Don't be fooled... you'll pay for Terry's loyalty
Kiss off: John Terry's show of supposed loyalty is misplaced
The phrase ‘loyalty payment’ has always struck me as something of a contradiction. Loyalty has to be earned. It is not bought. But let’s just accept that this rule does not apply in modern football. Here loyalty is bought and sold like fruit — by the pound. And if any player possesses a club loyalty card he will keep it where it belongs, in his wallet next to the cash.
That isn’t a problem as long as everybody is honest. It just grates when players prattle on about their allegiance and devotion when their true commitment is usually to Coutts and Co.
Apparently, John Terry’s ties to Chelsea have been severely tested over the past couple of weeks by a wage offer of £1million a month from Manchester City.
This temptingly wild salary has been playing on his conscience to such an extent he has been waiting to find out whether or not Chelsea will give him a handsome pay rise to turn it down. This counter-offer was being described as a ‘loyalty payment’, when a more fitting term would surely be ‘disloyalty payment’.
Terry is perfectly entitled to earn whatever he can from the game, but he would go up in my estimation if he spared us the inevitable twaddle about loyalty, given that he had three years remaining on an already enormous Chelsea contract. This is not an instance where the cliche that he is merely getting ‘what he is worth’ according to ‘market forces’ can be trotted out.
You don’t need a meerkat to know that when City offered Terry £250,000 a week to kick a ball about, with a further £50m in transfer fees to Chelsea, it was an offer designed to obliterate the constraints of the market.
The Arab sheiks now running City can operate way beyond the parameters of any idea of ‘worth’, because the word has no meaning to them. They dangle extravagant sums of money in front of players because they realise that the chance to play for City isn’t enough of a lure in itself as yet, and they must pay hugely over the odds to tempt them in.
For now it’s about greed, not glory, although that, too, may be bought in time. It’s all very reminiscent of Chelsea in the days before Roman Abramovich discovered how to translate the Russian for ‘budget’ into English. Now the hunter has become the hunted.
Other clubs simply refuse to play the high-stakes game, or surrender at the first opportunity.
Arsenal sold Emmanuel Adebayor to City because they could not refuse the cash and did not consider him to be worth £150,000 a week. After seeing some of the lackadaisical performances he put in for the club last season, they’re right.
Laughably, Adebayor then tried to play his own loyalty card by claiming he had really wanted to stay at the Emirates, but the jeers of the fans had driven him into the arms of a contract worth almost £8million a year in Manchester. What a wrench that must have been.
The oddest thing about all of this bartering is that it is so uninspiring. The season is fast approaching, but for the first time in years it feels as if there is a better party happening elsewhere, only we’re not invited.
I’ve just returned from Spain and the place is in a frenzy of excitement. As Stewart Downing and Peter Crouch swap shirts here to sighs of apathy and we struggle to summon up a flicker of interest in the employment prospects of David Bentley, a glittering La Liga prepares to welcome Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka and Karim Benzema to Real Madrid.
Des Kelly
