My old neighbour, Ian, (now moved out to ‘the country’ for some peace and quiet from horrible neighbours) retired early from his City bank job, as they do, and decided to take a masters degree. In football. Ok, not football, exactly, but he was working (and possibly still may be) on a theory suggesting that the better the footballer the greater his intelligence. I told him to expect a serious negative correlation. That the better the man is at football, the more stupid, uneducated and dim he’ll probably be. Based on the Rooney Study, Conway et al, 2014.

Yet this week a premier league player (well Sunderland are just about still in the Premier league, if he fails and needs resits we may have to change that) will graduate with a first class degree in Economics and Business Management from Newcastle University. And that is rare. Its like finding a monk who can break-dance; a government minister who rides bulls in the rodeo; a ballet-dancing tree-surgeon; a UKIP candidate who can read.

Duncan Watmore comes from a clever family, yet is great at football. So after being rejected at 12 years old by Manchester United’s youth academy, he returned to education and played his football at amateur level. But like many Man U rejects before him; Paul Pogba, Kevin de Bruyne, he was a talented individual, but just peaked a little later. Kids are taken into the system when they’re about 8 and turfed out when/if the clubs find any kind of insufficiency. Its fucking brutal. Yet every kid wants to play premiership football; 100 grand a week, all the Lamborghinis you can eat, all the tattoos you can fit down one arm, all the groupies you can gang rape; what’s not to like???

But they strive for that in lieu of an education. You can’t have both. You don’t have time for both. And if you’re one of the very lucky, very top-of-the-tree few, you can make your first team debut at 16/17/18. Like Rooney and many others. And the dream has been reached.

So football is full of uneducated dimwits spoilt rotten by the massive rewards they gain. Education is the anti-culture in football. Its a joke. A slur. An insult. Grounds for taking the piss.

Graeme Le Saux, former Chelsea and Blackburn defender, spent his whole career ridiculed because he chose to read a broadsheet newspaper, rather than a titty-filled comic like his teammates. They called him ‘The Poof’. Not because he was gay, which he wasn’t, but because he was educated to some minor degree, spoke relatively nicely and took an interest in the world beyond diamond ear studs and video games.

The Americans breed their sportspeople in their colleges. It forces them, if not to get an education worthy of the name, at least to play their sport in a vaguely educational environment. But College Football, for instance, is massive. As big as NFL. So the young adults go to College, where they play and train all day and they get a Ferrari each, three houses and $4 million a year. Even though they’re strictly ‘amateur’. Its a ‘scholarship’.

Wouldn’t it be just lovely if now and again they could interview a footballer after the match and he could actually speak. Like he knew something. In an informed manner. Proper sentences.

But at the end’a the day, issa game, innit, iss’all abart the winnin’. Free points is free points.

Happy Friday

A xxxx