Is it any wonder professional footballers grow up to be such cocky, ignorant scum?
Where I play five-a-side, three teenaged greaseballs show up around the same time as I do. The two eldest show up in full Arsenal, Manchester United or Porto replica gear. Their socks almost as carefully folded around their shin pads as each strand of hair has been lovingly teased with three times its own weight in hair gel so that the whole resembles some kind of interpretation of Pat Sharp fighting a porcupine in a deep fat fryer. They also sport beards that look like they have been drawn on with biro and a GCSE geometry set. Pencil thin streaks of fur being, to a beard, what a stick figure is to Michelangelo's David. The third member is a vile looking miniature of the elder two of around fourteen. He differs in appearance only in that he wears Chelsea training kit and isn't up to the facial hair yet. They stand about before their match practicing keep-ups and other tricks and they're quite good at it.
The true villain of the piece though is the caretaker of the pitches. This oversized lumpen halfwit leaps around these three like some ingratiating Dickensian butler. He celebrates each kick by screeching like a retarded sea lion at feeding time the name of whatever Premier League "Megastar" happens to be floating within the cavernous space between his ears at that moment.
One day, he found out the fourteen year-old had just signed some sort of apprentice contract with Chelsea. He nearly blew-up. Residents up to half a mile away must have thought it was mating season for some hitherto undiscovered donkey sanctuary. Needless to say the thirteen year-old was beaming though he beamed in a way that suggested he expected that reaction and was used to it. Sadly, he probably had every right to.
Adulation for footballers is such that one can beat a colleague sufficiently to get himself locked up and not even face a serious threat of losing his job. Another can become captain of the national side and still stand about in nightclubs urinating almost pure alcohol down the inside of his trouser leg. At work he can acquit himself snarling at and manhandling anybody who dares question his supposed authority, referees included, without any significant threat of criticism, let alone censure.
The reason why is because of the unfulfilled dreams of morons like the caretaker. Idiots like this will now tell the thirteen year-old that absolutely everything he does is brilliant which, judging by the sneering little twerp's face, plenty of people already had. They will cluster fawningly around him just for the slightest whiff of glory by association. The odds against this kid actually making it as a professional, let alone one at Chelsea, are enormous. That won't stop them though. Those with a professional interest in his development will tell him he's great because of the money they can make from him if he actually is good enough. Talk is cheap and therefore, a great investment. Everyone else doles out the same kind of unquestioning adoration just because it is a chance to say "I knew him when..."
As such, he'll grow up, as he seems to have done already judging by his haircut, able to ignore anyone with anything critical to say in favour of any number of creeping morons, many of whom will be full grown men, who would be happy to drink from his jockstrap. When he gets it wrong, unless the club spits him out, like a two year-old, there will always be someone to coo over him and wipe up his mess no matter how old he gets. Paul Gascoigne is an example.
Boys who are good at sport are courted by men prematurely. Footballers in their mid-thirties are still referred to as boys or men as if they were interchangeable terms.Treating boys as men for purely on the grounds of ability to run, jump, kick a ball whilst continually relieving them of responsibilities, duty or serious criticism ensures that those who grow up to be footballers never get to grow up at all.