Writing, reading or hearing that sentence will never stop arousing incredulity. Whether or not it was an accident the fact remains that a professional footballer took a weapon to the training ground and injured somebody. This is a perfect example of the 'Football Bubble'. Many of these people no longer live in the real world and most of them haven't done since a young age. In their formative years these young men are thrust into a life of unbelievable wealth and comfort meaning that some of them end up behaving in ways that most people would find absurd, but they seem to think is acceptable. Obviously each player is different and I'm not suggesting that every player behaves like a wealthy, deranged moron. Just some of them.
It seems to me that there are three main reasons as to why some footballers end up so out of touch with reality. First up, those most wonderful and popular of persons, agents. The football agent has come to prominence in the last 20 years of football due to the increased revenue and earnings in the game (I'll get to that) and the idea of an agent in its simplest form is quite understandable - let the player concentrate on football and the agent negotiates a good contract for his player and sorts out things like buying a house on his behalf. Fine. However, the agent has become more than that, he has become the players 'cleaner', if he makes a mistake the agent is there to protect him from the consequences. A case in point would be Ashley Cole (him again) allegedly having unprotected sex with a hairdresser whilst married and his representatives then offering her money to keep quiet and have an abortion. This is not an option for normal people, we don't have someone to go around mopping up our mistakes and most would consider the idea of paying the girl for her silence/to have an abortion reprehensible. This relationship results in the player not having to learn about causality in the way the rest of us do and is of severe detriment to the quality of their decision making skills.
Next we have earnings which have also changed incredibly in the last two decades. At the inception of the Premier League in 1992 the average player wage was around £75,000 per annum, for the 2008/09 season the average was around £1.1 million per annum. Now, although £75k a year is a very handsome wage its not enough to distance you entirely from the common man and in the case of most footballers where they came from, £1.1m plus the vast amount of sponsorship deals now available to footballers on the other hand is. In the case of Mr Cole who signed a contract worth £120,000 per week in 2009 at Chelsea, it most certainly is. A large proportion of supporters in this country earn a modest wage which means the £40-£100 it costs for a ticket to see your team play is a lot of money to you or I, but to someone that earns £120k a week its loose change. This has resulted in a perfectly human yet depressing reaction on both sides, envy from the stands and alienation on the pitch.
Ashley Cole getting of seemingly scot free for shooting someone with an air rifle is yet another example of the increasingly bizarre and distant world footballers live in. As I said before I'm trying not to be too nostalgic about the past and footballers were different to other people years ago I'm not disputing that, but you still felt that you could sit down and have a reasonable conversation with most of them. You still got the impression that the majority were regular people lucky enough to be doing a job they loved and getting paid well for it. That impression has become very a much a rarity in the modern game to the benefit of nobody.
