Footballers being slagged and compared to Olympians

[Fox]

Seems like the press and lots of public on facebook ETC are going with this whole footballers are a disgrace, over paid wimps, cheats, no team spirit, not dedicated, celeb mad twats when compared to Olympians.

I know a handful of the top athletes earn footballers wages and they can do well commercially after winning gold but you can understand why after watching the Olympics people are a bit footballers meh.

One mate of mine has totally lost it with footy, the diving, twitter shit, the disresepct to refs ETC he cannot watch it anymore with the same passion and simply watches MOTD on a saturday night only.

Is it fair that footballers are getting this stick, most Olympians train all sorts of strange hours, sacrifice their life, their diet/social life ETC for a chance at something which happens once every 4 years and they may completely fail in.

Thought this picture was quite good and sums up the mood of some folk out there.

 

[Silver Sean]

Typical agenda-setting by a past-it, pointless press. Journalism died in this country when it was decided that every mouth-breathing twunt in the country had an opinion worth hearing.
Wont be long before Sky Sports reporters are in the crowd getting instant reaction to moments in matches. Like those pricks who wave when they appear on a big screen. Wankers.
Give it 2 months and no-one will give a fuck.

 

[Insignificance]

In some sports you take a hit for the team without crying.....

 

[peterhague]

I always resent the comparisons. Seems like we can't praise one set of athletes without trashing another. Random thoughts on it:

1. I think the only significant difference is that footballers are from poorer and less well educated backgrounds. I'd naturally expect someone from a dodgy estate to be more oafish than a public schoolboy. On average.

2. No-one ever cheats in Olympic sports. Ever. It's practicallly unheard of. Yep.

3. I hear constant complaints that footballers don't deserve their salaries and that Olympians deserve higer ones, despite the one being the result of real world demand for their services (and also, therefore, making the competition in their chosen field quite incredibly high compared to being a champion, say, pole vaulter) and the other a result of a public subsidy paid for by mostly poor people buying lottery tickets that might yield a tenner a year in revenue.

 

[Insignificance]

I always resent the comparisons. Seems like we can't praise one set of athletes without trashing another. Random thoughts on it:

1. I think the only significant difference is that footballers are from poorer and less well educated backgrounds. I'd naturally expect someone from a dodgy estate to be more oafish than a public schoolboy. On average.

2. No-one ever cheats in Olympic sports. Ever. It's practicallly unheard of. Yep.

3. I hear constant complaints that footballers don't deserve their salaries and that Olympians deserve higer ones, despite the one being the result of real world demand for their services (and also, therefore, making the competition in their chosen field quite incredibly high compared to being a champion, say, pole vaulter) and the other a result of a public subsidy paid for by mostly poor people buying lottery tickets that might yield a tenner a year in revenue.

Normally they cheat to get better.... Not to have some physio come running to comfort them as the other guy kicked him! Yeah KICKED HIM!!!!!!

 

[peterhague]

Normally they cheat to get better.... Not to have some physio come running to comfort them as the other guy kicked him! Yeah KICKED HIM!!!!!!

Oh well that makes it perfectly ok. But of course you're wrong anyway - *all* cheating is done to gain an advantage. That's what cheating is. But perhaps it's the nature of the play-acting that's so disgraceful? Not sure why it's so much more admirable to inject one's body full of steroids than to take an occasional dive, if I'm honest.

 

[Insignificance]

Oh well that makes it perfectly ok. But of course you're wrong anyway - *all* cheating is done to gain an advantage. That's what cheating is. But perhaps it's the nature of the play-acting that's so disgraceful? Not sure why it's so much more admirable to inject one's body full of steroids than to take an occasional dive, if I'm honest.

It is not more admirable at all. It is actually more disgraceful. But if an "occational" dive was even close to that disgraceful, should they be punished harder for cheating?

 

[Spionkop69]

I think the general thing is to the ordinary man in the street is that we have had 2 weeks of people showing pride, commitment and a general joie de vivre in all things British and sporting. And now the football season is on us....

It was bound to happen, whether the Olympics were glorious failure or glorious success (which they were).

Someone pointed out that the overblown media is part of the issue and I agree, along with Twitter giving everyone not only a place to air their opinion but also for many more to read it. Barton and Owen are banging on about it on Twitter and getting quite annoyed about the press footballers are getting.

The thing is, though, stereotypes wouldn't exist as much if large numbers of people didn't conform to the behaviours of said stereotype....

 

[Insignificance]

For fucks sake. Nani is spending his money building a tall statue of himself when his most prolific teammate spend his spare time cheating on his newly married wife by shagging prostitutes older than his granny. Englands by that time Captain screwed his international and club teammates wife while his own was pregnant. The whole kingdoms well respected SIR Giggs is despited by his own brother for spendign his sparetime shagging his wife. Not to mention Joe Barton and all the other racism going on. All this when those performing in the Olympics spend there sparetime training and working out so they can perform. Which is something none of the UK national teams has done in football since 1966.

 

[Spionkop69]

But the point many are making, and I think its pretty valid, is...can you compare footballers with Olympians? Not really imo. That doesn't mean that many won't, especially if it sells copy OR helps reinforce prejudices already in place.

 

[gkmacca]

The same people who've been happy enough to celebrate the obscenely over-paid and over-hyped profession are now moaning that it's not like the Olympics. Of course it isn't. But if the Olympics itself became a year long professional event, I'm sure the same patterns of behaviour would develop. It's a pointless and misleading comparison.

