The Rewards of Mediocrity

We all know kids who were brilliant with the ball in the school playground at lunchtime, or on the car park football pitches in Stanley Park, and some dreamed of being professional footballers. In our heart of hearts, however, they felt they were just not good enough. 

So, as seasons passed, even the boys with golden feet set aside their dreams and became builders and computer programmers and teachers. To be a professional footballer, you had to be in some way specially gifted.

But it was not so!

Look around. Everywhere we see incompetence. If plumbers, bricklayers, bakers – let alone surgeons, airline plots or air traffic controllers – performed at the level that many footballers play, they would be out of work. In the world of football, they are simply moved on to other clubs. 

Take Neal Maupay. Those offensive social media posts seemed to compare Everton to a maximum security prison from which players are desperate to escape, but in truth, Everton escaped him – not the other way around.

Maupay’s career peaked at 17 when he was at Nice. His Premier League track record is the very definition of mediocrity: 28 goals in 172 matches; a single goal in 32 appearances for Everton. Over the last 10 years, no fewer than seven clubs have found him out and moved him on.

Yet he was earning £2.6M a year – more in a week than most people earn in a year. And despite everything, his services are still valued at £4M – a paltry sum for a striker in the greed-warped economy of football – but it still seems a lot for a goalscorer who can’t score goals.    

He is not alone, of course. He is not even the most egregious example in football. It seems being a professional footballer is like being a member of a closed guild. You may be incompetent, but you’ll never be out of work for long. In some respect, that’s unfair to guilds because most guilds try to uphold certain minimum standards.

Every season we see managers failing upwards. Some would say our own Arrigo Dycchi is a poster child of mediocrity based on his career-long win:loss ratio and the abysmal standards he sets for his players.

The guys who harangued the Everton players at Euston Station – and I’m among what seems to be a pitiful few to agree with them and their right to express their outrage – were not protesting the result so much as their attitude and nonchalant incompetence, the absence of consequence, and the rewards of mediocrity.

Each of us could name players who have come and gone – but alas, not fast enough – and yet enriched themselves while they were here. There are players like Rondon, and Jo, and Niasse, and Nyarko, and Bakayoko, and Li Wei Feng, and Idan Tal – I could go on – at every club. Indeed, Anthony Gordon’s stock continues to rise at Newcastle Utd despite the fact that his only real skill is a blistering pace.

Now, I realize that you can’t compare athletic performance precisely with other arts or crafts but what they do all have in common is practiced skill. You practice something repeatedly and it becomes second nature.

I’m really not sure modern footballers actually practice their fundamental skills – not enough anyway. If they did, surely we would not see so many basic errors on the pitch.

Most training sessions seem to focus on physical fitness, endurance, stamina, pace, upper body strength and diet. The evidence is in front of us every week and not just with Everton. The pace of the game is faster than ever, the physicality more demanding, the pitches more forgiving, the balls more responsive, yet I don’t see a corresponding increase in skill, ingenuity, artistry or genius or even just courage. Quite the opposite. 

Accomplished players – and you read this all the time in memoirs – often stay the extra hour after training sessions to practice the skills that make them great. So what are the others doing?

Presumably those great players don’t think they, and therefore their teammates, have done enough actual football in regular training. You see the results on the field. The mediocrities are firing crosses 20 feet above the heads of the strikers, mistiming tackles in scoring positions, and making many other basic errors.

Football has never been more competitive. It used to be that a talented young English player only had to compete for places with the other talents in the UK and Ireland. For over a generation, clubs – even lowly ones – have recruited from all over the world. Theoretically, foreign players seeking a work permit have to show that they have skills that set them apart from homegrown talent but these rules seem to be observed very liberally indeed.

We bring foreign players to the Premier League presumably because they are better than the players available in the UK and Ireland.  Many overseas players have indeed enhanced the skill and competitiveness of the Premier League. However, what is the point of importing so much mediocrity?

Surely we can find enough home-grown mediocrity in the UK. And there has to be a way of weeding out more mediocrities during the development process, which for most players began at 5 years old, and putting a greater emphasis on actual skill over physical development.

Someone once said that Pele and Garrincha – both of whom once graced Goodison Park – were greater artists than Michelangelo because, when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, he didn’t have 11 guys shaking the ladder, like they had.

I get that. The opponents are there to stop you playing well. But I look around the Premier League and see too many players who are frankly barely at the level of journeymen.

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