He's dared to say what we all think about overpaid footballers. So perhaps Signor Capello should sort out the BBC

 

 

By Stephen Glover

Last updated at 1:50 AM on 05th March 2010

 

 

 

 

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Critical: England manager Fabio Capello arrives for a team training session ahead of a friendly against Egypt

 

The England football manager says that footballers are paid too much. According to Fabio Capello: 'They are young boys who are rich boys. This is the problem.'

He seems to be saying that because they are paid more in a couple of days than most people earn in a year, they blow cartloads of money on expensive champagne and fast cars and faster women. They end up by having serial extramarital affairs, as the England players John Terry and Ashley Cole appear to have done.

I'm sure he is right, but doesn't it go deeper than that? The problem is not just that footballers are paid too much. It is also that they are accorded heroic status in our society yet offer such a dismal and uninspiring example to the millions of young people who misguidedly look up to them.

On the same day that Mr Capello said what no other topflight manager has dared to say, the BBC announced a few changes. It is closing two radio stations - 6 Music and the Asian Network - which few people listen to and most of us had never heard of. Nonetheless, these decisions have attracted a fair amount of controversy.

How wonderful it would have been if Mark Thompson, the BBC director-general, had said something along the following lines: 'The BBC should be this country's most influential cultural organisation, and it exists to supply what the market cannot guarantee. Our founder, John Reith, said that the BBC's role is to inform, educate and entertain, and that objective will again become our guiding light.'

But he said nothing of the sort. Though Mr Thompson is a highly intelligent and cultured man, he talks like a bureaucrat. His greatest terror is to be thought elitist. Far from striving to supply what the market does not, the BBC usually competes with it, measuring the success of its programmes in terms of the ratings it receives in comparison with the commercial competition.

Mr Capello says that the problem of overpaid footballers exists in Germany, Italy and France. But I doubt there is any country in the world in which the values of our footballer aristocracy - conspicuous consumption, flashy cars, coarse and sometimes depraved behaviour - are so pervasive.

 

 

Put on a pedestal: Football players such as Jermaine Defoe, John Terry, Steven Gerrard, David Beckham and Ryan Shawcross, left to right, earn 'cartloads' of money

 

I know: the media is at fault. But it is no good just blaming the messenger. It is the message we should worry about - the message being beamed at the young. Whereas children were once encouraged to admire real heroes who had risked their lives or made some contribution to society - and generally did not behave like wide boys - now they are offered fake heroes who have achieved fame and great riches and high status merely for kicking a football around.

Almost no one dares say this, of course. To do so is to risk the deadly charge of elitism or anachronism. The old intellectual Left, which wanted the best for ordinary people, has retreated or disappeared, and the intellectual Right blindly repeats that the market rules. Politicians of all hues compete with one another to be seen joshing with one of Mr Capello's overpaid stars.

Please do not say there are many footballers who behave decently and tuck their children up in bed every night. That is not the point. What is objectionable is the celebration of values that elevate easy money and loutish behaviour rather than hard work and restraint. I can't believe many of us want our children to venerate as their role models people who brawl and get drunk and carelessly swap WAGs.

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The problem is not so much footballers as the culture many of them represent. Look at The X Factor, a TV programme that offers young people, often with little and sometimes no talent, the dream of becoming overnight stars. It epitomises the same meretricious values of instant success without the bother of long study and hard work, as well as grotesquely disproportionate rewards.

This is our society, our shared nihilistic culture. But you can't fight the market, we are told. Footballers are paid so much because that is what the market wants. The same argument is used about bankers and traders, a few of whom are paid millions of pounds a year despite having been bailed out by the taxpayer.

In fact, if the market really ruled in the City, a lot of them would have lost their jobs, but the Government intervened to prop up what would have otherwise collapsed. For many clever students, who in an earlier age might have gone into engineering or applied science or some other productive industry, the City exerts the irresistible allure of potentially easy riches today, more than it ever did.

The inescapable lesson of the past two years, which Rightwingers should not shirk, is that the markets in finance failed us to the point of catastrophe. To depend wholly on a free market in culture - to expect it to supply all of society's needs - is no less foolish.

And that is supposed - was supposed - to be the mandate of the BBC. Once it really did educate and inform, as well as entertain. Of course parts of it still do, but these objectives no longer shape its mission. In a multichannel world it has decided increasingly to compete with the market, and the charge its top brass dreads above all is that it is uncommercial, unpopular or, worst of all, elitist.

