Has soccer lost the plot?

Last Wednesday evening, all of us with a certain modicum of love for Arsenal Football Club celebrated when news came through that Declan Rice had joined the club. The man who played for Ireland before deciding he was English after all is undoubtedly a top-class player, so he will be a great addition to the Arsenal squad next season.

The £105 million deal that took him across London from West Ham is a stunning sum, hard to comprehend in the real world. That obscene amount of money would fund a small country, but it seems to be acceptable in the world of Ronaldo, Messi and the many multitudes of millionaires who kick a ball for a living.

On Wednesday last I felt old, really old. The van loads of cash crossing London from north to east in payment for Rice were a long way from the transfer deals of my youth.

It seems like only last month I was in the Corsair outside Bobby McAndrew’s shop in Ballycroy on the way home from Mass in 1977 when I read on the back page of the Sunday Mirror that a young Scottish centre-half had signed for Liverpool for £100,000. That young man turned out to be one of the club’s great captains, Alan Hansen.

Less than two years later, England striker Trevor Francis joined Nottingham Forest from Birmingham City in a deal worth over £1 million, which was a British transfer record at the time.

It was hard to get one’s head around that huge amount of money, and many predicted that transfer prices would rarely reach that level again. A million pounds was a colossal fee at that time, and as the dreary 1980s dawned, very few expected the price of players to continue the upward surge. How wrong we were.

At that time Celtic were my team. They still are and always will be my team. I love them, and one of these days I’ll get around to spending a stunning Saturday or a wild European night in Parkhead watching the men in the famous hooped jerseys doing their thing.

Like a lot of Celtic fans I also have an English team I follow, and for my sins, I like Arsenal. They have made my heart dance since 1979, when a team laced with Irish men won a thrilling FA Cup final against Manchester United.

On an August evening in 1986, Celtic came to London to honour David O’Leary, one of Arsenal’s great Irish men. My cousin Michael and I were in The Clock End in Highbury that evening with the thousands of Celtic fans who rocked the night away.

Michael was usually in the other end of the stadium, on the North Bank, as he was, and still is, a huge Arsenal fan. He lived within two miles of the famous old stadium and loved the fact that Arsenal had a huge Irish connection at that time.

We stood in the midst of the Celtic hordes as both sets of fans chanted O’Leary’s name into the night sky. Sometimes, if I think hard enough, I can recall the sights and sounds of that North London night.

The men on the pitch that night lived a much more exciting life than those of us on the terraces, but they still existed within touching distance of our reality. They were rich, but there were plenty of men and women in ordinary society earning similar wages.

That has changed beyond all recognition now. The earnings of Declan Rice and his ilk are beyond our wildest dreams and bear no resemblance to real life.

The average weekly wage of a Premier League footballer stands at a little over £60,000, while the average wage of young men of a similar age throughout British society is £516. 

How did this happen? How did it occur? How did football go from being a game where the players were real people to a sport played by multimillionaires? How did we arrive at a juncture where the fee for Declan Rice could make a massive dent in world hunger or send a man to the moon?

How did we get from Highbury on a wild August evening in 1986 to the sterile environment of last Wednesday when the Arsenal Twitter account announced the biggest transfer fee between two English clubs? How long that record will stay in place remains to be seen.