These footballers are models of British youth

Kevin Myers

Allegations about the Leicester City team going on the rampage in Spain oblige me to confess. I was raised in Leicester, whence the Myerses had emigrated from Dublin. I used to go to Filbert Street in that distant epoch when just about the whole team were called Len, with the exception of Albert Cheesewright. You wouldn’t even be allowed to register as a professional footballer these days with such a name.

Most of the players were bald and had false teeth, which they left in the dressing room, and games consisted of 22 middle-aged, pot-bellied footballers, their faces wizened like elves’, hoofing an ankle-breaking medicine ball around the place. Those few chaps with hair kept it in place with cement-mixer measures of Brylcreem.

Of course, they didn’t go to La Manga on the Costa Calida for special training, but to Skegnessa, on the Costa Lincolnsha. They were paid £17 basic a week, and they were as likely to run amok as they were to read Jane Austen or crossdress. When a player’s bags were torn, which happened perplexingly often, both teams would surround him to protect his modesty while he changed into a fresh pair. Ladies, for whom “roasting” was confined to Sundays, would avert their eyes and gasp. Roasting these days in soccer parlance consists of two footballers (or more) having simultaneous sex with a single woman, usually a stranger. The term comes from “spit-roast”, with the volunteer host female being skewered through either end (at the very least). When it’s over, the spits retire to the bar, and the joint returns to her friends, to regale them proudly with tales of who put what where. No, I don’t understand it either.

That the scandal of Premiership footballers’ conduct should now engulf inexorably drab Leicester is like hearing that Beefeaters are soliciting for gay sex in the Mall and that the Law Lords are running a chain of betting shops. So, now almost no team in England is safe. But it’s not just a matter of football. Soccer, with its combination of fame, money and libertinism, provides a congenial soup in which the common bacteria of English misbehaviour can prosper in almost perfect laboratory conditions. I say English, because the clubs are English, but actually, the disease belongs to these islands: for in this regard, we are truly a United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland (UKBI), a singular realm distinguished by violent drunkenness and boorish, witless promiscuity.

So it is far too easy to blame the Premiership, when the players are merely enacting in exaggerated form what can be seen in most UKBI cities any Friday or Saturday night. UKBI is now alcopopia, where a Bacardi Breezer is diluted with a double Bacardi, where nights end with people vomiting in the gutter, and where complete strangers have incoherent, instantly forgotten sex in shop doorways - chip and kebab wrappings at their feet obligatory, condoms elsewhere optional.

Take it out of the doorway, put it in a nightclub, swap the Breezer cocktail for a horse-trough of vintage champagne at £200 a bottle, and you have the Premiership today. Young men of even average talent whose libidos have never known any restraint, and who earn in a week what would have been a world record transfer fee when I was a child in Leicester, will behave precisely as young men have always done when not socialised in discipline and continence.

On the Continent, these qualities are still prized, at all levels of society. There, the violent, drunken crowds that bring a grisly uniformity to Grimsby, Dublin, London, Swansea and Glasgow at 2 am, simply don’t exist. So footballers in UKBI are not the exception to a society which is otherwise sober and celibate: rather, they are the exalted exemplars of a society which is the very opposite.

Yet such conduct is unthinkable within an essentially foreign “British” club like Arsenal. One can’t imagine the sophisticated aristos of Highbury breaking up a hotel room at 4 am, or lying in the gutter drunk, or giving a 10-second roasting to Charlene, who has been lying awake, fantasising about this moment ever since her best mate Kiely was roasted by the Accrington Stanley second team, plus a few of their wives.

Perhaps both islands are reverting to those bawdy ways which were the norm of merrie, bear-baiting Englande and chaotic, pre-Famine Ireland. But merely identifying the disease does not mean we are closer to a cure. For this is a disease of volition: getting drunk, smashing down doors and exchanging bodily fluids with whatever strangers’ parts are within pelvic reach - these are clearly desirable objectives for many within our two islands.

So in both their celebrity and in their excess, footballers today simply embody the values of the society around them, but only more so. They are extravagant, hall-of-mirrors reflections of what large numbers of young people seek to be or already are. And denouncing them alone for such conduct is just another symptom of the UKBI illness.

Kevin Myers article first appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 7th March, 2004 and we are grateful to the editor and the author for their kind permission to reproduce the article.