Every man has a price!

It’s a famous quote by a British politician of the 18^th century, Sir Robert Walpole, and till today he hasn’t been proved wrong. In the recent week newly elected Real Madrid President Florentino Perez has been making a mockery of the ongoing Global economic recession by making the two of the highest transfer deals in the History of Club football. He shook the entire football world by spending around 140 million pounds to bring in Kaka from AC Milan and Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United. An amount of money which can easily buy all the 8 teams in the IPL(Indian Premier league).

Has professionalism reached this far? Has winning become that important? The first encounter I had with the so called “The beautiful Game” was 9 years ago when Real Madrid beat Valencia 3-0 in the European Cup final. It was a magnificent display of football artistry by the Los Merengues which cast a spell upon me that night and this game became my favourite sport. At that point of time Real didn’t have any really big names in their ranks, and star players were mostly home-grown talents. There wasn’t any team in Europe who could match their brand of exhilarating football.

However a certain man named Florentino Perez became the President of the club, He was a very successful Madrid businessman and wanted to make Real Madrid a club which could win championships and also make money. To ventilate his interests he adopted the policy of ”Los Galacticos” by which he went to any extent to bring the big names of football to the club. The policy initially was a big hit as they entertained and won trophies after trophies. However, it backfired when they bought a certain man called David Beckham, Real name started to disappear from the sports page and appeared on page 3 more often than not. Despite lacking success on the pitch, Perez said,” I will never let go of Beckham, he sells T-shirts for me”. But was Perez really the root of the problem?

English premier league in the 90s was a sub standard league dominated by one team Manchester United, it was light years behind Spanish and Italian leagues. So it was not a very popular high earning league. In order to pep up the revenue it started to target Asian market to gain popularity and get revenues out of it. So the league with the help of the ever exaggerating English media gained control of the Asian market and started earning massive revenues compared to other rival leagues, hence English clubs were able to price away big names of the game from other leagues of Europe. Not so great players of English league were converted into Demigods. People in Asia knew David Beckham and didn’t know Zinedine Zidane. So in order to counter this, people like Perez broke their bank accounts to remain at par with English clubs. However, English clubs went a step further and started selling the clubs to foreign investors who would pump in millions of pounds get the best players in the club.

However in the whole process only one thing suffered: “The beautiful game”. The game has been slaughtered by these people, who in the name of professionalism have taken away the very essence of the sport- “Amateurism”, the raw love for the game. Even players are to be blamed, they are nothing more than mercenaries, who kiss the crest of the t-shirt after scoring a goal and the very next day would pounce on a lucrative offer which would pay them more. Some of them even go as far as saying that they love the club and would retire there and then behind the scene threaten to leave it if they are not paid as per their demands. Ronaldo as far as one month back said that he won’t ever leave Manchester United, but as soon as he got an offer of 12 millions pounds per year he readily packed his bags and set off for Madrid.

The game is really dying, every year we see the same teams reaching the top. Where have the Steaua Bucharests and Red Star Belgrades gone? Where are players out of Ajax youth academy who blew away each every team in their wake and won 4 European cups?

The thing is that, when it’s a battle between money and love 99 out 100 times, it is the money which wins. Love it or hate it , Robert Walpole’s words will always be right.