Cod Almighty | Diary

In the dock

7 April 2020

Day 15 of the lock down and the world continues to perplex Casual Diary with its sense of priorities. 13 people die in a care home, there's widespread evidence of residents in others being pressured into signing DNR notices and not a peep. Post a pic of your street dancing less than two metres apart and Twitter loses it's collective shit.

Of course it hasn't taken long for the media to find an angle to criticise football for its role in the current crisis. First Liverpool, Spurs and Norwich were vilified for placing non-playing staff on furlough and asking the government to pick up the tab, a decision which Liverpool have since reversed. The media were quick to pounce on this as greedy football, more than able to pay it's way with their inflated salaries and TV millions, asking the hard-pressed taxpayer to foot the bill.
They then went on to attack footballers in general for not taking a pay cut and generally being all-round bad eggs.

Whilst I would not normally leap to the defence of the Premier league or over-compensated individuals it does beg the question: why pick on football?
Now I don't condone the actions of well-financed clubs furloughing staff, but are they guilty of anything worse than Virgin, Wetherspoons or a whole host of equally profitable organisations who have availed themselves unchallenged of the government's new-found conversion to Marxism.

Gordon Taylor of the PFA - never a man to resist the chance to pour oil on burning waters - pointed out yesterday that footballers paid a lot of tax. Yes Gordon it's because at the elite level they earn a lot of money. Gary Lineker - also never short of an opinion - leapt to the defence saying they needed time to reflect but that he was sure they'd do the right thing. I'm not sure when you earn the money they do how long it should take to come to the conclusion that you could manage for a month or two.

They don't make life easy for football, but what does go unreported is that, outside the top two divisions, footballers earn not too much more than a grafter with a skill. They may not do twelve hour shifts seven times a week for their wages but the bills don't take account of how many hours you work: they just need paying. They also don't report the great work done by clubs such as Everton who have organised box deliveries to the vulnerable around their Goodison home.

Also are footballers and football the only hugely rich organisations in the entertainment business? Gloucester is a UK hot spot for the virus. That just three weeks after the Cheltenham Festival was allowed to continue, making horse racing and the bookies millions. Not a word of criticism of the self-proclaimed "sport of kings".

Multi-millionaire entertainers like the omnipresent Ant & Dec (I use the term "entertainers" loosely) face none of the scrutiny of footballers, nor film or recording artists. One of the most bizarre things to come out of this whole episode is the fact that the pre-eminent voice calling for the record industry to do more has not come from the tabloids criticising football but from Britney Spears. Who knew Britney was a comrade?

We will leave aside the Sunday-evening spectacle of a billionaire, lives in a castle with a 100-acre garden, rent-free, telling people from a Council flat in Peckham to stay off the Rye.

No. All of the other stars and industries, the corporations and inherited aristocracy are beyond reproach with their actions during the virus. Only football stands in the dock, accused of perpetrating all of societies ills. No change there then. UTM