What footballers really want: Each other

Men sharing a girl is, if you think about it, as gay as kissing on the lips after a goal; it is a way to have sex with your comrades without actually touching them.

That is, in summary, the opinion of my analyst friend on the strange phenomenon of ‘roasting”, as expounded in most newspapers recently by Nicholas Meikle.

Meikle is famous because he is the one acknowledged male presence in room 316 of the Grosvenor House Hotel, where a 17-year-old girl alleges she was raped by several men, including a number of Premiership footballers. But, according to Meikle (a ‘party organiser” by profession), everything was consensual and normal, it being common for younger footballers to ‘share their girls”. It was Meikle’s ninth such share of the year, or — to use his own expression — his ninth ‘roasting”.

A glossary note here: according to several newspapers, ‘roasting” is supposed to suggest the stuffing of a piece of meat. More likely, it seems to me, is that it refers to spit-roasting, with an insertion at either end. This would tend to confirm my friend’s view that the woman here is, essentially, a tube to permit contact between the men.

Of course, it would be better if the guys just roasted each other, without getting someone else involved. Meikle could then get the sort of attention that one feels he secretly yearns for. But at the time of writing we have had only one ‘out” gay footballer, so this may be the only way in which soccer players are able to make the love to each other that so many of them manifestly feel. And the unique love of teammates, and their mutual physical dependence, may explain why it is harder to imagine, for instance, short-listed nominees for the Booker Prize going out ‘roasting” together. JM Coetzee, Peter Carey and Ian McEwan on the razzle? That would be a party. Oh yes, we could have fun with this topic if it wasn’t for the rape allegation. Or if it wasn’t for the insistent image of the one girl, just out of school, being used by many men.

The case is contested. She (the meat) says ‘rape”, Meikle (the spit) says ‘consensual”. Unable to draw any conclusions about the Grosvenor House scandal, I started doing a little research on the phenomenon of team athletes and sex. And I came across this comment. ‘Rarely do accused athletes,” said the writer, ‘deny sexual contact with their accusers; more often they say it was consensual. [Typically,] the accuser is vilified as an opportunist out to seek fame or money by filing a false rape complaint.”

The author is an American sports sociologist, Jeff Benedict, who had been asked by sports authorities to collect data to contradict the perception that many athletes were committing crimes against women.

Benedict interviewed 300 athletes, victims, lawyers, cops and groupies and discovered that, unfortunately, the perception was correct. In 1995 and 1996, he revealed, there were 200 cases of college and professional football and basketball players arrested for abusing women. This was a significant increase on 1992/93. Benedict’s book is titled Public Heroes, Private Felons.

‘Almost across the board,” he wrote, ‘professional athletes have a warped perception of women because of what they are exposed to: women approaching them, offering to have sex with them, sending them their underwear in the mail. This conduct makes it all the more difficult for other women abused by these guys — it makes it so much easier for skilled defence lawyers to point to any woman as a groupie.”

Katherine Redmond, a woman who was raped by a football player, set up one of those inevitable United States lobby groups, the National Coalition against Violent Athletes. Redmond has pointed out a common feature in many of the cases she has dealt with. ‘At some point the athlete has said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ He feels he’s entitled to her, and if she says no to him or embarrasses him, he puts her back in line.”

‘We can do what we like,” say the young footballers. ‘There is nothing that is forbidden to us. We are gods. And our perception of ourselves as gods is endorsed by the purblind fans, by the groupies, by the amoral administrators who only care about what we do insofar as it affects their investment.”

Where in the turbulent history of the superstardom of footballers is there a single case of an in-form, top-rank player being sacked for appalling behaviour? ‘Do you know who I am?” The six words that will always open the gates of Hades. —