 

 

 

More...

 

 

• Bloodbath at BBC: Thompson wields the axe to fund £600m drive to quality programmes
  

 

The former Labour leader Michael Foot, who died yesterday, was in my view wrong about many of the great political controversies of the age. He believed in unilateral nuclear disarmament when the Soviet Union still presented a threat, and he thought the State often knew better than the private sector how to run great industries.

But he, and others from the old Labour Left, did believe that ordinary people deserved the same chances as the privileged, and could not rely on the market alone to supply them. I don't know what his views were about the hegemony of our football culture, but I am sure he deplored the moneyobsessed values of our age, the spivs in the City as well as all those who since 1997 have sat on the Labour front bench.

Don't get me wrong. I believe in the market, but as a tool, a means to an end, and not the end in itself. The role of our great institutions should be to make up for the deficiencies of the market, to augment what it will not provide. Alas, we have an established Church which is itself increasingly market-orientated, telling its congregations largely what they want to hear; a Royal Family which has turned into a kind of torrid soap opera and, the Queen apart, offers little in the way of inspiring example; and the BBC, whose cowardly failings I have mentioned.

Perhaps it takes an outsider who is Italian to illuminate our problems. Fabio Capello is himself a former international footballer, and he is paid a great deal of money. None of this seems to have spoiled him.

In his private life and his work he evinces those qualities of rectitude and discipline and restraint which are so lacking in many of the young heroes he manages. He has the courage to insist on his values. I wonder whether after the World Cup he might be prevailed upon to take over from Mark Thompson at the BBC.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1255279/Fabio-Capello-dared-say-think-overpaid-footballers.html#ixzz0hIKYnUR7

I can't be bothered to read that shit, what is the supposed problem with the BBC?

I stopped reading when the op/ed turned into complete mush at the mention of bankers, I scanned to also read about the royal family and decided just to focus on this:

 

Please do not say there are many footballers who behave decently and tuck their children up in bed every night. That is not the point. What is objectionable is the celebration of values that elevate easy money and loutish behaviour rather than hard work and restraint. I can't believe many of us want our children to venerate as their role models people who brawl and get drunk and carelessly swap WAGs.

 

That is the point. Most of these footballers are young guys who left school at 16 and never really had education as top of the priority list, give them ridiculous amounts of money, more women then they could know what to do with, and a certain amount of fame and worship (In their own minds) and it will lead to an arrogant sense of entitlement towards life.

 

Remember that there's a couple hundred first team players in the Premier League, and while there is more then enough incidents of controversy and court appearances, it's inevitable among guys of this background. Because Ashley Cole and John Terry, two high profiled idiots, are going to fuck around, it means very little on the whole. Football has always been like this, even back to when they didn't get paid ridiculous sums of money (And now it only comes out in autobiographical books about players nobody cares about anymore) a tiny percentage of players do stupid things, it's like that in any working environment, as anyone who will have worked in a big office will know, people's personal lives are not always smooth and quiet.

 

The difference between now and the 60s? The media, and more importantly people's interactions with the media. Back then a football groupie could tell all her friends which footballer she shagged, and that would be as far as it goes. Now, kiss and tell girls have a freephone number which they can use to call any tabloid paper with their story, and they know the juicier it is the more money they will get for it. In cases such as JT or AC, they wait until the right moment to come clean, because they're waiting to get more and more of a lovestory but once said footballers are exposed as cheats, there's no need to waste time and then they cash in on it. Tiger Woods' situation was no different.

 

Fabio Capello is himself a former international footballer, and he is paid a great deal of money. None of this seems to have spoiled him.

 

What?! A former overpaid footballer?! Who's not hell bent on cheating and destruction?! Like 99% of them playing today?!

 

Absolute madness.

I can't be bothered to read that shit, what is the supposed problem with the BBC?

 

The entire article was relating how Capello spoke his honest opinion about how footballers behave, and related it to the press release the BBC Director General John Thompson gave, with regards to the closing down of 6 Music and BBC Asia. They gave an example of what John Thompson should have said (And it was pointlessly word-for-word fiction) and then didn't actually reveal what he did say or even if he did make a statement, you couldn't make this shit up.

 

6 Music and the Asian Network simply didn't have enough listeners to fund a radio station, John Thompson supposedly didn't just come out and say that. But surely people can realise that for themselves? It's a business like any other, if they don't get a return, it can't run. What that has to do with football management, I'm completely lost there.