Pink boots offer no refuge from reality
MONEY, the trophy wife, the big house, holidays in Dubai and a Range Rover Sport on a heated driveway.
Professional football offers a lifestyle other jobs can’t match.
A young man signs his first professional contract and his life changes. Suddenly he is a someone.
Shop assistants are handed a gold Amex card and don’t see the Championship clogger standing before them. Or the League One journeyman.
All they see is a footballer. The man with the life everyone wants. Wealth, glamour and adulation. The perks of a rock star.
It comes as a jolt to us all, then, when an Aaron Lennon comes along and shatters the illusion.
Premiership footballers are not supposed to reveal their vulnerabilities to the world. They are expected to exist on a different plane.
Lennon was detained under the Mental Health Act as Everton revealed the winger was suffering from a ‘stress-related illness’.
You could almost hear whitevan man shouting in disbelief, asking what the hell a millionaire footballer knows about stress?
Anyone struggling with the concept could do worse than read The Secret Footballer’s latest tome. What Goes On Tour (Penguin, £12.99) presents a warts-and-all account of what being a player really means. Receiving a £2,000 signing-on fee in the 1990s, The Secret Footballer’s first act was to borrow another two grand so he and his partner could go on holiday to a swanky resort in Mauritius and ape Posh and Becks. By the time they got there, they didn’t have the money for a club sandwich.
As the anonymous Premier League mole puts it: ‘We stood out like two teenage backpackers from poor backgrounds trying to make it around the world on a gap year they couldn’t afford.’
This pressure to live the dream — even in Scotland’s lower leagues — is real.
It’s not enough to be a footballer. Peer pressure dictates that a young player has to look and act like one as well. With an armful of tattoos, a cockatiel haircut and a top-of-the-range Merc.
PFA Scotland chairman John Rankin, captain of Queen of the South, fears the new generation are too taken with the perks of football.
That the rewards and trappings of professional football take priority over the hard work and self-improvement needed to stay there.
Knuckling down doesn’t come easy to a 17-year-old. For most spotty-faced teens, wealth and public attention is something that happens to X-Factor winners. The would-be footballer is a slightly different beast. He grows up in an academy system which encourages him to think big. To believe he can be Chelsea’s next Billy Gilmour.
Most become disillusioned and drift out of the game completely. Some will make a decent career and a comfortable living earning a couple of grand a week.
But, in the public mindset, Britain’s footballers are all Ashley Cole. The former England left-back drew notoriety when he accused Arsenal of taking the Happier times: Everton’s Aaron Lennon, left, before his mental-health issues came to the fore p*** when they offered him only £55,000-a-week to stay at the club in 2006.
When footballers go off the rails, then, they don’t receive much sympathy or understanding.
People can’t quite grasp what could possibly go wrong in Aaron Lennon’s life. But even millionaire footballers need help sometimes.
Dr Andrea Scott-Bell of Northumberland University says that ‘uncertainty, paranoia and loneliness’ stalks the corridors of the nation’s top clubs. That the pressure to sustain the footballer lifestyle is making players ill.
Mental Health Awareness week has witnessed the likes of Neil Lennon, Charlie Adam and Ian McCall speak with courage and candour of their private demons. The kind of things they wouldn’t necessarily share with Chick Young on the Ibrox touchline.
Hibs boss Lennon has spoken at length about his battle with depression as he strove to secure promotion to the Premiership for the Easter Road team.
Adam needed counselling when his father took his own life and McCall quit Partick Thistle to deal with a serious gambling problem.
None of the three conform to the dim-footballer stereotype. They are bright, intelligent, articulate men. If they can run into difficulties, anyone can.
Society insists on placing men who kick a bag of wind around on a pedestal. But a pair of pink boots offers no immunity from the realities of real life.
Footballers are not Gods, they are human beings.