boy billionaires who control the sport at the highest top flight level.
When, rather than if, Bale moves to Real Madrid the fact that he will take home net weekly wages of some £150K (yes, that is net after tax) or a straight net £7.8million per annum for playing his footie – is nowadays almost neither here nor there as far as the agents or the players are concerned. Football agents, together with the very weak and inept football management of the FA together with the other footballing governing bodies have long since been the very scourge of the industry and they too sold out its soul to the worship of cash and cash alone a long time ago. These bodies do not give a hoot where the money comes from so long as it comes. And, for a young lad from the land of how green is my valley – Bale and his agents have known for quite sometime that his valley is no longer green – it is a glittering gold – coloured by the fact that his talent is much in demand from the big hitting football gold hunters of our day. Those who pull the strings of Bale’s career are about to call-in that first massive payday within the very near future – perhaps even before the end of this transfer window which ends on 2nd September.
But is the player worth that sort of money that chimes in at around £104million? A year or so ago I said to one Tottenham season ticket holder:
“ You’re lucky. You have the greatest talent in British football. The best player in the game (perhaps even in the world on his day) that I have seen for a very long time. The player has everything: speed, balance, strength – he can shoot with either foot, he can dribble from deep like the best, he has a great engine, he can play anywhere, and, most importantly of all – he scores goals – not just goals but great goals. The boy is worth £100million plus in today’s silly, cash sloshing transfer market. ”
That Spurs season ticket holder that I uttered those words to was the writer, Phillip Vine. Whilst Phillip may have lifted an eyebrow at my valuation thinking it “a little overly ambitious” – he seemed to agree with everything else I said in my assessment of the player. There can be no doubt that this latest football talent to emerge from these sceptre football isles is of genuine world class. And, Phillip should know. Not only is Phillip a very good writer and poet – he’s a pretty shrewd judge of football talent himself, too. Phillip has watched this particular player week-in and week-out from just a few yards away from the Spurs pitch in his seat as a long time season ticket holder at White Hart Lane. But even Phillip, a devout comeonyouSpurs supporter if ever there was one – jibbed at the £100m+ price tag.
In a way Phillip is right but probably not for the reasons that he had in mind when he raised an eyebrow and glanced a disbelieving look my way at what he thought to be overly ambitious price tag to place on the pacey Welsh Wizard’s head.
But there is another issue here. Because, in the real scheme of things, not even the very best players in the world should command that sort of crazy cash. It seems almost pukingly obscene for mere footie players to command those sort of transfer fees. Players bought and sold like champion prized racehorses for oodles and oodles of dosh or as if they were some ancient rare and important antiquity – simply to satisfy the unbridled ego of some football club president–cum-chairman-cum-owner of a football club – seems somehow to be as ridiculous as it is bizarre.
The fans are to blame too – at least to some degree – and they should share some of the responsibility for this crazy state of affairs that governs the way our top teams are run. Because most fans of clubs will care not one jot where such oodles of cash is coming from so long as it is going to bring to their team a star that will see their team win a trophy or climb up a League table. This is what owners and fans share – they are both in the hunt for glory in the unbridled glory game.
Owners and fans lose all rational sense in their mutual desire to see victory as they chase the dream of lifting little tin idols to further massage their ego and swell their vanity to the heights of Everest as they all seek to bask in the reflected glory of their team as they seek to wallow in triumph that such victories bring to the victorious.
Such excessive player transfer fees, even if it is to pay for an exceptional talent like Gareth Bale, also distorts and over inflates the entire football transfer market. So then we see very average Johnny-come-lately players moving between clubs for sums which in no way reflects their real value on the pitch. Again, that’s just the way it works and no doubt the Professional Football Association (PFA) boss, one Mr Gordon Taylor, thinks that such obscene amounts of cash for a footballer is perfectly proper. And, of course for his members that is the way he feels it should be. After all, for a man who is believed to be the highest paid trade union official in the world whose £1m a year salary plus top of the range motorcar and other fancy perks – what else would or could you possibly expect? The PFA chairman’s salary package being more than six times what the prime minister of our country earns rather says it all really in respect of how unbelievably insane our football game at the top level has become.
It seems to me that almost everyone involved in the sport of top flight professional football just wants to get his or her snout deep into the trough of money that now governs every aspect of the game. Now, I know that this will sound a bit rich coming from me – the very man who – so some writers claim – was the catalyst that pulled the trigger on the starting pistol of the race towards the game pursuing the notion of pure naked commercialism – but I do wonder how on earth the real governing powers that be at the FA and elsewhere have lost control of the whole thing in such a short space of time? For me, turning clubs into profit making machines was only ever supposed to foster the good of the game in my book – it was not meant to simply line the pockets of slippery football agents and over paid, preening, tattoo invested, prima donna footballers.
Further, it is a sad and lamentable fact that many of our teams have long since lost their close affinity with their local communities in which they live. Many of our top flight clubs have never been so remote from the average football fan. And, for me, that is the biggest loss in our modern day game. Top-flight clubs no longer have much to do with the towns and cities that they claim to represent and this sense of belonging to, hailing from a particular place was always the essential ingredient that provided the binding essence that cemented the potent link between club and community. That sentiment has now gone. It has long since drowned in the sea of TV money and the influx of foreign owners from distant lands with their oodles of cash. At the highest level of the game – it is this phenomenon that seems to have changed our football game forever.
More importantly, I always ask myself when I see and hear of these dizzying sums of money on the table for a single player – just how many mosquito nets could the proposed Gareth Bale money, either the transfer fee itself or his £7.8m per year wages, buy to protect young children in third world nations from terrible diseases like malaria? Well, yes, I know, no one likes to think of those things and in those terms because, as I freely admit, you might just as well apply that sort of logic to every single commodity you might think of – but you take my point.
Nevertheless, I’m pretty confident that I’m right on the point about unbridled ego and pumped-up vanity of football club owners who chase the dream of victory in their drive and desire to be seen lifting little tin gods high in the sky in self-satisfied celebration – because I’ve done that myself. As an ex-football club chairman-cum-owner – I reckon I know a bit about what these chairman-cum-presidents are like and what motivates them to cross the winners line first. Of course, I never had anything like the sort of mega millions these new owners are able to play with – but ego and vanity knows no bounds when chasing football trophies – whatever the size of the pocket. That much I can assure you is true.
Is Gareth Bale worth the cash? If you’re a mega rich football club owner then you bet he is and he will be sold for £100m + very soon – that much I can guarantee. If you’re a sane, sensible down-to-earth human being with values that make sense, then, no, the player is not worth the price of a King’s Ransom and neither is any player on the planet – anyone with half a brain would agree with that obvious fact.
But, for all that I mourn the passing of a time when our footballing heroes might have travelled with us on the bus with their sandwiches in their kit bag instead of zooming past in the latest flashy limousine to the nearest fashionable trendy expensive restaurant – I still can’t wait for the start of a new football season. I can’t wait to share in the thrills and excitement of watching great athletes on top of their game. For me, too, just like any other fan I long to look on in awe at the brilliance of young men like Gareth Bale play with the wizardry and talent of a mesmerising football magician as they entertain us as all as they ply their trade. And, in the end – money or no money – that is the unbreakable thread that holds all genuine football fans together – whatever the price.
