The recent transfers of Nasri, Fabregas and Barton has got me thinking about loyalty and football and when you put aside the badge kissing and the fist pumping you will realise that it doesn’t really exist. All it needs is for Nick Clegg to confirm it and you will have your answer – footballers are about as loyal as vegetarians are to KFC. This statement may make me seem like someone who should be wearing NHS specs, eating hard sweets and spending all day gardening but in today’s market can player loyalty really exist?
I mean take Robbie Keane as an example, someone who seems to have supported at least 50 clubs when he was a child and has luckily had the chance to play for nearly all of them in his career. He recently moved to LA Galaxy. Could he be bothered to stay in England, play for a mid table Premier League team or higher Championship team and challenge himself for a few more years.
Of course not – he simply he chased the money and moved to America where they still believe Darren Huckerby was a superhuman footballer – basically Pele, Eusebio and Messi rolled into one powerhouse striker (if you don’t get this please type in “Huckerby on KRON” into you tube, amazing stuff). Basically Robbie Keane, chased the money and let’s be honest, bottled it. In doing that, he showed the mentality of a modern footballer today – in most cases, money will come before a club.
Some recent transfers show that a player’s loyalty to a club can run thin. Take Cesc Feberegas. I know it seems to be a bad thing to question his loyalty to Arsenal but his massive desperation to move to Barcelona – going to the extent that it was rumoured he paid £5 million of his transfer fee shows his loyalty – shows that it can’t have been that great.
Also, look at Samir Nasri, given a platform by Arsene Wenger to become a top quality player in the Premier League. As soon as the money came from City, he was gone in a flash and not without a few passing shots at Arsenal’s support. I’m not that keen on Arsenal but that’s just plain disrespectful to a club that has given him a lot.
Or Luka Modric, who recently asked to be left out of the Tottenham team who played Man City ahead of a proposed move to Chelsea, another disrespectful move to a club which pays you thousands of pounds a week. This just sums to the lack of loyalty or perspective some players have in the game today.
Then again, do these players have to be loyal to clubs that they don’t support? Also, there are cases where clubs show no loyalty to them as in the transfers of Joey Barton and Kevin Nolan from Newcastle in this current transfer window. They were two useful players for the club last season and in Kevin Nolan’s case, an integral part of an important 2 years for Newcastle United. If the stories are to be believed, the contracts that they wanted (and could be argued were deserved) never came.
Take the contract supposedly offered to Nolan – one year will bonuses depending on team performance. This was not exactly the sort of deal many clubs would give to a midfielder who scored nearly 30 goals in 2 seasons. Joey Barton was given a rather bitter parting shot by Newcastle chief executive Deark Llambias following his move to QPR showing that you can hardly show loyalty if your employers don’t show you any respect.
Then again players like Barton and Nolan didn’t seem too distraught to move when better deals were offered, despite claims of underlying loyalty and never leaving. In this age of claims and counter claims for clubs and players it’s tricky to know who to believe. But let’s put it this way, if a player can earn up to £250,000 in the premier league, where do you think the loyalty will be – the club or the bank balance.
As I write this the transfer of Owen Hargreaves to Man City is in the stage of a medical. I’m not even sure if Man City’s mega rich owners will be able to afford those sort of medical bills. But I bet the medical staff are loving it, all that overtime pay will mean that their families are going to have one massive Christmas this year. Arsenal seem to be on the verge of signing up to three players – someone must have locked Arsne Wenger in a cupboard…
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