 

[Insignificance]

First of all I don't like the lazy bullshit journalism which is onlybased on scoring cheap "clicks" on any hysterical headline.

But the flack against footballers is not only regarding the olympians. I think it has to do with how normal people can identify themselves with sportsmen without seeing the same sportsmen making complete fools of themselves in more and more disgraceful ways while showing how much they idoloze themselves. Just a brief example. You will find a lot of sportsmen that can be unsympatic bastards. But they don't rip your wallet for millions while acting like a cock like Niclas Bendtner. Where is his touch with reality and how he is supposed to behave? Does he deserve the space he gets in media?

 

[Spionkop69]

The same people who've been happy enough to celebrate the obscenely over-paid and over-hyped profession are now moaning that it's not like the Olympics. Of course it isn't. But if the Olympics itself became a year long professional event, I'm sure the same patterns of behaviour would develop. It's a pointless and misleading comparison.

Where there's two weeks of unbridled joy there has to be a downside. This time its footballers! The press in general prefers a negative story than a continuously positive one.

 

[LarryHagman]

To be honest, I don't mind footballers getting a kicking for being obnoxious cunts because most of them are.

 

[Insignificance]

To be honest, I don't mind footballers getting a kicking for being obnoxious cunts because most of them are.

Agreed. They have a lot to learn about public behaviour. And they are really underestimating the fans.

I mean, look at what some of the guys do to get a tiny piece of attention about their own person. Writing books about the "story of my life" at 24 or oepn the house to the public through a magazine after a life as left back at Nortworthing Rovers. They need to climb out of their own arses for a period and become decent people again.

 

[Judge Jules]

Nice avatar Fox BTW. Very nice indeed.

 

[Spionkop69]

Agreed. They have a lot to learn about public behaviour. And they are really underestimating the fans.

I mean, look at what some of the guys do to get a tiny piece of attention about their own person. Writing books about the "story of my life" at 24 or oepn the house to the public through a magazine after a life as left back at Nortworthing Rovers. They need to climb out of their own arses for a period and become decent people again.

There are a fair few who need to climb out of their own arses. But to counter that there are many more who are earning an honest living and generally are good human beings. As with every walk of life, which ones get written about most?

 

[themn]

This made me laugh my head off the other day.

It's from Talksport and the protagonists are as follows:

Andy Goldstein: Presenter, tedious, puerile, sniggering Scum fan who only lasted a year on Soccer AM.

Andy Jacobs: Presenter, Chav fan and one of the bitterest cunts ever.

Rob Beasley: Shitrag journo, Chav fan and very angry about everything (especially Rafa).


View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU7MDz0152k

 

[Woland]

Ah, the cretinocracy again. How lovely.

 

[themn]

A cacophony of cancerous cunts.

 

[peterhague]

Crikey, what a horrible bunch of cunts.

 

[Judge Jules]

Cockroaches squabbling in the gutter.

 

[themn]

I heard it live and was pissing myself.

 

[gkmacca]

How a normal, quite amiable bloke like Paul Hawksbee continues to put up with that ghastly creep Andy Jacobs is a mystery to me. And what a terrible trio that lot make!

 

[Fabio]

That was fucking obscene! Hilarious and I'm glad they all look like cunts

 

[gkmacca]

It's a fascinating see-saw stupidity game - with each comment you think, 'Wow, that one's even thicker than the other one,' then the next one speaks, and you think, 'Christ, he's even thicker than that,' and so on...

 

[themn]

How a normal, quite amiable bloke like Paul Hawksbee continues to put up with that ghastly creep Andy Jacobs is a mystery to me. And what a terrible trio that lot make!

Quite.

I love Paul Hawksbee.

He's the best thing on that station.

 

[Judge Jules]

I wouldn't go that far. As a Tottenham fan he's not above a bit of Liverpool-bashing (or at least baiting).

 

[Woland]

It's as if people think that football as a sport is the problem, and not the fact that its played by 22 subnormal lottery winners who are spoilt rotten and treated like gods by everyone around them. The reason people hate footballers is because a very sizeable amount of them are handsome dickheads who've come into a lot of money very quickly, and some get quite loud, preaching irrelevance from their nonsense realities - if there's one group of people they're similar to it's hip hop stars, another bunch of utter bellwhiffs.

The thing with athletics is that the facilities and coaches tend to be in universities, or at least in leafy suburbs. The thing with football is that you tend to have to fight your way past a burning car to get to training and only the fittest survive. Athletes love to prove how hard they are because they aren't. Footballers don't care about looking hard, only winning. What do people expect?

What people moaning about football want to see is 22 loveable bankers with BoJo haircuts smiling, laughing at each other's shit jokes, picking each other up as they fall, as a crowd of startled Mary Poppins-a-likes discuss house prices in Cambridge, waiting for the cucumber based cocktails to be served. They can all fuck off out of my head.

We're living in phase 2 of the Clare Baldingeriastion of the UK. I fear for post-Baldingian society.

 

[FoxForceFive]

How a normal, quite amiable bloke like Paul Hawksbee continues to put up with that ghastly creep Andy Jacobs is a mystery to me. And what a terrible trio that lot make!

I listen to the show simply cos Paul seems very nice & is very funny. Jacobs is a complete nob though.

Heard that & was dying to hear that Rob had found him & battered him after the show.