Para os adeptos mais fanáticos, um pequeno balde de água fria...
"At last, a footballer who tells it straight. A footballer who gives an interview devoid of spin. A footballer whose opinion you may not like very much, but who cannot be faulted for authenticity.
At the weekend Benoît Assou-Ekotto, the Tottenham full back, was asked his reasons for leaving the French league to ply his trade over here. This is what he had this to say: “If I play football with my friends back in France, I can love football.
“But if I come to England, where I knew nobody and I didn’t speak English . . . why did I come here? For a job. I don’t understand why everybody lies. The president of my former club Lens, Gervais Martel, said I left because I got more money in England, that I didn’t care about the shirt. I said: ‘Is there one player in the world who signs for a club and says, ‘Oh, I love your shirt?’ Your shirt is red. I love it.’ He doesn’t care. The first thing that you speak about is the money.”
Those who like to think of themselves as sporting purists will doubtless be appalled by this. They will discern in the defender’s candour the long-anticipated apocalypse. If the arrival of money into sport triggered its long demise, this is the reading of the last rites. If sportsmen cannot even pay lip service to the idea that sport is about more than Mammon, where does that leave us?
But those of us living on Planet Earth will surely applaud a footballer refusing to indulge in the customary hypocrisy. The protestations of loyalty to a club’s badge have increased in recent years in direct proportion to the diminution of the sanctity of the clubs. Is it not welcome that a player is prepared to move beyond the usual self-serving homilies?
After all, in any other walk of life, the inclination to work for the highest bidder is considered perfectly normal. It reflects a natural impulse to do as well as possible for oneself and one’s family, oiling the wheels of capitalism and making the world turn. So, why is the mercenary tendency considered so treasonous in football?
The answer, surely, is to be found on the terraces. Fans, you see, are not mercenaries. They do not run into the arms of another club if the ticket prices are cheaper or the meat pies tastier. They are not the usual floating voters of market capitalism, but more like a captive audience, held in place by deeper and more abstract allegiances.
This aspect of fandom has not escaped the notice of club owners. In a prospectus to market a new bond issue earlier this year, the Glazers boasted of the willingness of Manchester United’s consumer base to tolerate ever spiralling ticket prices. “We have been able to consistently increase matchday ticket prices for both general admission and seasonal hospitality seats at levels above the rate of inflation,” it said. Fans, the prospectus was saying, possess a loyalty that goes beyond the strictures of conventional economics.
And therein lies the essential contradiction of modern football: it is bankrolled by partisans but played and run by mercenaries. Most of the hypocrisies of the modern game can be traced to this dichotomy.
Badge-kissing and other such rituals are merely the players’ way of trying to convince supporters that their fidelity is reciprocated. It is not so much an individual deceit as a collective pretence that underpins a ferociously successful industry.
But the most remarkable thing of all is not the gall of the modern footballer but the gullibility of the modern fan. Sure, many supporters comprehend — and inwardly rationalise — the charade being perpetrated on them. But there is also a critical mass of supporters who are so willing to gobble up this deceit, so pitifully open to the con trick being played out before their eyes, that you begin to glimpse the meaning of the phrase “blind loyalty”.
The curious dance between gullible fan and promiscuous player has reached vaudevillian proportions. Players actually seem to be competing with each other to see who can get their fans to swallow the most baloney. John Terry, for example, spent much of last summer chewing over an offer from Manchester City. He remained silent for three weeks about his intentions when a simple statement of loyalty to Chelsea could have put the speculation to bed.
Only after squeezing a vastly inflated offer out of Roman Abramovich did Terry break cover with a public statement. “I am totally committed to Chelsea and always have been,” he said. But while most of us giggled at this self-serving hogwash, many Chelsea fans solemnly bought into it. The fan sites and airwaves were full of acclaim for a man who “would never leave for any money, under any circumstances”.
Which begs the question: are these people ferociously loyal, or merely delusional? Are they wielding some form of doublethink, hearing the messages, seeing the signs, but only encompassing their own version of reality?
We hear much about the psychology of the modern footballer, but how often do we deconstruct the curious mindset of the modern fan? It is not just hardcore Chelsea fans, but thousands of men and women of all allegiances who travel to watch their teams through thick and thin, whose devotion is a willing form of personal sacrifice, who derive deep pleasure from the accompanying sense of tribalism, but who do not seem to see, much less comprehend, the cynicism they are embracing.
Of course, many fans go along with the charade of shared allegiance the way older children go along with the myth of Santa. When they express anger at a player leaving for a fatter pay cheque they do so ironically and with an appreciation of the essential pantomime. But can it be denied that a hardcore of fans harbour a rather different conception? That when they express their anger at a departing player they do so viscerally and with a sense of genuine confusion that all those protestations of loyalty turned out to be fictitious?
Assou-Ekotto’s comments were shocking not merely because they were truthful but because they also fired a missile at the central mythology of modern football. To one half of the football family, the game is a facet of personal identity, a fact of allegiance that cannot be altered by the superficialities of promotion or relegation, victory or defeat. For the other half, however, football is a cog in the capitalist machine, a means of economic advancement in which money talks and loyalty is rarely anything other than a sham."
