ARE footballers scum? The accusation has been launched in characteristic hyperbole by Sir Alan Sugar, once the embattled chairman of Tottenham Hotspur, and the man who did save them from the clutches of Robert Maxwell. Never afraid to call a spade a bloody shovel, Sugar, the founder of the Amstrad electronics company, would no doubt agree with the dictum of Joseph Schumpeter, the economic historian, that the entrepreneur is the true hero of capitalism. After all, Sugar has been buying and selling since his schooldays in the East End of London. Others perhaps might see him as an anti-hero.
Footballers, he thundered in a Sunday newspaper, “are scum, total scum. They’re bigger scum than journalists. They don’t know what honesty or loyalty is. They’re the biggest scum who walk on this planet and if they weren’t football players, most of them would be in prison, it’s as simple as that.”
Simplistic, you might say, wondering why all this, why now? For it’s a long time since Sugar was actively involved in football, a ten-year period when his bitter rivalry with Terry Venables, the then Tottenham manager, deluded by dreams of being an entrepreneur himself, made Sugar the target of vicious opposition by some Tottenham fans.
But when he says of footballers: “Do not believe a word that comes out of their mouths,” one recalls, years ago, the declaration by Alan Hardaker, the autocratic former secretary of the Football League, that he “wouldn’t hang a dog on the word of a footballer”.
There is no doubt Sugar could produce abundant chapter and verse for his stance. Almost every week, there are reports of misbehaviour by footballers: from the court case involving Leeds United players after the attack on an Asian student in the city through to the alleged “roastings” in a Park Lane hotel and the imprisonment of Lee Hughes, the former West Bromwich Albion forward for charges relating to a fatal car accident and onwards to Jermaine Pennant ‘s conviction this month of driving while disqualified and drinking and driving for the second time in a year, for which he still awaits sentence.
Advertisement
Yet, how justified was Sugar’s outburst and how historically objective? The first thing to be said about football is that, for better or for worse, it reflects wider society. And if today’s footballers tend too often to be greedy, libidinous and violent, surely they can be seen as society’s product. Above all, the more successful of them have never been so subject to temptation.
The money poured into the game has made rich men, even millionaires, of people barely in their twenties. Where once especially before the abolition of the iniquitous, £20-a-week maximum wage in 1961, a professional was obliged to lead a modest life, now these youngsters earn salaries that dwarf even those of the upper middle classes.
What preparation have such players for such wealth? Especially since clubs will now swoop on a promising boy as young as 8, so that football becomes a dominating dream to the dangerous exclusion of true education? Wouldn’t it be fair to say that players of an earlier generation behaved better because they had no alternative? After all, professional football has traditionally been associated with a drinking culture.
Before the Second World War, for example, the whole Clapton Orient team turned up drunk on Christmas morning at Waterloo Station, en route to a match at Bournemouth. The manager himself arrived with a barrel of beer. After the match, Ted Crawford, the Orient centre forward, told me that every time he went up to head the ball, he saw two of them. Yet Orient gained a draw.
And if, since the Bosman ruling, the ball is so clearly in the players’ court, for generations they were at the mercy of their clubs. The boot indeed is simply on the other foot.
Advertisement
One more relevant reflection: never in the history of English football has there been a scandal such as Italy’s totonero (black-market betting) in the early 1980s, when two small-time Roman crooks, Trinca and Crociani, were able to walk into any team’s hotel and fix a game. Even Paolo Rossi, leading scorer for Italy in the 1982 World Cup in Spain, was able to play only because he was amnestied just in time. We should surely keep matters in proportion.