Jack Grealish- a £100 million player. Has football lost its senses?

 Jack Grealish- a £100 million player. Has football lost its senses?

Of course we've been here before and we still can't believe it. Football has always gone through evolutionary cycles and has to move with the times. Progress made is always to be highly commended but when society and the free market economy dictate exactly which way it wants football to go there can be no room for any kind of argument. So it was that another landmark was reached last week. Football was seduced by money and literally lost its moral bearings. Where on earth is the game we've so loyally followed throughout the years going? Football has now become consumed by rampant greed and nobody has so much as batted an eye-lid. This is almost the accepted norm. 

When Trevor Francis became the first £1 million player way back in the early 1980s, we thought football was simply going through a silly phase and Francis would become the exception rather than rule. The sight of Brian Clough standing proudly next to his latest acquisition at Nottingham Forest now seems just a minor financial aberration that could have been avoided. But it did take place and then the game spiralled out of control. 

Last week, Jack Grealish, a vastly gifted midfield playmaker, catalyst, starting motor, footballing architect and general, signed for Pep Guardiola's Premier League champions Manchester City for the eyeball rolling figure of £100 million. For a moment most of us were just stunned, even traumatised by what we had seen with the evidence of our own eyes. But then we recognised the absurdity of it all, the mindless materialism that had once again infected football. We shut our eyes for a while, looked at the sky and just sighed our exasperation, the numbed shock you always feel when you can barely understand why. 

Back in the 1960s Johnny Haynes, Fulham and England's classiest of players, became one of the first footballers to bring home a £100 a week wage packet  to his family. At the time most football supporters thought the game had lost its mind. Football would go to hell in a handcart, the road to ruination and damnation that would lead to the complete disintegration of the game as a force for good, no longer considered as the working men's sport where players and managers could ever live with their social conscience. 

Besides, the world around football was surrounded by abject poverty and starvation, hunger and deprivation in the heart of Africa. There is a sense that football was losing its identifiable focus with the supporters on the terraces who could only see their heroes getting wealthier by the day. The firemen, milkmen, shop workers and office workers were earning peanuts and here were those muddied oafs pocketing a fortune.  But Haynes was just the tip of the iceberg, an example of what could happen if a considerable sum of money was offered to a player who had known only financial hardship and nothing but struggle. 

So here we are back at the same old drawing board. A mind boggling £100 million sum has been brokered between Aston Villa and Manchester City. City of course have got so many millions in their bank account that the figures now seem like chicken feed to its multi billion pound Arab owners. Grealish of course is not to blame since he was the pawn in the middle of all this money grabbing acquisitiveness, this pursuit of the fast buck, this blind ignorance of reality. But this latest football transfer can only be regarded as another obscenity, another heinous outrage, an arrogant disregard for the game's fundamental grass roots. 

And this is the crux of the issue. While the Premier League season will resume again this weekend, football's brethren, its lower division uncles and cousins will be wrestling with its poor attendances, the trickle down of the pandemic's furloughing problems and will have no idea how it'll ever make up the lost revenues from a lost season. Oh for the Rochdales and Grimsby's of the world, the Plymouth Argyles and Prestons that have so often languished in the provinces and margins of the game, outsiders looking in with anguish and hurt in their hearts. Survival is painful and nobody cares about them. 

But Jack Grealish will certainly be alright of that can no be doubt. During the summer Grealish could have been the vital difference between England quite possibly winning Euro 2020. Gareth Southgate, England's very respectable manager, may be kicking himself for not starting with Grealish in the Euro 2020 Final at Wembley. He will probably wonder if he could have done anything different, privately acknowledging that Grealish could have opened doors and broken through the Italian defence. 

After that game, few people would have noticed that Grealish did more than most to justify such an extortionate transfer fee. Spotting a youngster on the terraces with his family, Grealish climbed over a railing on the Wembley terraces, took the young man under his wing and agreed to a selfie photo. Grealish then handed over a brand new pair of green boots to the child, wrapped his arm around the kid's shoulder and smiled for the camera. It was a selfless, humble and unassuming gesture and we then offered nothing but whole hearted appreciation. 

However, when Manchester City forked up £100 million our perceptions of the nation's favourite game were still unshaken. Those footballers are all the same, feeding at the trough, obsessed with all of those Bank of England millions of pounds, the wages of sin, the root of all evil. But it does indeed make the world go around. It's the stuff that pays off the bills, big, old mortgages, all of that essential food and drink and all of those frightening obligations that have to be met. It's there and has to be and may always be the case. 

And so it is that the Premier League will set out on its nine month journey with all of those customary expectations, the modest ambitions in some cases and just a backward glance at Jack Grealish. Are City guaranteed another Premier League trophy with Grealish in their ranks or is Pep Guardiola hoping, possibly assuming, that the former Aston Villa man will tip toe, tread very delicately through tangles of opponents legs, dribbling at breath taking speed, stepping over and dragging back just for fun? Or will Grealish find himself exposed to the oppressive environment of a team who are somehow expected to win trophies every season. £100 million still sounds like a mad extravagance, the kind of money which comes with intolerable pressures. But we must hope that Jack Grealish is worth every single penny.