the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I hate football or rather, what I’ve grown to hate is not the game itself, but rather all of the attendant nonsense that goes with it. And I suspect I’m not alone in feeling this.

As a boy I was in my primary and secondary school’s football teams. Playing football was great fun, and you quickly learned that despite every appearance to the contrary, you did have a fiercely competitive spirit.

As I say playing football is one thing, watching it is quite another.

The sponsors of the World Cup in Brazil wish, as all sponsors of sporting events do, that some of the reflected glory of a sporting event watched by billions will rub off on them and so give their brand an image of health, vitality and energy. Look at the sponsor’s of the World Cup in Brazil. And ask yourself how many of the logo’s are prominently emblazoned on screens that players stand in front of at post match interviews or press conferences, ‘How many of them have even the most tenuous connection with football?’

Aside of course, from the cost of staging such an event in the first place which is offset to some very small degree by the money the sponsor’s stump up. The most watched event on earth (according to FIFA – an organization that’s whiter than white – 715 million people watched the last World Cup final) – a marketer’s wet dream – will cost a staggering $14 billion. No wonder there are riots, with six out of ten Brazilian’s believing the money could be better spent.

Football is no longer what it was and that is both a good and a bad thing. We have seen the tragic consequences of terraces at football matches. The death traps that these could easily become have been replaced with all seater stadia – and prices to match – with the result that the average fan cannot afford the price of admission.

My brother supports Arsenal, always has done but he recognizes he cannot afford to go to any home game, as the cost of it is well beyond him. And he earns a decent wage, but given that footballer’s wages are no longer rooted in any discernable reality, the cost of admission has to go someway to pay their wages. On the subject of wages it is ironic that some players in the premier league earn as much in a week as a nurse or a teacher earns in a year.

What kind of society allows this to happen? I mean, ask yourself if you were in need of life saving medical attention would you ask a footballer to help? Likewise if you had a child, and that child required educating, who would you ask? David Cameron may not be everyone’s ideal choice as Prime Minister, but nonetheless, he does what thinks is right. We may disagree with his thinking but still, he juggles lot of balls in the air, some smooth and some covered in spikes. Balls that I for one have neither the time, nor the experts on hand to give me policy options necessary to soberly consider them and thence to make a reasoned evaluation. And nor, I’d wager, do you. And we pay him for making difficult decisions on our behalf, decisions with ramifications so potentially…potent that our heads would explode at the sheer enormity of it all, we pay him less, less,  in year – £142,500 – than some footballers earn in a week. I have no clue whatsoever to do about the Isis uprising in Iraq, the consequences for the region in general, global security in particular and our national security. Best if we ask Rooney what he thinks we should do.

As I say when I played football it was fun, but as soon as I stopped playing, I soon stopped being a spectator, because, as I said I hate all the nonsense that goes with it. England are playing Uruguay in the World Cup tonight. I could care less about the outcome, but only if I really, really tried very hard.