What matters more: cash or cups? Take a guess
I know what the Birmingham City players would have been thinking during their Carling Cup lap of honour and I also know what many of them would have been thinking when they were relegated three months later.
The League Cup has long had its detractors but none of the natives on the blue half of the divide at Wembley were complaining after Birmingham’s win over Arsenal in the final last season. Yet the sterile reality of football is that for many of us players winning a trophy is a bonus.
Since the inception of the Premier League, silverware has been monopolised, to a certain extent, by three or four of the biggest clubs. Breaking that stranglehold has never been harder but it isn’t impossible. Recent Carling Cup finalists have included Blackburn, Middlesbrough, Bolton and Wigan before Birmingham’s triumph last season.
But hard facts are hard facts. Relegation from the Premier League has cost Birmingham financially and almost all of the side that won the cup only a year ago have had to be sold. But then ask this question: what will the Birmingham fans remember and talk about in years to come? The fact that the team finished ninth in the Premier League in 2009-10 and were financially stable without being spectacular, or beating Arsenal in the dying moments of the Carling Cup final last season? As a player I would love to say the latter, which would be the supporters’ response, but that would be a lie. Nice though another medal in the cabinet would be, football is a job and the best place to ply your trade is in the Premier League.
I have sat in the changing room before games at Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge and the Emirates knowing that if all the stars in the sky are lined up and the opposition put in their worst performance for a decade and in turn we produce a herculean effort, then we may just, if we’re lucky, snatch a draw. The standard manager spiel in such circumstances is to trot out the tired line “just enjoy it”. After one of these games in which we’d taken a good hiding I approached our manager on the team bus, someone I thought I’d built up a good relationship with, and said: “Why do you say: ‘Just enjoy it,’ before we go out? How is chasing the ball around for 90 minutes, being beaten four or five nil and being made to look shit on TV in front of everyone supposed to be enjoyable?” He turned to me and, raising his voice so the whole coach could hear, said: “What do you want me to say, that you’re not even half the player Paul Scholes is? Fuck off to the back of the bus and shut up.”
The point that my manager was trying to illustrate is that we really didn’t have any chance of winning the league, or even a cup competition, but as long as we kept working hard and “did the right things” we could all earn a living and not upset too many people. For our owners, our manager and the players, it was all about Premier League football. At least I think that was the point because otherwise he just thought I was crap.
Wembley is a nice day out but the Premier League is a cash cow. Craig Bellamy gave an interview ahead of Sunday’s final that was about as candid as you are ever likely to hear and reflects what I know most players, among themselves, would agree is somewhere very close to the truth. Bellamy said: “Honestly if I win, I win, if I don’t, I don’t. I won’t lose one second of sleep over it. I’ve had a great career and enjoyed it but is it defined by trophies? No – and it never will be. I don’t even know where my Scottish Cup medal [won in 2005 with Celtic] is.” A few years earlier, Tottenham’s Benoît Assou-Ekotto dared to go further: “I don’t understand why, when I said I play for the money, people were shocked. Oh, he’s a mercenary. Every player is like that.”
The mindset of a player has changed dramatically as TV money has swelled our pay slips. Every player knows the retired professional who has spent all his money and has had to find a regular job. Financial managers have ensured we squirrel away a high percentage of our earnings and, as a consequence, our career decisions are, to a certain degree, influenced by how much money we need to earn and for how long. The biggest mistake I ever made in football was moving clubs for more money. I vowed never to do it again, until I realised it was too late and that I had arrived at the point where my career would for ever more be only about how much money I needed to earn. It’s regrettable and makes me cringe when I put it in writing but I promise you it is the same for a huge number of professionals.
Last week I had dinner with a friend I grew up with. We used to dream of playing at Wembley together and lifting the FA Cup. Unfortunately for him he never fulfilled his ambition of playing professionally and, in what feels like an attempt to make himself feel better and knock me down a few pegs, has been asking me questions where the only possible answer proves that I am a greedy footballer that has sold his soul.
Towards the end of the meal he asked me what I would choose if I were offered an FA Cup winner’s medal or another season in the Premier League. The answer, as I told him, is another season in the Premier League. Sell out I may be but stupid I ain’t.
TSF, I wouldn’t feel bad for realising you feel this way about your job at this stage of your career. As far as I’m aware, pretty much everyone at some stage in their lives reaches a point where we realise that although we don’t enjoy our job as much as we used to/thought we would/at all, its still the best course of action to keep going at it due to the vastly decreased earnings that we would face were we to start a new career in something else. I get these feelings from time to time in my job and I’m 26!
Likewise, most fans (not the ones you hear who scream at you in supermarkets though) do understand a player moving clubs when offered a ridiculous contract. Almost all of us would move workplaces for a significant pay rise (unless the conditions were deplorable) without hesitation.
