In DEFENCE of Wayne Rooney
Everyone will have their own view on the Rooney shenanigans of the last week – some will say he was an idiot for questioning his manager, some will say his performances do not merit an improved contract, some will say he has the right to question the club’s ambitions, some will blame his agent.
Either way, I don’t really care. What I do care about is how yet again a footballer has been blamed for all the world’s evils. Well it’s certainly annoyed me a bit anyway.
I was reading the Daily Mail at the weekend (I want to make it absolutely clear I was in a sandwich shop at the time, and fancied a laugh). Rooney’s new contract was the headline story – under the premise of his unbelievable greed.
As the rest of the nation faces job threats and austerity over the next five years, Wayne Rooney can afford that self-satisfied smirk.
They questioned how he could earn £250,000 a week just for kicking a football.
Yeah, cos that’s all he does isn’t it? Just kicks a pig’s bladder around for 90 minutes a week – I mean, I could do that, for a lot less money.
But it was the last paragraph of the headline story that had me slumped on the shop counter in despair. It quoted a nurse bemoaning cuts at her nursing home, saying how disgusting it was that he could get so much money when people are losing their jobs.
Shame on you Wayne.
Football has long been blamed for much of the world’s ills, usually by people who don’t like football – overpaid prima donnas, bad role models, ill-disciplined, ill-educated, run by idiots. Nothing has changed there.
But just what level of stupidity leads you to believe that Wayne Rooney is somehow responsible in any shape or form for the state of the NHS, or our recession? Would that nurse have felt better if Rooney had taken a massive pay cut? Would that have helped keep more of her colleagues in jobs?
No, of course it wouldn’t, but let’s blame him anyway.
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The ironic thing is that the only link Rooney has to government policy, jobs and the recession is the wage he gets. And the best thing for those nurses is for him to get paid as much as possible – the more he gets, the more tax he pays, the more money the government has. They should be thanking him.
You can blame footballers as a whole if you wish for the financial troubles many clubs are facing, but at the end of the day, those clubs chased impossible dreams, spent beyond their means, and no-one forced them to pay these figures. And even if you feel players should be blamed, you can’t lump all the guilt on one player, and for all the acquired debt that the Glazers have introduced to Manchester United, no single pay rise is going to trouble Rooney’s club. This was a contract negotiation between an employee and his employer, simple as that. A very public one, admittedly, but a contract negotiation nevertheless. However ill-deserved it was, the club agreed to it, and can afford it. Rooney, like everyone else, is simply demanding the best payment he can get for his services. If United didn’t like it, they can always get rid of him.
Are movie stars earning £20m a film ever called greedy? Pop stars, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, JK Rowling or Richard Branson? What’s their responsibility to our faltering economy? I mean, all Formula 1 drivers do is drive a car round a track every couple of weeks!
Of course it was widely reported that Rooney’s deal was worth £250,000 a week, the media using that well known trick of adding on every bonus imaginable to make him look even greedier, knowing full well that to earn that he would have to score a hat trick every match, lead United to the treble every season for five years, and find a cure for cancer. This is how Yaya Toure is on £230,000 a week and Carlos Tevez cost City about £97m. And all the while there’s people in Doncaster that can’t even afford their next packet of fags. It makes me sick.
Miranda Sawyer wrote in The Mirror in an appalling little piece about how she imagines Rooney to be like a spoilt little child, commenting on how he is spiffing away money (what?) whilst United fans face up to recession. Yawn.
One United fan slated him for jetting off on holiday when his club needed him. Need him for what? He’s injured, but then again maybe he wanted him serving behind the bar on match days.
The world is a strange place when I turn to Tony Cascarino for some sage advice, but about the only sensible thing he has ever said was in an article five years ago.
