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Harsh realities stalk today’s pampered stars

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

In order to cope with the amount of increasingly insane requests they get from their players, most Premiership outfits have started to employ full-time player liaison officers. The PLO’s job is to help the socially deficient modern footballer with the simple things in life, like sorting out car insurance, or finding a parking space for the helicopter. This is how crazy the football world has gone.
It’s not as if these sort of services aren’t badly needed. A few months back, The Mirror’s Oliver Holt, one of the most astute observers of the English game, mentioned in his weekly column that a group of young stars at one Premiership club had neither driver’s licenses nor insurance for the glamorous sports cars they were all driving to and from training each day. It’s not that they intend to break the law. They are just oblivious to the real world. They live inside a bubble of fame, money and celebrity that insulates them from all such petty concerns.
The atmosphere of licentiousness and entitlement in which the average professional footballer finds himself in these times inevitably leads to problems when reality intrudes. Next month, the promising Irish goalkeeper Graham Stack’s trial on rape charges will begin at a Croydon Court. Over the last while, we’ve had a couple of incidents where Irish players at Sunderland ran afoul of the law too. Liam Lawrence was caught doing 109 miles per hour in his Chrysler Crossfire, and Niall Flynn, a Dublin-born youth teamer, received 60 hours of community service for firing a paintball gun at an off-duty policeman.
These incidents demonstrate that Irish pros are not immune to the stupidity and moronic behavior often considered standard in the upper reaches of the pro scene now. It seems that when salaries — which have finally steadied after years of growth — went stratospheric, players’ willingness to actually behave themselves like the rest of society disappeared completely.
Since average footballers began drawing down

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