The surprise I felt in hearing BAE (one of my favourite players, incidentally) say what he said was more that he admitted he doesn’t have any interest in the game itself, who he’s playing against next week, watching other teams etc which is hard to believe. Him essentially saying that he never liked football to begin with was more surprising than admitting he plays for whoever pays him the most. I would imagine the number of professional players who don’t actually like football is very small? Likewise, when you’re actually out on the field, surely when you get the ball with a goal begging, you’re thinking of the net rippling rather than your bank account bursting? Or no?
@BishopvilleRed – I think TSFootballer was trying to illustrate the distinction between fan and player. It would seem that once a lad makes that step from the stands onto the pitch his perception of a fantasy world of goals and cheers, fame and fortune becomes jaded by the reality that something has been lost. To say that the rewards far exceed that loss is to fail to understand the disappointment we all feel to some degree in the transition from childhood to adult. There comes a point in everyone’s working life when we realise that we are hostages to other people’s fortune and like it or not this goes against a basic yearning for freedom and self-expression. Therefore, most of us moan about work, so why do we expect a sportsman to be any different?
It is a very lucky person who can work for work’s sake! Witness the modern artists; Picasso, Hirst, Hockney, did they sell out while selling any amount of limited edition prints, did we really expect them to turn out masterpieces while living on scraps? Of course, they all had their moment of ‘joy, pride and excitement’ and equally probably had their dark moment of despair when all the money meant nothing.
Perhaps you too fail to realise that the employee that you watch, cheer and jeer from the stands is simply doing a job. He is not a fan of the club like you; at best he is a well-paid entertainer who will happily move on to the next theatre as soon as his agent gets a better offer.
@Stuart: You made the comment ‘smug…self-satisfied…bank balance’ while failing to understand that TSF is describing his disappointment in why all those boyhood dreams disappear and that (as Matt Busby never said) is a question larger than football.
I have been re-enforced in the above opinion by currently wading my way through Simon Kuper’s insightful THE FOOTBALL MEN, which I will be reviewing on site soon.
I have to tend to agree with the secret footballer to a certain degree. Everybody has bills to pay no matter how much you earn and trophies do not pay the bills. As for bonuses you would be surprised to see the amount you would get for winning the cup. It’s not a great deal and when you put it into context with staying up, the money is much greater to stay up. It is much more important for a team to remain in the top league than to win a cup and that is reflected in the bonuses. I would never consider “playing football” my job and i count myself very fortunate to get paid for doing something that i love but would I prefer to win a cup in the same year as get relegated. Definitely not.
You see, winning a cup is great and feeling for the few days after is amazing. Then that’s it. Where as relegation is something that you are reminded of constantly the following season during every game. The premier league is the place to be.
Well, that was definitely the most depressing piece you’ve written, Secret Footballer. Tell me, is there not a single moment of joy in the working life of a Premier League player that you can tell us about? Does not scoring a goal in front of a packed house, or simply walking out to training on a crisp Spring morning make the heart leap? Do you get nothing from feeling the ball at your feet anymore? Is there no pride or excitement left? Or is it all about the smug, self-satisfied feeling you get when you look at your bank balance? Come on, tell us there is something more than money.
But what about win bonuses in cup competitions? You could make a pretty penny for winning a cup – even the Carling Cup – if you or your agent was clever enough to insert such a clause in your contract.
Which raises another question: If you could win your £200K bonus but know you were pulling a Pompey on your club and ensuring its financial ruin (and therefore ensuring relegation) do the players worry much about the club? Is the bonus worth relegation?
My cynicism regarding football started with the inception of the Premier League, I could see that from now on all would be about cash over glory.
Of course, wearing my rose tinted pre-prem gIasses I had neatly disregarded that any business where punters pay cash at the gate would have been open to all sorts of money laundering, betting frauds, match fixing and bent officials from the beginning.
However, I still have trouble regarding anything that the FA does without the suspicion that they are serving either themselves or the big clubs.
The truth, as it nearly always does, lies somewhere near the middle. The FA is supposed to make money and there is no doubt that football has been dragged into the modern age with improved facilities etc. And, of course, cynicism is the privilege of those paying top money to watch top-paid sportsman.
But here’s the rub; While I may see the Carling or FA trophies as yet another cash cow that has become diluted in the public imagination I must admit to a frisson of excitement when it is MY team in the last four.
Looking around me at the Carling cup final on Sunday there was no doubting the enjoyment and pride of the 90,000 fans who had travelled far to support the teams. The excitement was palpable, this wasn’t some tin-pot cup meaning nothing to them. This was something they had decided to spend their hard-earned on and their enjoyment was very real.
To sum up; these competitions may be an irrelevance, even a nuisance to players and managers but to the fan they represent a chance to grab a bit of glory and, at the very least, a feeling that they are having a return for the price of admission.