KEY POINTS:
It has become an all-too familiar tale: footballers out on the razz, if not the rampage. And it was equally no surprise to find Manchester United and England player Rio Ferdinand - a figure who has emerged as a symbol of the excess and complacency that so besmirch the English game - at the centre of the latest one.
It was Ferdinand who reportedly collected £4000 ($10,400) from each of his United team-mates to fund an afternoon and evening of wine, women, wagering and song that Bacchus himself might have considered slightly over the top.
Tell Ferdinand what Bacchus might have thought of Monday's party and he would perhaps wonder why anyone should be seeking the opinion of the Panathinaikos manager. The man from south-east London is not, by all accounts, the brightest bulb in the chandelier. But even he must now realise that the Christmas party he helped organise was an unmitigated disaster, not least for the 26-year-old woman who claims she was raped and for United's promising teenage defender Jonny Evans, who ended the night in police custody, being questioned about the rape allegation.
There is no evidence that Ferdinand behaved any worse than any of his team-mates in the Great John St Hotel, where the party ended up. He is not thought to have been the player propping up the bar and lifting the skirts of passing girls, nor the player who reportedly dragged a tearful woman towards the toilets before a security guard intervened. But in most newspaper pictures of the revellers out on the town, it is Ferdinand, looking rakish in his velvet jacket, a scarf artfully tied round his neck, who looms largest. And he was the one who got 25 players, many of them married or in long-term relationships, to cough up £100,000 so all 30 bedrooms in the hotel could be reserved for the night; there perhaps to avail themselves of the pleasures provided by some of the 100 young women reportedly "hand-picked" for the occasion.
The image of 100 women being rounded up for the delectation of 25 wealthy men seems more Old Testament than Old Trafford; a whiff of Sodom and Gomorrah in 21st-century Manchester.
In a way, it is apt that United players should be implicated in such unseemly revels, since it was the club's most famous son, the late George Best, who more or less invented the champagne lifestyle of the modern footballer. In the days when British footballers almost ritually drank themselves horizontal, United was home to some of the game's most legendary boozers, men such as Paul McGrath, Norman Whiteside and Bryan Robson.
On the other hand, in 10 days, it will be 2008, the year of the 50th anniversary of the catastrophic Munich air crash, which wiped out the core of United's famous Busby Babes. As that poignant February date approaches, thoughts will start turning to more innocent, wholesome times, when footballers travelled to games on the same buses as the fans; when their incomes and lifestyles were constrained by a maximum wage.
More than three years after the Munich disaster, Jimmy Hill, then the chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association, got that maximum £20-per-week wage scrapped. Footballers could at last start earning what they were manifestly worth. But look where it has ended up: with £30m defender Ferdinand passing the collection plate round players for whom £4000 is so much loose change, to fund a breathtaking exercise in collective irresponsibility.
When it comes to irresponsibility, Ferdinand has impressive form. In September 2003, he was told to attend a routine drugs test at United's Carrington training ground but "forgot", despite at least two reminders, claiming that he was moving house, had to buy some new bed linen and therefore had other things on his mind. It was a memorably pathetic excuse; indeed, if he were as feeble physically in defence as he was verbally, he would be lucky to break into Dagenham and Redbridge reserves.
But 29-year-old Ferdinand at his best is far from feeble. He is a marvellous footballer, fleet of foot and mind and notably skilled in turning defence into attack. At Manchester United, he has contributed to two league championship-winning campaigns and for a decade now, successive England managers have recognised his worth to the national side, awarding him 64 caps.
Ferdinand grew up on the rough, tough Friary council estate in Peckham in south-east London, the son of a St Lucian father and an Anglo-Irish mother. The inevitable autobiography - Rio: My Story - is one of the least revealing books even in a genre that specialises in banality. (Apparently a footballer once called him a "coon" but he'd rather not say who it was). Yet in the light of this week's reports, there is one noteworthy passage, in which he recalls life as an impressionable 17-year-old playing for West Ham reserves and being invited by team-mate Frank Lampard for a night on the town with Lampard's glamorous older cousin, Jamie Redknapp.
"Jamie was 'the face' at the time, the bloke to be seen with. He had everything going for him and he had just started getting into the England squad. He was where I wanted to be. He arrived with his brother Mark, Phil Babb and Jason McAteer and we went to one of the best clubs in the capital - the Emporium. When we arrived, there was a queue about 100 yards long. We walked straight past the lot of them and were in through the front door in 10 seconds flat. I didn't know that was possible. I'd always had to queue, sometimes for hours, and here we were going straight to the front.
"When we got in, there were loads of other footballers, all really smart dressers and I felt so inadequate. I was just in awe... even for Frank this was a bit of an occasion and we sat in that club telling each other that if we played well, we could go on and play for England and be like Jamie. For the first time, it really hit home what the fringe benefits of being a top footballer were. People were buying the players drink after drink and there were birds crawling all over them. Jamie's a good-looking lad, of course, but I soon learnt that if you're a footballer it doesn't matter how pig-ugly you are, you will always get attention from the fittest birds."
This lesson perhaps explains the look of satisfaction on Ferdinand's face in English newspapers this week.
As a youngster, he also had a footballing cousin of his own to look up to, striker Les Ferdinand. In fact, the Ferdinands have made quite an impact on English football: Rio's younger brother, West Ham defender Anton, got into hot water this year when he excused himself from training, saying he had to visit his sick grandmother on the Isle of Wight. When it turned out that he had jetted off to South Carolina to celebrate his 22nd birthday, the club fined him a fortnight's wages, around £45,000.
Sick grannies, shopping expeditions... those Ferdinand boys might have learnt to play football on the mean streets of Peckham, but nobody taught them how to wriggle out of a tricky situation with a decent excuse.
The tough upbringing itself, however, might be the best excuse of all. Ferdinand was born into a world in which serious wealth was almost unimaginable and, while it was clear from an early age that he had talent, nobody expected him to become the world's most expensive defender.
If the television companies and public are so in thrall to modern football that its finest exponents can be rewarded with salaries equivalent to those of a dozen nurses, then maybe it is we who deserve censure and not the vastly remunerated players, spending their mountains of cash as they see fit. If they are dim enough to think that their celebrity entitles them to sit at hotel bars lifting women's skirts, maybe the fault lies with those who accord them such celebrity. So maybe we shouldn't, after all, blame it on Rio.
- THE INDEPENDENT
