Leo Messi and Wayne Rooney are different animals.
One is mostly modest, the other often vulgar.
Messi goes on the pitch and uses his artistry to win game after game after game. Then he goes home. He doesn’t watch much football or do anything controversial
Back in October, Wayne Rooney was very controversial.
He wanted to leave Manchester United.
He wanted to join City to earn more money.
Or so we were told.
At that time, more than six months ago, I thought : Sir Alex has protected the transfer value of Wayne Rooney by extending his contract and doubling his wages. If Rooney plays well this season, Sir Alex can sell him for £50 million in the summer of 2011. If he keeps Rooney for the following season, and he continues to underperform, he can still sell him for £30 million in summer of 2012 and say, “I kept him but it didn\’t work out.”
Rooney’s threat to leave Manchester United looked risky, an exercise in brinkmanship. It was an ugly and dangerous thing to do.
When he switched on his CCTV and saw about 40 angry United fans outside the gates of his mansion, did he think : “I don\’t need all this aggro. Do I really want a riot every time City play United?”
But was that move to Manchester City ever close? Was it ever really on for Rooney to join City? Or was his agent Paul Stretford just playing hardball? Was Stretford banking on David Gill and the Glazers being unable to call his bluff?
Always remember that Wayne Rooney is Paul Stretford’s only client.
As you know by now, I find Rooney a compelling subject, and, like many others, I\’ve often wondered wonder how long his career will last.
When that story broke, I thought that, at 25, Rooney should stop behaving like a boy wonder and start behaving like a champion.
A boy wonder is often somebody who is immature and inconsistent and blames other people for his mistakes. A champion is a different animal. A champion like Kenny Dalglish or David Beckham is self-motivated and self-disciplined and dedicated to improving his game and playing at the top for as long as possible. Look at Maldini, Seedorf, Tony Book and David O’Leary. Look at Ryan Giggs.
Before the U-turn by Rooney on that fateful Friday, there was a lot of gossip and speculation. Some said Rooney\’s divorce would cost him half his money, so he needed to double his wages. Others said Colleen would have another baby and divorce him in four years time when he is far richer than he is now.
Because the Rooney story climaxed on a Friday, the Sunday headlines were even more over the top than usual.
Sunday Mirror : Rooney flees- abandons birthday bash to escape fans fury. We reveal he turned town £85m to join Man City
News of the World : We can still sigh him, say City
The People: I don\’t want to be like Stevie G, playing for a team with a great history but no future.
Sunday Telegraph : Rooney contract contains ‘targets for United\’
That was the one that made me sit up.
The most shocking headline was in a broadsheet newspaper !
Sunday Telegraph : Rooney contract contains ‘targets for United\’
Those six words turned football upside down.
Until I read those six words I thought : Spurs have a contract with Peter Crouch, Chelsea have a contract with Frank Lampard, Sunderland have a contract with Darren Bent, and Arsenal have a contract with Jack Wilshere.
We know all about player power since Bosman but at 8.30 on a Sunday morning I was being asked to comprehend that football had turned upside down.
My reaction was : “What? WHAT? Manchester United have a contract with Wayne Rooney, not the other way round?”
Apparently, clauses in his new contract insisted that the club had to meet his criteria. If those are not met, Rooney can leave any summer for a fixed sum of £30 million.
Another crazy headline said: We\’ll buy you a new team.
BLOODY HELL!!!
Personally, before all that happened, I felt that Rooney was becoming a bad boy and bad boys did not suit the tenor of the times. Big clubs and big sponsors don\’t like bad boys these days.
Yes, Nike marketed aggro by signing up rebel heroes Ian Wright and Eric Cantona but this is not the Eighties boom. This is an era when a criminal (but legal) banking rip-off has triggered the deepest recession for 70 years. We were then in Year 2 of a six-year recession, so corporations now prefer safer choices to maintain respectability. Coca Cola quietly ended their sponsorship deal with Rooney.
Mainly, this story was about money. A lot of sports stories are about money, even when they don\’t appear to be.
Around the same time as Wayne Rooney was threatening to betray the world’s biggest club in the nastiest way imaginable, Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favourite journalists, published a fascinating article in The New Yorker headlined Talent Grab – Why do we pay our stars so much money?
Gladwell explained that before the Seventies the people who were super-rich in the USA were those with inherited wealth. Between the end of the war and the Seventies, investment bankers, chief executives and star athletes were well rewarded but only earned a fraction of what they earn today.
As America became richer, and taxes fell, a guy called Marvin Miller revolutionised baseball. Miller had been the chief economist and negotiator for the United Steelworkers. He looked at their union and was appalled because it wasn’t really a union. It was a Players Association and, amazingly, there was no collective bargaining agreement with the owners, who were taking all the money. Most players were just happy to be eating steak and getting cheered by big crowds.
In 1966, Marvin Miller went to pre-season training with the San Francisco Giants in Florida, where the players were encouraged to bring their families, and told them that right fielder Bobby Bonds\’s teenage son Barry could eventually earn more in one year than his father earned in his entire career.
By 1968, Miller had negotiated their first collective bargaining agreement, which increased their minimum salary from $6,000 to $10,000 a year. He led them through strikes in 1972,1980 and 1981.
In simple terms, at this point in America’s prosperous history, the big talents in each sector were in very, very short supply. The big talents came to realise that they were underpaid. Capital had accumulated massively, and there was now far more cash than baseball players with superstar talents.
It was supply and demand. And the social concensus now favoured privilege. So sports stars became multi-millionaires. So did top lawyers, investment bankers and business executives.
Miller led the Major League Baseball Players’ Association from 1966 to 1982 and during those 16 years the average player\’s salary rose from $19,000 to $241,000 a year.
Amazingly, his vision for Bonds junior turned out to be an understatement. The young Barry Bonds was exceptionally gifted and ended up making more money in a year than his father\’s whole team had earned in their entire careers.
In the UK, big sports stars didn’t earn megabucks until after 1992, when English football sold its fixtures and soul to Sky.
Before ’92, the talent grab was by the clubs. When Liverpool had the First Division’s best goalscorer, Ian Rush, they bought the second best, John Wark of Ipswich, in 1984, and sat him on the bench for four of his five years at Anfield, so no other team could have him.
But all that changed when the elite clubs split from the Football League. Rupert Murdoch started to pump billions into the Premier League and used his newspapers to hype it up. Arriving four years after the Premier League broke away, Arsene Wenger found Arsenal players earning £200,000 a year.
Asked whether Rooney was worth his new contract, Wenger said: “Only 15 years later, Rooney now has the same amount for one week. That is a shock.â€
It’s not only a shock, it’s an obscenity. But that’s the world we live in and nobody can change it. It’s logical for England’s most talented footballer to play for our biggest club. And it’s also logical that Rooney should be the EPL’s highest-paid player of any nationality, even if he is a poor role model.
You may disagree, of course. And you may wonder, if you believe in karma, whether Rooney’s greedy behaviour is bad karma, something that undermines United’s chances of winning at Wembley.
Marvin Miller is still alive and living in Manhattan at the age of 94.
A preview of Wembley?
I have a few ideas.
Please check ANR on Saturday morning.