United's messiah no football saviour

Just think, after finally agreeing terms for a new contract on Wednesday Roy Keane will have earned enough in about 12 weeks to fund another production of A Messiah for a New Millennium. A deal of "breathtaking crassness" some might argue, but then maybe Roy Keane is Manchester United's Messiah for a New Millennium, and they don't come cheap.

While the advent of the £50,000-a-week player in English football will probably have catastrophic consequences for the game, at every level, it's difficult to resist taking a certain degree of sadistic pleasure in one aspect of the story - Martin Edwards's failure to force Keane to sign a `you should be honoured to play for this club - you need us more than we need you' contract, his second significant defeat of the year after failing to seal his deal with Rupert Murdoch. Not that Edwards will go hungry, but still, any setback for the United chairman has to be a good thing.

He was, predictably, quick to warn the rest of the United squad not to start looking for similar deals, insisting that nobody at the club was as valuable as Keane - an admission, funnily enough, he never made at the start of the negotiations with the player. At least Gary Neville had the good grace to admit that Keane is worth five times more than him, a declaration that probably had his agent choking on his cornflakes when he read it in his morning newspapers. Neville, too, might regret his honesty when United refuse to offer him more than a miserly £10,000 a week (how do these guys live?) when his contract runs out. ("Well Gary, you did say . . .,' a grinning Edwards will purr, while holding up an old newspaper cutting from December 1999). David Beckham is probably the only other United player who would be entitled to demand parity with Keane on the salary front but at most of the other leading Premiership clubs there will be at least two or three players claiming they deserve the same deal.

There's a good chance, for example, that Arsene Wenger found Patrick Vieira, Emmanuel Petit, Dennis Bergkamp and Nwankwo Kanu queuing outside his Highbury office on Thursday morning, wanting to `have a word'. Gianluca Vialli might have found Frank Leboeuf, Marcel Desailly and Gustavo Poyet waiting for him, and Gerard Houllier could well have spent the morning trying to convince Michael Owen that Keane was indeed worth more than twice his £24,000aweek wage. (It would come as no surprise to learn that Stan Collymore turned up with his agent at Villa Park on Thursday morning demanding £55,000 a week, but I didn't hear of John Gregory being charged with GBH so we'll take it that he didn't. Give him time, though). David O'Leary, they say, is currently trying to sign a bigname striker to bolster Leeds's title challenge. When he picks his man and his chairman starts pay negotiations the player's agent might just throw Keane's deal into the conversation.

Not that they'll all have the neck to demand £50,000 a week but it's the knock-on effect of the deal that will have English football in real trouble. If £20,000 a week was the average pay for a half decent Premiership footballer before last Wednesday you can probably add another £5,000 to that figure in contracts signed from now on. And will there be a knock-on effect for Irish football? Probably, in that if there's an across-the-board rise in wages in England, Irish players at lower division clubs might be slower to return home to play in the National League, which couldn't possibly compete with those salaries. There's a wealth of talented young Irish players stuck in reserve-team football in England, or in mediocre lower division teams, who could greatly enrich the domestic league. But who could blame them for staying where they are - even if they would prefer to come home - if they'll be earning at least twice or three times what any National League club could afford to pay them.

And, of course, for English football supporters the consequences of the rise in wages will have its own gloomy effect. Higher wages, higher ticket prices. Season ticket prices at Newcastle United have gone through the roof in recent seasons, but then they pay a combined £84,000 a week to Alan Shearer and Duncan Ferguson. The armchair supporter, you can be sure, will be paying considerably more in the coming seasons for the right to watch football on television. The increase in wages will result in a steep rise in the asking price when the TV rights to Premiership football are next auctioned, probably making payper-view football the norm, rather than the occasional scourge that it already is. Back in April 1993, in a typically hard-hitting interview ("I think you're brill - would you sign this for my Mammy?"), I spoke to a 21-year-old Roy Keane, then at Nottingham Forest, about his plans for the future. "Would you like to play abroad," I asked him.

"Yeah I would."

"Would you fancy Italy?"

"Yeah, I think I would, I watch it every week. It'd be a new challenge in my career but I've only signed my contract so if I do well over the next couple of years I wouldn't mind a move abroad." The boy did very well but to keep the best midfielder in Europe English football had to match the financial attractions of its Italian counterpart. Great news for Roy Keane, great news for Alex Ferguson and supporters of Manchester United, but not such good news for English football as a whole.