- guardian.co.uk, Sunday October 12 2003 00.54 BST
Yet even such a disturbing charge sheet should be viewed with a sense of proportion. Young men behave badly, especially in groups. That is not confined to football players. Young men with too much money and too little experience of life behave particularly badly. But that is not unique to football, either. The deregulation of the money markets in the mid-1980s introduced us to champagne-popping 20-year-olds rich enough to drink away more in one night than their parents earned in a month (and foolish enough to do it more than once). Alcohol appears to be the driver of much loutish behaviour by fans and players and that should worry us; but so, too, should the fact that the nation is seen by the rest of the world as being on a permanent drinking binge.
And consider what did not happen last week. The rich and powerful Manchester United did not intimidate new FA chief executive, Mark Palios, into breaking Association rules on drug testing; Rio Ferdinand, having missed a drugs test, did not join the England squad in Turkey; Mr Palios was not bullied out of office; and the pugnacious players' champion, Gordon Taylor, did not convince the football world that forgetting a drugs test was a matter of no consequence. As for the more sordid rumours - rich footballers are as subject to the law as the rest of us. On Friday, two players from high-profile clubs were arrested in connection with the alleged rape of a 17-year-old girl. Charges may or may not follow, but footballers have no special criminal dispensation.
None of this will assuage fears that a money-saturated drinking culture is wrecking the game. Surely, we need better management or self-regulation? But it would be disingenuous to make such a call. This multi-billion-pound industry is regulated by the rawest laws of capitalism. Only when loutishness starts to affect profits will we see paternalistic controls of the kind now practised in American basketball: lessons in how to deal with sudden wealth; pints only of milk and early to bed.
Meanwhile, we should celebrate what football does well: bringing pleasure to millions across barriers of class, culture and, increasingly, gender. It has proved nifty, too, at crossing international borders, bringing xenophobic Britons to easy familiarity with other European cultures, at least on television. Maybe one day England fans will even be trusted to travel freely abroad.
