An Irishman's Diary

IT IS ONE of the more beloved clichés of our time that top professional football players, especially in England, are overpaid. And this is a perfectly rational viewpoint if you’re a socialist.

But even among socialists, the belief is probably coloured by the private lives of such players, as glimpsed in the popular press. These glimpses suggest that, in general, footballers have appalling taste in cars, houses, and extra-marital affairs.

So if not overpaid, they certainly seem to have more money than they know what to do with.

The terrible truth, however, at least for anyone who still believes in the free market, is that even the most pampered Premiership stars are paid exactly what they deserve. Or if not exactly, that their rewards are calibrated more accurately, via-a-vis their relative talents, than those of just about any other profession on the planet.

Compared with footballers, not even the great financial geniuses of Goldman Sachs, whose work has brought so much joy to the world, can with such justification explain their bonuses in the words of the L’Oreal ad: “Because we’re worth it”.

The highest paid soccer stars – John Terry included – have, after all, reached the top of what must be the world’s greatest meritocracy. Below them is a pyramid that extends to the four corners of the globe. From Bergen to Bogotá, from Sheriff Street to Shanghai, male children everywhere aspire to ascend it, and countless millions make at least a start on that ascent.

Between top and bottom, on every step on the vast structure, there are players clambering up, slipping down, or trying to stay where they are. And allowing that some will fall off altogether – you can’t legislate for bad luck, even in soccer – most will eventually reach a level fitting their abilities. No higher and no lower.

To be successful in soccer, it doesn’t matter who your father knew or what school you attended. Knowledge of secret handshakes is no help either. In most other professions, good connections can at least propel you into middle management, and you can probably hang in there until pension age by being nice to people and keeping your slate clean. But football allows for no such fudging. If you’re not good enough, at any level, you will be found out and demoted.

The corollary is true also. It doesn’t matter how humble your origins, if you have a conspicuous talent for the game, football will find you. It may take a little longer if you live remote from the main centres – in, say, Cork or Calcutta; but even there, the word will get out eventually.

If you're born in the favelasof São Paulo, the trick may be to stay alive long enough. Luckily, the system is particularly efficient in such places. Despite being born in a shanty-town outside Buenos Aires, Diego Maradona was "discovered" by age 10. The rest is history.

If anything, a comfortable upbringing can disimprove your chances of making it to the top. It's a popular view that a footballer has to be "hungry" – metaphorically if not literally – to do well. And the case of Graeme Le Saux, a heterosexual soccer star who suffered widespread homophobic abuse, apparently because he had been to university and read the Guardian, is often cited as an example of the obstacles facing footballers who can read and write.

Even so, education did not prevent Le Saux from fulfilling his potential. For just as it is indifferent to race and religion, neither does soccer discriminate against a player for being intelligent and well off. As it happens, John Terry’s Chelsea provides a perfect example.

Not only is the club’s high-scoring midfielder Frank Lampard a better player than his namesake father – a professional before him. But Frank Jnr also caused consternation last year when a company carrying out IQ tests declared his to be one of the highest scores it had ever recorded. For football critics, it was the shock result of the season.

The late Bobby Robson spoke once of the difficulties managers face in exerting authority over players who are paid a multiple of the managers’ salaries. This seemed like further proof of a system that was all wrong. Wise old strategists such as Robson should surely be paid more than young (and usually) stupid players, or so one would think.

But even this truism may be economically irrational. A recent book, Soccernomicsby Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, suggests that if there is an obvious distortion in the market-place, it is that managers are paid more than they should be.

The book’s shock finding, based on analysis of English and Italian soccer results over successive seasons, is of a very close correlation between a club’s league position, at any given time, and the amount spent on players’ wages. The more a club paid for players, in effect, the better it did. Changes of manager made little or no difference.

It seems almost sacrilegious to suggest that what Manchester United’s players earn is a bigger influence on the club’s success that the alleged genius of Alex Ferguson, whose every utterance about his opponents sets soccer writers talking about his mastery of “mind games”, as if he was a combination of Gary Kasparov, the Deep Blue computer, and Fu Manchu.

But if the book is right, even Ferguson may be overpaid. Whereas his players, who it seems would win the same number of games even with Louis Walsh as manager, deserve every penny they get.

fmcnally@irishtimes.com