The headlines about Lee Barnard this week where for all the wrong reasons, here Saints Flyer considers why.
Footballers have always liked a drink, at least Bristish ones anyway, so why are professional footballers nowadays hitting the headlines with a lot more regularity than they used to do, even in the not so distant past.
The easy answer would be to point out that they have a lot more time and money than their counterparts a few years back, but this would be too simple, especially as most Premier teams nowadays seem to be filled with foreigners and in the main it is not these imports who are being splashed across the tabloids.
To be blunt its a symptom of the system in this country that takes young boys and turns them into professional footballers, in the days of old we had the apprentice system where upon leaving school a potential professional would be taken on as an apprentice and moulded towards the ultimate goal, here we had a very succesful conveyor belt with perhaps Dave Merrington neing the last of the old guard, under Merrington and he was only the Saints version of what was replicated across the land, it was almost like joining the army for our apprentices, they werent pampered or cossetted, but were taught discipline by a regime where not only did they have to train but also perform various tasks around the club, anything from cleaning the dressing rooms to looking after the players boots.
To say Merrington was one of many old style youth team coaches is unfair, he was one of the best and its no coincidence that not only did we turn out more than our fair share of kids who made the grade, but in the main they were fine young men with a set of values and decency, Francis Benali and Matt Le Tissier being just two.
Nowadays the system is much different, kids are signed by clubs at around 10 years old and nurtured, this means that from this age they are developing an arrogant streak, now of course this is generalising and Im sure that there are some really nice kids in the system, but they are treated like the elite, not for them the pleasures of playing for their school team or a kick about with their mates, but training sessions with the club and then games against other professional teams at the same age group, put bluntly by the time they are 16 and signed full time, you already have the most arrogant group of individuals you could wish for.
Sadly this is what clubs want as what they are taking 16 year old kids into is gladiator school, of 12 or so every year who are taken on, how many actually make the grade at that club ? probably 1 every two years if you are very lucky, the rest are discarded.
So when you get a set of young professional footballers together in their early 20's you have individuals who have had to fight their way to the top and they havent got there by being good samaritans, they have had to be ruthless and single minded, they are also very immature having not had anyone say no to them since they were about 10, in todays youth system they dont clean dressing rooms, if you asked a trainee to do that he would be straight on to his agent to find him another club.
So if you are 21 and still in the professional game you have done very well, but chances are you are not a very pleasant person, your team mates are just as arrogant and if you have friends from outside the game then they are sycophants who want to be seen out with a sstar and Im not een mentioning the wanna be WAG's yet.
Then there is the money, a half decent 21 year old will probably have been earning £5- £10k a week for the past three years and if he has broken into the first team more with bonus's etc, he will be approaching a total earnings tally of nearly half a million quid, he has more money than he can spend.
This is where the desire starts to go, why does he need to stick to a spartan life style ? he has the money and lets be blunt he feels like he has enough money to last a lifetime, so what if he goes down the ladder to oblivion, he can live on reputation for a few years, rake in good cash and although he wont fulfill his potential he will fulfill his desire for a champagne lifestyle. Think of the players in this situation, there are hundreds of them who you thought might have good careers and disappear after early promise.
In the good old days professional footballers had pride, they had to keep performing at the top level as they knew that their careers would be short lived and when it ended they would become publicans if they were lucky, so they kept going till they dropped, they got hurt a lot because it mattered to them that they kept their first team place and kept playing as long as they could, nowadays that desire in most English players has gone meaning that although we still have the odd World Class player they are few and far between.
A look at those truly greats though reveals a common theme in many, they are lads that came from poor backgrounds or lets at least say far from priveledged, Wayne Rooney, Steve Gerrard, Rio Ferdinand, Ashley Cole, even someone like Robbie Fowler, they came from backgrounds where they had to work, they look at their old school friends and they dont want to go back their, the desire is still there because they are working not just for themselves but for their families.
If we take this theme a little further it starts to explain why a lot of the foreign imports in this country who succeed come from countries that are not known for their prosperity, ie Eastern Europe & Africa, these players too have that hunger to sudcceed and not to have to go back to where they started, they see a short career and they are willing to make sacrifices to ensure that their earning power stays and that they can lead a comfortable life for themselves and their families, not for them the comfortable cossetted system our players have come through, they have different back grounds and as I mentioned earlier rarely do they get in trouble off the pitch.
Again there are exceptions to the rule, but without racially stereotyping nations, the players who succeed in England if they dont come from the more impoverished countries, tend to come from Northern European places like Norway and Holland where they have strong work ethics, no coincidence in my mind.
Of course in many cases they are also cheaper than our home grown talents, all of whom have agents for whom greed is their middle name and demand big contracts and when they get them signed who cares if the player doesnt perform, we have had plenty of them here, Stuart Ripley was perhaps the first and up to a year ago we were sidled by the likes of Stern John, Jason Euell and even Marek Saganowski who were being paid big bucks and not earning it, take Euell for example reputably on £18k a week on a two year deal, he would have earned somewhere in the region of £2 million pounds from Saints in that time, possibly more when you take into account signing on fees and bonus's, he joined us 12 years into his career, I can barely remember a decent game he had for us and i guess that goes for most of his clubs, 84 league goals in those 15 years barely equates to 6 a season yet he is a very rich man, does this tell us where football has gone wrong, to put it into terms us mere mortals can equate to, Euell's earnings at Saints amounted to a big lottery win to us.
So where do we go from here ? in my opinion either a complete overhaul of the game or oblivion, whilst i dont begrudge players earning big bucks, after all who wouldnt sign a contract for stupid money if its offered, unless things change the in England the game will go the way it has in Scotland and some would say it already has.
Next week I will look at how the game could be re vamped in the UK and indeed Europe.