Football

It’s a divisive subject, make no mistake about it. The very mention of the game will have some people frothing at the mouth about a mistake (or wonderful piece of skill) while others will be equally animated about what a pointless game it is, supported by neanderthals.

I like football, but I’m not a neanderthal (although I am biased). I think my enjoyment came from playing the game first, as a kid, and being a fan came second. Still, I enjoy watching the best players in the world dazzle audiences with breathtaking moments of skill. Like most people though I do not enjoy watching some chancer collapse like he’s been shot in the face because an opposing player brushed his elbow. Gamesmanship, or ‘cheating’ as I like to call it, is increasing within the game but I see little effort to stamp in out (excuse the pun). These cheats never seem to be punished after the game when video replays clearly show they’ve tried to con the ref (and a couple of million people watching). How do these guys have the nerve to face anyone when they know TV cameras will have captured them writhing around the floor in pretend agony before jumping to their feet with a smile on their face once the referee falls for their charade and cautions the other player? It’s embarrassing.

What gets me really going is the word soccer; a word invented to describe football by people who barely play the game (because they quite liked the name football and wanted it for their own sport). Look, we had it first okay? Please make the effort to come up with a more appropriate name for American football. If we’re being accurate, maybe you could go with Handegg since you throw the ball and it’s shaped like an egg. See what I did there? How you can pretend to call a game football when neither a foot nor a ball is involved is beyond me.

I have nothing against the game of American football. It doesn’t really interest me and I don’t find it entertaining but, as an Englishman, I’m not about to go down the ‘real men play rugby’ road I hear so often because I do understand the differences. In rugby you play the ball, in American football you play the man and if someone weighing 130kgs was running at me with the sole intention of flipping me upside down then I’d want armour too. And maybe a gun.

Of course the thing which really gets the anti-football brigade in gear are the salaries. As we know, there is no salary cap in place. When the old English First Division ceased to exist and was replaced by the Premier League (in 1992), the average salary of a player in the league was reported to be £75,000 per year. By 2000 this figure had risen to £409,000 and was up to £676,000 in 2003. Now it’s around £1,200,000. That’s more than £21,000 a week, which is around the national average wage… for a year.

Let’s not forget that those are the average figures. Some will be earning less, but then many of them do little more than warm the bench for a team fighting relegation week in, week out. At the other end of the scale some players are earning mind boggling figures. After Wayne Rooney stated his intention to leave Manchester United he was eventually persuaded to stay and this was doubtless aided by a significant pay rise. Estimations vary, but the figure banded around is around the £200,000 mark… a week. That’s a cool £10m a year, before personal sponsorship deals. It’s not that unusual though and there are more than a few players on similar amounts of money, if not more. When Christiano Ronaldo left Manchester United for Real Madrid in a world record £80m transfer in 2008 he struck a deal which earned him cash by the bucket load. But the salaries from their clubs don’t present the whole picture. According to Forbes, David Beckham and Ronaldo collected £29.3m and £27.1m respectively last year. Reckon you could get by on half a million pounds a week?

The trouble is, people see these figures and they then see the country in a recession and people struggling to pay rent. What do these footballers do that deserves so much money – a ludicrous amount of money? They’re not curing cancer and they’re not saving lives, they’re simply playing a game that many people do across the world for free. Fans are being charged more and more at the turnstiles and must wonder sometimes why they bother when they see a dire performance from one of their team’s players before he hops in his Lamborghini and heads back to his eight bedroomed mansion.

The answer is simple: supply and demand. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. You might not agree with Ronaldo’s wages but the point is that you cannot do what he can with a football. People pay to be entertained by him, media pay for broadcast rights and companies pay to be associated with him. Absolutely, it is a far less significant role than the nurse at your local hospital but many more people are capable of performing that role and the salary reflects it. It might not be right and it might not be moral, but it is the way of the world.

Former player Robbie Savage waded into a discussion on the subject, citing that his fellow professionals were worth the money. He was quoted out of context by the press, even though he said that soldiers and medical professionals should be paid more. His final point was “who wouldn’t take the money if it’s on offer?”

Football is not alone in this respect. Forbes list the top ten highest paid athletes and it only contains two footballers. The rest come from boxing, golf, basketball, tennis and American football. Despite Tiger Woods suffering sex scandals, the break-up of his marriage and the loss of sponsors he probably wouldn’t get out of bed for Ronaldo’s wages. He reportedly pocked £37.8m last year. Although that’s a huge amount of money he was still beaten by Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao with the former collecting a very tidy £54.2m. I’m sure that’ll be comforting while he’s sat in his jail cell.

There has to be a ceiling for these wages, but you wonder where it is. Go back to my earlier figure of £21,000 a week for the average player in the English Premier League and compare that to the £100 earned by players when England won the World Cup in 1966. That’s quite some increase (even when you include inflation).

