(This post was first published by The Dabbler in July 2011 under a different title, illustrated with a photograph of Bobby Charlton wearing, unusually for him, a malicious grin – )
I’ll say this for C.S.Lewis: he knew how to coin a memorable book title. The Screwtape Letters. Surprised By Joy. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe… but my personal favourite was Till We Have Faces, the title of a short novel about the battle between sacred love and profane.
It makes me think of this photograph, and of Bobby Charlton’s face in general: like Auden’s, Charlton’s face was cut deeply by character, belief and experience, but whereas Auden’s face makes me feel uneasy, untrusting and unsafe, Charlton’s inspires feelings of safety, warmth, humour and even a little national pride. He has the face of a good man.
So when a photo catches him looking like a satyr who’s had sight his opponents cards, it makes you sit up a bit..
Period details aside, that grin there: he looks like every droning pub narcissist’s image of the modern football player. The overpaid, pampered primadonna. As a sport psychotherapist, I had some contact, at least, with the Premiership football world, and it’s a view of footballers that I despise. Bully for me. Like throwaway comments about Tony Blair, the idea of the lazy, arrogant, womanizing footballer has become English weathertalk, and disagreeing with it, at least out loud, is just plain bad manners.
It’s not about money for me. There are an awful lot of people who are paid more than they are worth for their effort and talent in the United Kingdom, and my idea of what constitutes unjustifiable pay starts rather lower than most.
Nor is it about behaviour. Our sweet, traditional public libraries teem with admiring biographies of artists, musicians and writers, who got away scot free with everything they wanted to, the more so the more they struck the correct political postures.
In any event, given the astonishing scrutiny players are under, it’s remarkable how many of them go through careers with no stain on their characters. Rewriting your own adventures from your teens and twenties in the style and syntax of the Sun, the Mail and the News of the World is an interesting and humbling exercise.
In my own case, I don’t believe for one second that “if I had that sort of money, I could..” be a Charlton. Not today, because what you lose for the money are things that are not to be gainsaid for any level of financial return.
Once you reach the level of fame that a footballer has, you have no boundaries; you are no longer entirely real – you can’t hurt, you can’t bleed. Demands can be made on you: autographs at best, but every top player has had serious problems with stalkers. From your perspective, the entire population of Britain has turned into a staring crowd whose eyes follow you everywhere you go. There are always people outside your house, and people are always trying to break in. Your workplace is always surrounded and you are harassed on the way in and on the way out. Even in the top restaurants, you never complete a meal undisturbed. Driving, people race your car, or cut you up, or shout at you as their windows slide down. Adulation comes at a huge price, but it’s not just adulation that players receive. In Scotland, this year, they have started sending bombs.
I think that were I transplanted overnight into a country where the populace treated me in this way, I’d develop, rather quickly, a powerful sense of contempt, a contempt that would, I expect, corrode my own internal compass before too long. So many people have a strong opinion about footballers but it never seems to occur to them that those footballers might have an opinion about them.
And that’s before we get to the issue of love and marriage.
There is nothing new about young footballers, or young sportsmen in general, being extremely popular with women and taking advantage of the fact. In Robert Roberts’ recollections of Edwardian Salford, it was the boxers who ruled the local bars and pubs, and declared to any woman who would listen that their condoms were guaranteed not to break… not a terrific opener perhaps, but then it didn’t have to be.
Nonetheless what’s happening to young footballers now has the makings of an especially unkind and perverse psychological experiment. The unique combination of wealth, physical fitness, fame and, in some instances, international glamour, seems to throw a switch in some women’s behaviour, in ways they might not themselves have expected. The sheer amount of unasked attention a footballer will receive in a nightclub or restaurant has to be seen to be believed, and fights have broken out between women simply because they have got in each other’s way in trying to get within calling distance.
There is a reason why successful football marriages – to a truly striking extent – involve childhood sweethearts and fashion models. The childhood sweethearts predate the madness of fame, and can be trusted, as no one from later life ever will be trusted again, to want to know the player for himself. The fashion models have made their own money, so don’t need the footballer’s: furthermore, the world of a model – with the hours of travel, the intense discipline, the restricted diet and the public intrusion – is similar in many respects to a footballer’s, and certain things are understood.
All of this goes some way to explain why, when polled, most footballers say that they were happiest at around the age of 14. That result has remained consistent since the end of the 1960s – the beginning of the period in which a player’s income would wrench him forever from the world of his upbringing, away from the friendly, familiar streets and faces.
So, no: as the poet says, Give me my loaf-haired secretary..