Blamethrower

You might have read in the papers recently that a young Welshman called Gareth was offered a fairly high-profile new job a few weeks ago. He wasn’t sure whether to take it, since it involved relocating abroad, but the monthly salary of £1.11 million was enough to swing his decision. His old employers were paid an £86 million lump sum by his new ones, and everyone ended up happy. Actually, that’s not true. The only really happy people were Gareth, his representatives, and the owners of the two respective businesses, one of whom now has loads of money to re-invest, while the other is planning a marketing campaign in the Far East to cash in on Gareth’s new-found celebrity.

Gareth, you see, is pretty good at his job – in fact, he’s acclaimed far and wide for his talents. So much so that his £256,000 a week salary is earned for roughly a 25-hour week, including around three hours of high-profile work in the community. He also gets lots of additional revenue for his image rights, which is a bonus in every sense when you’re not exactly a looker, and Gareth also has some new friends with whom he can party during his extensive amounts of free time. Indeed, there’s more free time than even Gareth expected, because much of the time, his talents are deemed surplus to requirements, and he’s told to stay at home while other people do his job.

If you re-read those opening paragraphs and think of Gareth as a consultant, or a solicitor, or a motivational speaker, or pretty much any career imaginable, it seems utterly obscene that someone can be paid so well for effectively a part-time job, particularly when the country he’s moved to is Spain, with 56 per cent youth unemployment and a rapidly contracting economy. However, as the more astute of you will already know, young Gareth earns his crust by kicking a plastic sphere into an onion bag strung between three pieces of fibreglass, and he is therefore apparently worth every penny.

Fucking disgusting, isn’t it? The problems and poverty that exist in the world today, and Spurs get £86 million for selling a midfielder to Real Madrid. But that’s the hyper-inflated bubble of football. While you and I balance our cheque books each month and battle to live within our means, the football elite get to enjoy a real-life Brewster’s Millions – every weekly salary of £100,000 or £150,000 needing to be spent on something. The problem is, though, when you’ve already bought an eight-bedroom mansion in Alderley Edge and filled its quadruple garage with Ferraris and Bentleys, what else do you do with your cash?

Well, drugs are out for a start. RDTs and Diego Maradona have put paid to that. Prostitutes are risky, especially now the whole super-injunction thing has been cruelly exposed by Twitter. You could buy more houses in Alderley Edge, but since all your team-mates and players from several other clubs are competing to do the same, that’s not really viable. Foreign holidays are a limited commodity when you only have every second summer off (and even then you often end up doing overtime in China or America), and there aren’t many yachts that can fit up the Manchester ship canal. Your wife would probably love to go on high-end shopping sprees, but even a Victoria Beckham dress is priced in the upper hundreds rather than the thousands, so that’s not going to empty your bank account. Maybe artworks hold the answer, but since most footballers couldn’t tell a Canaletto from a Cornetto, that’s probably not going to happen.

All of which makes me wonder why more footballers don’t use their astronomical wages to do some good in a world that’s clearly desperate for their assistance and cash. A notable few do their best – and quite often the players you’d least expect. Uber-merker Rio Ferdinand funds various charitable initiatives in his childhood suburb of Peckham, while Cardiff’s nutter-with-a-putter Craig Bellamy has a truly heart-warming footballing foundation set up in Sierra Leone for children who wear rags and live in mud huts.

Sadly, these are the glorious exceptions to the inglorious rule. For the most part, the money in football is raised from Sky subscribers, given to football clubs, lavished on player wages and then…what? What do they do with it? Where does it go? How many billions are sloshing around in offshore tax havens, unspent and pretty much unwanted? And, most depressingly of all, how much further does this bubble inflate before it bursts, leaving people like Gareth earning less than ten times as much in one week as the average British worker earns in a year?