Having said that, after England’s recent performances many people would have begrudged them earning even £100. This is a common complaint: do these millionaire footballers care? Of course they care, but do they care enough? After all they’re set for life and have everything they need. I’ll be honest, I can’t understand an argument which revolves around saying, “you’re paid a fortune, just do better”. You could pay me millions and I wouldn’t be any good; the money is irrelevant in that respect.

Experts

This is going to maybe sound a bit odd, so bear with me a second: what is the point in having experts? There exists at least a thousand ‘experts’ in absolutely anything you could possibly mention. Don’t believe me? Name something then. There are experts in everything from growing grass to putting a bloke on the moon.

I’m not decrying experts as a whole because I reckon putting someone on the moon is pretty specialised and a damned sight more complicated than getting grass to grow (side note: it does it by itself! You’re no more an expert in that than I am in making the sun come up each bloody morning!). My beef is where there is no proven correct answer and you end up with a group of spectacle wearing men in white coats arguing at two polar opposites. Surely at this point you cannot regard them as experts anymore than a ‘bunch of people who have an opinion’?

Want some examples? Global warming. On one hand it’s being caused by me every time I turn on a light or start my car. On the other hand, shit happens and the planet naturally cycles through phases of warming before cooling again. There you have two camps of thought which could not possibly be any further apart. One of these camps is very, very wrong. No longer are they ‘experts’ and they might consider re-classifying themselves as ‘idiots’. Which camp? I don’t know, I’m not the one professing to be a bloody expert.

Another example? Food and drink. Not a day goes by without some media-spotlight chasing ‘expert’ proclaiming that his research conclusively proves you’ll die for eating something which was previously considered healthy. That on its own would be fine, and useful information, if it wasn’t for the fact that all these ‘experts’ contradict one another at every turn. Not only do they contradict one another but they’ll also leave out critical details when presenting good news. For example, red wine is good for the heart, but will give you liver failure. I’ve stopped paying attention now because otherwise I’d never eat anything. I expect I’ll open a paper tomorrow and discover that potatoes are good for my digestive system but will make my head fall off. On balance, they’re probably best avoided but then except another ‘expert’ will denounce the theory completely and state that potatoes are wonderful for my joints and my head will stay exactly where it is.

For years ‘experts’ thought the world was flat. At no point during their retarded bickering did anyone think to hop in a boat and go and find out (mainly because they were worried about falling off the edge. Really?!). For centuries the likes of Pythagoras and Aristotle claimed the Earth was spherical, whilst being laughed at. Eventually someone did jump in a boat went, looked and didn’t fall off the edge. The only thing he needed to be an expert in was pointing a ship in one direction. All the boffins left at home had little idea of the outcome, so what value had they added? If I want to know whether there’s a shop around the corner I’ll go and have a look, I don’t need a team of experts to theorise over probabilities and give me an answer which proves nothing either way.

The BP fiasco at the Deepwater Horizon rig made headlines across the world, for months. Why? Because it took them five months from the date of the explosion to completely seal the well and stop the thing pumping oil into the ocean. Let me say that again: five months. And this was major international news; the biggest environmental disaster in years and one of the biggest oil spills ever. It cost billions of dollars in clean-up money and the lives of countless animals. So, how many experts do you think were involved? I’m gonna go long and plump for ‘just about every marine and drilling expert on the planet’. Why did it take five months then? I’m going to guess again: because they were probably all sat in a bloody room disagreeing with each other.

So called ‘experts’ will disagree on many things which could kill us. Mobile phone technology and wireless networking still haven’t been put to bed although the general consensus is they’re okay. What, completely okay or only a small percentage of users will develop brain tumours and die? We need to know, because there’s still a group of ‘experts’ who aren’t convinced, even though they could end up looking really stupid if it’s all fine and dandy.

The ‘experts’ I have the least amount of time for are those in financial markets. These guys don’t even have to back anything up with proof! If a scientist makes a medical breakthrough he would be expected to show the calculations and substance behind his findings. Not so in the financial market. It seems that if you work for an estate agent you are automatically a ‘property market expert’ and what you say regarding the future of the market should be taken as gospel. Just because someone showed a couple round a two bed flat in Clapham he is not qualified to talk about the state of the recession. The same thing applies to bankers, except more so because they’re the very reason we’re in a recession. 

I could probably go on for days on the subject, but I’m sure I’ve made my point by now. Sure, people will disagree with each other but if one side has a well based, water tight and scientific explanation why something happens then anyone who doesn’t agree is moronic. They’re likely to be in the minority once everyone else has sided with the smart bloke anyway, so no-one will listen. The fact that things don’t happen this way leads me to believe that most of it isn’t water tight and isn’t scientific. In fact, I bet they’re all just winging it.

