An Average Spurs Player Demands Insane New Deal Shocker!

Article by Simon Lipson

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We all know about the insatiable global appetite for the EPL and market forces and the ever-rising cost of tickets and merchandise and the TV billions, and how all the cash generated by the beautiful game helps fund players’ tacky, gold-plated Chigwell mansions and top of the range watches/cars/blondes. But as long as we keep watching and cheering and booing and speculating and fretting and loving and hating and caring (and, if you’re a Lilywhite, glorying in the tragically lasting joy of the odd win over the Gooners and Chelski), the players in whom we invest so much of our money and emotion will continue to earn silly money. It’s the way of the world; we’re all responsible and can have no argument with it.

Can we?

Do I care if Soldado earns three or four million a year? No, as long as he scores his two goals per season and…hang on, let me start that again. Do I care if 21 year old Harry Kane out-earns me, a qualified lawyer in his fifties who has had some modest success in business and now has a reasonably healthy career in voiceovers, by a factor I can’t begin to calculate? No, I don’t. Much. Because Harry is rather brilliant and he gives me joy; he fulfils my sepia-tinged fantasies of going out there myself and scoring wonder goals against the scum; and he works his socks off. Truth is, I don’t even begrudge Robbie’s ginormous pay packet because I know, deep down, that he’s really good, and that he’s trying as hard as he can and desperately wants to succeed for you and me and himself but just can’t help being absolute shit.

But, if I may adopt recent party political bullshit about lines in the sand for a minute, I find the behaviour of little boys like Raheem Sterling and, I’m sad to say, our own Nabil Bentaleb, both inappropriate and appalling. Sterling strikes me as a smaller version of Andros. Quickish, trickyish and ineffective-ish. How the boy has half of Europe’s elite drooling over him is a mystery. Liverpool’s refusal to pay him the – what is it now? - £12m per week? he believes his genius merits, has got him stomping around like a petulant two year old who’s had his Lego confiscated. He’s 20 and he’s done next to nothing yet (apart from one good half in a World Cup group match after which everyone worked him out). He might be very good one day, he might not, but you and I are permitting this boorish, selfish, faintly disgusting form of masturbation because, unlike Sterling and the equally unproven Bentaleb, we can’t just walk away. Our team is in our hearts, not our heads, and we’ll continue to throw money at our dreams. Inelastic demand, I believe it’s called – I knew my Economics A Level would come in handy one day). The players, I’m sorry to say, couldn’t give a shit about you and me and especially not the team, no matter how many times they kiss the badge.

So I say this to Nabil. I’m sorry you’re ‘tired’ of waiting for Levy to meet your insane demands (tired? Absolutely shattered, I would think) but you have only played 50-odd games and been fairly useless in a good proportion of them and your obvious gifts have yet to translate into actual influence and goals and results. So hold up for a minute and think of us poor bastards who watch you and laud you when you’re good and beseech you not to go to the Woolwich and earnestly wait for you to be an integral part of a successful team. It’s us you should be playing for, not yourself. You will earn good money over your short career, trust me on that, young fella. Just remember who’s paying.

I’m sure, taking all of this sage advice into consideration, Nabil (or, more precisely the agent who’s telling him he’s second only to Messi) might respond: ‘I could give a flying one, fatso.’

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