The newspaper coverage this week of Adam Johnson, the Sunderland footballer facing a five-year prison sentence after being found guilty of sexual activity with a child, offered an intriguing glimpse into the different faces of top-flight football’s moneyed circus of the grotesque.
In the news pages, victim support groups were asking increasingly fierce questions about why the £10m winger was allowed to play for Sunderland after being arrested, earning £3m in the process, despite the club’s chief executive, Margaret Byrne, having been fully briefed by police and shown 834 WhatsApp messages exchanged between Johnson and his 15-year-old victim.
On the back pages, executives from the country’s biggest clubs had been photographed leaving a secret summit with representatives from a US sports marketing giant, at which they discussed ways in which they could make even more money from potentially revamping the Champions League. Meanwhile the prime minister insisted that he felt the pain of ordinary fans protesting over ticket prices in the light of the Premier League’s £8.3bn broadcasting deal.
These three loosely connected strands coalesced by the end of the week into a familiar feeling that football has long slipped its moral moorings, even as its commercial value and the wages of its star players soar.
The details of the Johnson case illuminated a world in which talented players are plucked from school and paid huge sums from an early age, often well before they break into the first team.
Over two days in the witness box at Bradford crown court, Johnson painted his fellow players as a bunch of pampered millionaires who, when not playing football or partying in Las Vegas, Los Angeles or Dubai, were glued endlessly to their smartphones. He was candid when asked how football had affected his maturity. “It slowed it down,” he said, adding that he had become arrogant and acted without integrity
Jon Holmes, the former football agent whose clients included Gary Lineker and David Beckham, believes the way the dynamic has shifted between players, their advisers and their clubs as wages have risen exponentially in the Premier League era is a factor. “The problem now is that if the agents do anything to upset them, they get the sack. They get someone else to feed their ego,” said Holmes, also a former chairman of Leicester City. “They are more glorified concierges than advisers. There are so many people hanging on to the gravy train that nobody wants to upset it.”
One former neighbour in Grants Houses, the mining village on the east Durham coast where Johnson honed the skills that would later make him a multimillionaire, said the 28-year-old had never had to grow up. “Adam never had a normal adult life. He was a footballer when he was still a boy and he never learned how to become a man,” he said. “He had everything done for him and he had too much money at too young an age. I think it made him believe he could do whatever he wanted without having to face up to it.”
Clubs are under huge competitive pressure to sign the brightest talent from the age of seven upwards and keep their young charges and their parents happy. Perhaps that is one reason why, despite employing child welfare officers and increasingly delivering lifestyle courses, they tend to default to protecting their “asset” when crisis hits. From John Terry’s on-field racism and Jose Mourinho’s treatment of club doctor Eva Carneiro at Chelsea, to Liverpool’s determination to defend Luis Suárez over racism charges and the furore over Oldham Athletic’s unsuccessful attempt to sign the convicted rapist Ched Evans, a depressing trend has emerged.
Namely, that clubs are keen to promote their community schemes and champion diversity when it suits them, but mislay their moral compass when it comes to the bottom line and results on the pitch. It is one in which fans are sometimes complicit: Johnson’s and Evans’s victims were both hounded on social media.