Advertising

Advertising at its best is informative but at its worst it’s annoying and invasive. The trouble is it’s mainly the latter and there’s no way of getting away from it because it’s everywhere; TV, magazines, the internet, the roadside and even your own home when leaflets get pushed through the front door. Truly, to escape advertising you need to abandon technology, move to the remotest place known to man and never again purchase a packaged product.

Magazines, realistically, have had their day. With the exponential growth of the internet the sun is setting on their monopoly, so to keep revenue up they seem to ram as many adverts as possible into each edition. At first glance these magazine might look good value for money but you’ll spend half your time flicking past pages of ads for shampoo and cut price camping gear. For some reason they also insist on inserting a million leaflets of varying sizes so that when you pick the thing up they all fall on the floor. It’s not in the least bit annoying.

Even the BBC, which is free from commercial advertising due to being funded by a tax, still jumps in on the act. Instead of taking money to advertise other people’s products, they spend the time advertising their own. It’s still better than the alternative though, which is why I won’t listen to any non-BBC radio station. I don’t want to hear the same Carphone Warehouse advert sixty times on my way to work, or have some annoying jingle stuck in my head all day because a certain advert was playing as I parked my car. Call me crazy but I’d like a radio station to play music… which they mostly don’t, so I listen to CDs instead.

Satellite TV is no better either and the bastard channels conspire with one another. There are about a billion music channels so what would you think the odds are of them having conflicting advert time slots? You’re watching one music channel when it breaks for adverts (you know, all those absurd ringtones for sale) so you change to the next music channel. Which is also on an ad break. And the next one. And so on. They also alter the volume levels so that when the adverts come on they’re about three times as loud as the programme you were watching so your gran’s hearing aid explodes and the dog shits herself.

With the advent of technology you should do what I do, which is never watch anything ‘live’. You simply record it and start watching your programme ten minutes late. That way when the advert break kicks in, you can simply fast forward it. By the end of the programme you’ve pretty much caught up and haven’t wasted the time being subjected to that singing twat in the Go Compare commercials. It also stops the mood being ruined when some TV company genius decides to drop an ad break straight in the middle of the pivotal emotional scene (because nothing says “I’ll help you battle your debilitating illness” better than switching to an advert for garden peas).

At least with the above example you don’t actually miss any content (you’re just left with a deflated atmosphere which the director spent months perfecting and an hour of the film building up to). Watch motor racing and you’ll curse when it goes to a commercial break halfway through the race and then curse some more when it returns and you discover the guy who was leading is sixth, the guy who was second has crashed and the new leader appeared from fourth to capitalise on the confusion. But at least you’ll have learned that The Sun has an exclusive interview with a celebrity (you’ve never heard of) about her marriage break-up (which you don’t care about).

Anyone who’s used the internet will be familiar with pop-up advertising which, helpfully, opens a hundred new windows about Viagra and sex with college students when you click on a link about a kitten stuck in a tree. Thankfully enough people saw a niche in developing software to block it all, but it still persists.

Surely it’s the people who accost you in the street who are among the worst though. These are the people who you deliberately go out of your way to avoid making eye contact with and yet they still thrust a leaflet under your nose, advertising something to revolutionise your life (cut price carpet cleaning services! How did you survive before?). The correct response is to say, “If you want them put in the bin, do it yourself”.

Advertising has its place but its place is not right under my nose. I’m a big film fan, so I like to see all the trailers and artwork for movies before they’re released. I’m aware that many people aren’t though so I wouldn’t want them splashed across every medium going (even I got to the point of violence about how many times I was subjected to the bloody Avatar trailer). What’s the answer? Well, in this case I know where to go, specifically, on the internet and I watch all my trailers there. Problem solved. Granted, I don’t imagine there are many avid fans of toilet cleaners who will sit, with baited breath, waiting for a new, improved formula. But on the other hand, as much as I like my toilets clean, I really don’t care.

If you’re going to subject me to commercials for a product I’ve never heard of (and don’t care about) at least make it entertaining. After all, that’s why people watch TV; to be entertained. I actually don’t watch much, but one of the greatest (and simplest) adverts ever was a John West tuna one where a bloke has a fight with a bear, which clobbers him with a roundhouse kick before getting kicked in the nuts. It’s entertaining because it’s funny and it’s funny because it looks real. And I don’t even like tuna, but I remembered it so it’s successful. If I was ever tempted to give the fish another chance, John West is the brand I’d head for. At the other end of the scale I doubt I’ll ever forget the aforementioned Go Compare brand but I’d chop my arm off before I used any of their bloody products, out of general principal.

John West: Genius.