/ 12 March 2004

A culture of Omerta

Some day in the near future a footballer — or, more likely, a group of footballers — might do something so gross that even the game’s blind apologists, the managers and chairpersons, the agents and all the talking heads who are part of this ailing industry, will be stunned into silence.

They will stop mouthing their platitudes. They will hang their heads, turn away again and they will wonder where it all went wrong.

You hope that day will never come, because who but a ghoul or a tabloid editor revels in excess? You want football to be the way it was: a little rough around the edges, certainly, but not a playground for monsters, bullies and morons with not enough hours in the day to spend their wages.

The majority of footballers, as their representative Gordon Taylor is trotted out to tell us at nearly every newsbreak, are decent young men. Nobody would dispute that. But there are enough millionaire hooligans doing their thing in nightclubs up and down the country most nights of the week for the latest outbreak of excess to constitute more than an aberration.

It’s the sinners who are corrupting the good guys. It is the gang-bang mentality, where impressionable young players are urged to abandon their inhibitions and morals: get stuck in or you’ll look wimpish. And it translates easily from the pitch, where such loyalty is forged, to the bar and, now, the bedroom, where it is horribly distorted.

So the allegations of sexual assault, drunkenness, brawling, dogging, drug abuse, racial taunting, boardroom chicanery, bungs, lies and all-round cynicism roll on. Because nobody from the top of the game to the bottom is prepared to seriously challenge the virus that has been spreading irresistibly through football for at least 20 years. Like everything in society, bad behaviour becomes modish.

The problem is not just youth running wild, as some like to think. The fault starts with those who think football is more important than nearly anything else in our lives. Nobody challenges the God Football. And why does it not apply in the rugby codes, which offer far more opportunities for skulduggery on and off the field? Because it has never been allowed to.

Footballers openly defy all values of honesty and honour nearly every day of every week on our television screens. But so vital are they to the plot, their employers rarely chide them. When the God-fearing Glenn Hoddle admitted before France 98 that England’s players were encouraged to dive to win penalties, there was no turning back. If you wanted a seal of approval for a cheats’ charter, that was it.

When the BBC reported on the Leicester City players detained in Spain last week on charges of sexual assault, they quoted — without comment — a spokesperson for the club’s supporters’ association saying, ‘This couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

He was talking about relegation. In a court house in Spain, there were people with far more serious issues on their minds.

When Alex Ferguson complains that Rio Ferdinand’s appeal has been unfairly delayed he fails to point out Manchester United’s part in that delay. And the club have yet to admit even the faintest possibility of Ferdinand’s actually being guilty.

He failed to take a drug test and was justifiably punished, but when you have a valuable player chained up for eight months, your priorities are inevitably distorted. Nobody takes their licks any more; they just go to the next appeals court.

Arsène Wenger says it is not football’s fault, it is a societal problem. He says the tabloid tell-all culture also encourages people to sell and distort stories of high jinks — presupposing that if we don’t know about it, everything is fine.

In as much as Arsenal ban drinking and old-fashioned ‘bonding” on out-of-season trips, Wenger is seen to be fulfilling his responsibilities.

But what of simpler values? What about those myopic moments when he fails to see one of his players hacking down an opponent, or diving to win a penalty? It is a misplaced loyalty, as misplaced as the culture of Omerta.

Once there was a different sort of loyalty, a loyalty built on old-fashioned values. On Thursday night at a dinner at White Hart Lane, Bill Nicholson, a man who represents codes long forgotten, will become the first inductee to Tottenham’s Hall of Fame.

The following Spurs players will be among those there to honour their old manager: Peter Baker, Ron Henry, Dave Mackay, Maurice Norman, Terry Dyson, Les Allen, Bobby Smith, Cliff Jones, Steve Perryman, Pat Jennings, Martin Chivers, Martin Peters, Phil Beal, Ralph Coates, John Pratt, Dennis Bond, Eddie Clayton, Tommy Harmer, Mel Hopkins, Tony Marchi, Terry Naylor and John Ryden.

Now not all of them were angels as players. Or even as citizens, occasionally. Some — Gordon Taylor, for instance — would say the same applies to the likes of Jody Morris, Stan Collymore, Dennis Wise, Craig Bellamy, Carlton Cole, Titus Bramble, Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer, all of whom have come to our attention over the past couple of years for the wrong reasons.

But I wonder if the latter will be queueing up to honour any of their contemporaries at a similar dinner in 20 years’ time. —