Football’s feared feet of clay

Last week Sepp Blatter told my colleague Jim White: ‘Football is the most powerful force in the world.” And according to the Federation Internationale de Football Assoc-iation (Fifa) chief, the most important people in football are the players.

Since the most powerful force in the world was previously the atomic bomb, clearly what Blatter is saying is that footballers are equivalent to the plutonium in a nuclear warhead. Having seen John Craggs play, I am prepared to believe him.

So far the power of footballers has been harnessed largely for the good, but there is clearly a worry over what might happen if one should fall into the wrong hands.

The threat that terrorists might obtain a ‘dirty” footballer, possibly from the former Soviet Union, then set him off in a major city — a scenario used by Hollywood in the hit movie, End Zone (where Mel Gibson and Wesley Snipes successfully defused a depleted Ukrainian wing-back who had been primed to explode at the Super Bowl), is already being taken very seriously in Washington.

Indeed, this week it is believed that President George W Bush will push the United Nations to draft a new Soccer Non-Proliferation Treaty in an attempt to head off such an event.

Luckily, the players themselves have thus far refrained from invoking their own terrible power for destruction — even in the most trying circumstances.

This week, for example, good-natured Australian soap-opera star Harry Kewell elected to use the threat of the Bosman ruling rather than his own awesome force (believed by scientists to be the equivalent of three oil tankers packed with high explosives) to bring about a move to Liverpool.

Other players have resorted to even more drastic means. Top footballers holding their clubs ransom is nothing new, but this week, in the wake of Kewell’s move to Anfield, things took a fresh and sinister twist.

Last week it was reported that a leading premiership striker had cut off his left foot and posted it to his chairman with a note saying that a package containing a body part would arrive every day ‘until I am allowed to leave and join the team my agent has dreamed of me playing for since he was a boy, or I am reduced to a worthless and bloody stump”.

A couple of years ago the striker’s left foot alone would have been worth several million pounds (Spanish club Real Betis, you will remember, bought Brazilian star Edmilson in instalments, starting with his knees.)

But in these days of collapsing transfer values it would probably command no more than a few quid from the local dog-food factory.

As the chairman commented bitterly: ‘I could call his bluff, but what good would that do? I either give in and get something for him, or wait 12 months till his contract expires and watch him hop away on a free transfer.”

Though by no means as dramatic, the situation at other clubs is equally fraught. One top Midlands side encountered problems on the first day of pre-season when their latest signing climbed a tree at their training ground and vowed not to come down until he was paid a loyalty bonus and given a testimonial in advance.

‘You cannot put a price on loyalty,” he told reporters through a megaphone, ‘but I want it upfront.”

Meanwhile, at a club recently relegated to the first division, it is reported that three England squad players have tunnelled under the pitch and declared their intention of staying down there until they are allowed to move back to the premiership.

‘You do not become a top player to win nothing,” said a spokesman for the trio. ‘People will say, ‘Well, you are the players, so if you have won nothing it is your own fault.’ That is rubbish.

‘Football is a team game, which means that failure is never the responsibility of one, two or even three brilliantly talented stars, but of everybody else.

‘As long as you can look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘Hello handsome, I bet that shirt cost a packet,’ then that should be good enough for anybody.”

At one time, the board of directors of the relegated club would have been able to act quickly to bring the situation to a close using poison gas or dynamite, but since the day Jimmy Hill broke the employers’ iron grip on the game by threatening to get every professional player in Britain to hide under the bed for the duration of the 1962-63 season, their hands have been tied.

Now that Blatter has revealed the truth about the players’ mega-tonnage, they face an even greater threat.

During his transfer negotiations with Real Madrid, David Beckham was reported to have said that he was being treated ‘like a piece of meat”. (I have yet to see a leg of lamb dressed in an Armani suit and driving around in a Ferrari.)

However angry he was, though, the England captain refrained from using the ultimate deterrent — detonating himself. Today the knowledge that not every footballer is so restrained casts a dark and ominous shadow over the globe. —