Value For Money - Only Matters When You Win

So Fabio kissed goodbye to a £6m a year contract last night, and apparently did so on a point of principle.

Good luck to him, but as someone remarked this morning it’s a damn sight easier to have principles when you are on £6m a year than when you are on £6 an hour.

The fact of the matter is, though, that no one would actually give a monkeys what Fabio Capello had earned during his tenure as England boss if he had actually done a good job.

People talk about value for money (and god knows this website wouldn’t exist if people didn’t demand it) but what people value more than anything – and this is especially true of sport – is that the person we are paying these exorbitant sums actually wins something and in turn makes us feel good.

On the BBC News last night the journalist Mihir Bose was trying to make the comparison between Capello’s (it must be said exorbitant) salary and the bonus which Banker Stephen Hester refused last week under public pressure. But that rather misses the point.

As much as the callers to phone-ins like to say words to the effect that “if I did my job that badly I would be sacked” in relation to a player who has a bad game, or more likely a referee, the same employment rules do not apply.

With sports (and most importantly football seeing as that’s what we are about at cheap5aside.com) we live vicariously. Think of the language you use: “We played well.” “We were crap”. When things get really bad there will be some variant of “you’re not fit to wear the shirt.” Will be sung, you can bet on it. The teams we support are part of us, in a way that wear you bank isn’t and never will be

The big difference between any footballer and Stephen Hester is that we love football, but we have to go to the bank.

That doesn’t mean though, that we are here to be ripped off. Which is why footballers get abuse when they don’t perform, its why Managers are under pressure, its why Capello was never widely loved. If they don’t provide us “value for money” then we will come down on them like a tonne of bricks – and all of a sudden we will care what wages they get.

Of course, this loyalty only refers to the 11 aside game, when it coes to 5 a side, we only want a good product. Here we genuinely want value for money and here, we will all happily leave on a point of principle.

Rip us off at your peril.