Modern football, like banking, has rotten values

I trace what became my own galloping disinterest in football to a conversation with a mate of mine about Ryan Giggs’ testimonial match a decade or so ago. My friend, a good Salford leftie and lifelong Manchester United fan, suddenly became an impassioned defender of unearned wealth when I argued the match was utterly unjustified.

“But he’s played for United for ten years”, he protested. So what? Does turning up for work each week for a few years now entitle a millionaire in his 20s to an extra massive lump sum payout?

Apparently it did.

I was reminded of this by the reaction to Luis Suarez’s quite justifiable ten-match ban for biting another player last week. The Liverpool star’s manager, Brendan Rodgers, gave a magnificently dotty interview defending his player, questioning the judgement and the motives behind it.

“I honestly feel that the punishment has been against the man rather than the incident,” said Rodgers in a wonderful piece of metaphysical rhetoric.

He claimed the ban was “a punishment with absolutely no intention towards helping the rehabilitation of the player”. (Should we rehabilitate him against biting human beings by giving him a dog chew to gnaw instead?)

And in a leap into extremely dubious anthropology Rodgers added: “If you look at lots of South American players they do whatever it takes to win,” he said. “This is the way they have been brought up, to fight for their life.”

This is now par for the course. Every time footballers do something ghastly we have to put up with a ludicrous, carte blanche defence of the plainly indefensible, with the hyper-tribalism of modern football now blinding us to objective standards of behaviour. Fairness and decency in how players deport themselves are distant afterthoughts. Self-pity abounds.

Back in January football commentator Pat Nevin gave a similarly loopy defence of Chelsea star Eden Hazard who had been sent off during a match against Swansea following an incident where Hazard kick a ball boy who had fallen over the ball in a silly bid to waste time.

“His behaviour was disgraceful” said Nevin, and ex-Chelsea player, referring not to Hazard lashing out at the ball boy, but the ball boy himself. The player had done absolutely nothing wrong. And anyway, he protested with incredulity, the “boy” was in fact seventeen. Which apparently made it ok for him to be kicked in the guts.

Managers like Rodgers should know better, alas he is not alone. The constant post-match whinging become a ghastly ritual. Silly middle-aged men ranting and raving about how hard done by they are like UKIP bores banging on about the Greek bail-out.

Conceding that “our side” might have been in the wrong is unconscionable. Winning is everything, even when that involves crowding round referees to scream abuse about decisions that players know are perfectly reasonable.

Yesterday, the new Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby lambasted bankers for being similarly immune from “what people see as reasonable in the rest of the world”.  He said they operated a “culture of entitlement” and improving how the industry “behaves in relation to the common good is very key”.

Greed. Reckless behaviour. Bad judgements. A culture of impunity. Moral relativism. Faux victimhood.

He could just as easily be talking about modern football.