The babied generation ... all bling & no sting
Pogba must show Mourinho how he helped France win World Cup GET RID OF WEMBLEY
Whereas, these days, professional football seems to celebrate players’ immaturity because it’s all seen as such fun.
Take Benjamin Mendy running along with the World Cup when he hadn’t played in the final and sliding on his knees with the trophy.
If you think about it, that’s the sort of thing you’d do aged 11, isn’t it? But it all links to the young fans who are buying products, so clubs embrace it.
There would be no value to Nike or Adidas in a Paul Scholes or a Roy Keane in 2018.
Neither would be doing cartwheels on social media – they’d just be off home to walk their dogs.
Yet they were great players for United who got their heads down and won everything there was to win at club level. Of course, Pogba has won the World Cup, but there are so many other things he can achieve in the game if he really wants to.
People will say, ‘Oh, Collymore, going on about haircuts’, but these things do matter.
And I’d love to see Pogba and Neymar getting their hair cut, saying nothing to the press, to sponsors, and then going out and winning everything they can win this season.
Then, at the end of it, they could say, ‘Actually, we made a conscious effort to reward the fans who paid good money to see us – rather than spend all our time trying to get people to buy jogging bottoms designed by a mate or an album released by a cousin’s other half’.
It’s about being consistent rather than trying to live like a rap star and, if Pogba decides to do that, then we know the footballer he can be.
But that will only happen if he stops actively choosing to indulge in all the distractions in his life. FUNDAMENTALLY, I agree with Gary Neville on the vast majority of his arguments on the non-sale of Wembley.
He called for a taxation on agents’ fees and for Premier League clubs to pay more for grassroots football rather than selling off the national stadium.
And I’d even go as far as to say the top of the Football League should be taxed, as well as a percentage of England merchandise being pumped into youth football.
We have the world’s richest league and councils are calling off games at an alarming rate in that environment – and it’s a disgrace.
But I’d still sell Wembley, which is in a terrible location – the worst possible – and I’d pump half the £600million raised by the sale into grassroots football and look to put the other half into building a stadium in Fenny Drayton, Leicestershire, which is the centre of the country.
At least then it would be more accessible for every England fan – and getting home after games would be far more bearable for those supporters who live in different corners of the country. IT’S bizarre how underwhelming Cristiano Ronaldo’s move to Juventus is – no player is ever bigger than a club but, in this case, it feels a bit like he is.
It would just have felt right if Ronaldo (above) had gone back to Manchester United, joined Paris Saintgermain, or even gone to Bayern Munich, the Hollywood FC of the Bundesliga.
But Juve is the sixth, seventh or eight place I’d have thought he’d have gone and I can’t see him winning the Champions League there.