“For all the improvements to stadiums and the great popularity that the sport enjoys now, the majority of players are still poorly educated working-class guys. They’re not, for the most part, paragons of virtue. If society wants to hold them up as role models, that’s society’s choice, not football’s. The last time I checked, I was responsible for bringing up my children properly, not Wayne Rooney or El-Hadji Diouf.”
Of course, there’s no need for abusing referees all game, something kids may well copy – on the pitch players have a responsibility, as kids will mimic what they see footballers do when they themselves kick a ball around. But off the pitch I don’t see them as something to aspire to at all, and a section of them will inevitably misbehave as they always have done, and as many of the rest of society do – they are human beings.
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But back to society in general, This myopic view of the world and how football should take some blame first came to my attention when Manchester City were kindly taken over two years ago by some very wealthy men with whom you will now be familiar, and Mark Lawrenson questioned how City could be throwing obscene amounts of money in trying to sign Kaka when hospitals were closing down around the country and people were living in abject poverty in their millions.
“At a time when people have been left devastated by the credit crunch, football is in danger of shooting itself in the foot. It would be bad enough during a boom time, but during these tough economic times it is sick. If City do this then they will lose the sympathy and support of fans who will begin to question the morality of how someone can spend that sort of money on a player rather than build a new hospital or pay for some lifesaving medical care. People will turn round and say: ‘The world has gone mad. I’m not sure about football any more’. How would you feel if you can’t pay the bills while a player at your club is on mind-boggling money?”
It’s hard to put into words how stupid this comment was, but I’m going to try anyway.
Imagine if you will the time I was packed and ready to go on my holiday. Waiting for the taxi to arrive at my parents’ house (both at work, in the days before mobile phones), I popped out to the newsagents for some crisps, and came back to discover my house keys were packed in the suitcase. After crying for a bit, I tried to kick the front door down, failed, but set off the burglar alarm, alerting a few of my neighbours. I tried to climb in an open window on the first floor, but fell off the porch, injuring my ankle. In the end I was forced to break a window, which had the knock-on effect of spraying the cat with glass. I left a note for my mum apologising, and off on holiday I went.
Anyway, it’s about that level of stupid.
Steve Coppell too said it was completely wrong when people were losing jobs in credit crunch times for City to be spending so much money. Apparently football clubs can only spend money during times of economic boom. And it seems players can only get pay rises too if unemployment levels are low enough.
PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor then told the world of his disapproval of City’s reported £100million bid for Kaka.
“It is a bit bizarre that, in these times of credit crunch, we are talking about a club paying £100m for one player,” he said.
“One of the things we have to ask is…is football sending out the right signals given the current financial climate? Football needs to set a good example to the rest of the world, as we do with our anti-racism programmes and community projects. Football cannot be immune from the credit crunch and whilst City are an exception to the rule, the game has a duty to show financial propriety at this moment in time.”
Gordon Taylor is the highest paid union official in the world. Taylor earns a £1million yearly salary – five times the remuneration of the second highest-paid union official and around ten times that of the average League Two player. For this money, his jobs seems to consist of blindly defending the rape allegations, prison sentences, two-footed tackles and roasting sessions that his members seemed so keen to enjoy (thanks to football365.com for that quote).
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It’s this obsession with “making a gesture”. Sadly, these gestures don’t actually achieve anything. If Rooney had for some reason agreed to play for free, not one person in this country would have benefited as a result. A few Americans maybe, but none of us, no one on the breadline, no one out of a job, no one looking for football to make some gesture that will make them feel better for ten minutes before the reality once more hit home.
Put simply, some footballers earn a lot of money because they generate a lot of money. Supply and demand. Wayne Rooney is worth every penny to Manchester United plc, even when his form dips.
I am a Manchester City fan. I have no particular warmth towards Wayne Rooney, or most footballers to be honest, (him more than most). There is a lot to dislike about Rooney – he is not someone I would aspire to be, or want kids to look up to. But let’s focus the blame for society’s ills where they are deserved, and for once give football a break.
Written By Howard Hockin
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