David Beckham is handsome, boyishly charming, well muscled and makes no pretension of articulacy, virtues that in more sane societies than our own would have guaranteed him riches beyond the dreams of avarice — or even Michael Schumacher.
Yet as a Grade 2 supply footballer with 10 years’ experience he is forced to hawk his services around Europe, struggling by on just £22 000 a year.
”People look at the money we earn and say, ‘Well, what do they expect?’ They think it’s a short working week, long holidays, free spotty dick and custard in the canteen,” Beckham says of his chosen profession. ”They don’t see the preparation that goes in beforehand, or all the marking, the endless bloody marking I have to do.”
Beckham raises a beautifully manicured eyebrow when the subject of the latest record-breaking transfer is raised. If there is bitterness, he does not show it.
”Fair play to them,” he says with a rueful grin. ”I mean, people can go on about how we bring joy, excitement and hope into the lives of ordinary working people, while all they do is fill kids’ heads with knowledge and a basic framework of moral principles, but at the end of the day, y’know, as I say, obviously.”
Others are less sanguine. The news that Lord Latymer Grammar School has just paid £40-million for the services of Norma Pringle, making her the most expensive head of history in history, has once again led to cries that humanity has dropped its chalk.
”Has the world gone mad?” asked Kinnaird Slurry in the Daily Malevolent. ”I confess that when I read that a mere slip of a 47-year-old mother of two can earn more in a week than the Premiership’s top scorer nets in three full years of graft I stuck my face in my soup and blew.”
Known as Miss! Miss! to the legion of fanatical supporters of the school where she made her name, St Mary’s Sixth Form College, Pringle was quick to refute suggestions that the motives for her move were purely financial.
”I can’t deny that £60 000 a week plus a Ferrari and a penthouse apartment at Chelsea Harbour were a factor,” she told journalists at a press conference in the fourth-year common room, ”but this was not about the money. It was about joining a school with ambitions that matched my own. St Mary’s was great, but they are a mid-table outfit and any teacher will tell you that education is all about winning trophies.
”Roman Abramovich has pumped millions into Latymer, he has appointed Europe’s most successful headmaster, assembled a fantastic squad of tutorial talent and I know he will not stop until we have finished top of the government league table.”
”The English Education League Table is the toughest in the world’s, no doubt about it,” Latymer head Gérard Houllier commented.
”The days when Merchant Pawnbrokers could lift the title fielding just 14 teachers is long gone. It’s now a squad game. And while we’ve got a great squad here, I felt that Pringy would give us something different, that extra little bit of magic around the Louis XIV and the Gallican Question.”
Houllier — who himself briefly flirted with football before returning to his first love, PE — denied that the signing of Miss! Miss! was purely based on marketing. But few believe him.
What with modelling for Prada, her high-profile, on-off romance with Jude Law and a well-received cameo appearance in the latest Will Smith movie, hers is a face that is well known even to those who refuse to read the education section of their daily paper.
”She’s an international superstar who totally transgresses her field,” says trend expert Noah Talent.
”Education has been trying to break into the lucrative United States market since the 1960s. But though schools are very popular with kids and ethnic minorities, most adult Americans just don’t get it.
”To them it is boring when compared to the alternatives, like beer, cheesy corn-based snacks and reruns of I Love Lucy. A supernova like Norma can change all that. Financially it’s a no-brainer.”
The man who captains England’s football XI is all too aware of the allure of professional educationalists. ”Like all kids I dreamed of being a teacher,” he tells me as we sit together on the terraces of the empty Santiago Bernabeu stadium, which later will fill with 70 000 fans eager to catch every moment of the night’s lecture in particle physics by some wild-haired bloke off Open University.
”I had a poster of Dr Rhodes Boyson above my bed, never missed an episode of Maths of the Day and everything, but it just wasn’t to be.”
One man who has experienced life on both sides of the divide is Chelsea’s manager, Jose Mourinho. In the 1990s the elegant Portuguese unexpectedly quit a top-flight teaching career to become a football coach.
”Yes, the financial rewards of teaching are enormous, the lifestyle is glamorous and people worship you as a God, but a job in football is so much more fulfilling,” he told me. ”I feel that by stalking up and down the touchline, waving my arms around, I am really putting something back into society. To be honest, the only thing I miss about teaching is the staff-room banter. And the sponsored Jag.” — Â