Football: Coolness gives way to clueless

George Best. Photo / Getty.

Top players used to be hip but are more likely to commit fashion crimes and fight over Phil Collins songs now.

When did footballers become quite this uncool? In generations past, they were cultural icons, oozing glamour and sophistication.

George Best was known as the fifth Beatle. Stan Bowles and Rodney Marsh were as celebrated as pop stars. Paul Breitner invented the hipster look 35 years in advance.

Now, there is a vaguely clueless whiff to the footballer - a species with all the money and time in the world, yet little idea how to spend either. As someone of roughly average footballer age (29) and average coolness, I searched for answers.

We should lay down some ground rules here: the first of which is that being good at football does not, in itself, qualify one as cool. Paul Scholes was a midfield genius, but strip away the context and you are left with a boring bloke from Oldham. Luis Figo does Just For Men adverts. Xavi picks wild mushrooms.

Equally, however, being hip and fashionable is of little benefit if your career is going down the pan. We are thinking specifically of Emmanuel Frimpong here.

Even the more likely candidates are only cool in comparison to other footballers, which is not saying a great deal.

Pep Guardiola looks cool, until you find out he likes Coldplay. Daniel Sturridge was described by Vice magazine as football's only hipster, despite the fact that his Instagram account consists almost entirely of naff motivational memes like "realise how blessed you are" and "tough situations build strong people".

The more thought you give it, the less surprising this all becomes. The modern footballer is a sort of grotesque human experiment, wrenched from his social cadre at an early age and fed on an exclusive diet of seven-a-side, trained not to say anything of interest, denied any of the chemical vices that make young people vaguely interesting.

Occasionally you see the mould broken. Xabi Alonso is an effortlessly cool man, with the sort of musical taste you would happily pass off as your own. Brede Hangeland reads Don DeLillo. Djibril Cisse has just opened a trendy pop-up boutique in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. But these are lone wolves; floating buoys in a sea of Identikit tattoos and Beats by Dr Dre headphones.

Does any of this matter? Of course it does. Footballers are often portrayed as role models, executors of a broader social legacy.

Yet in truth, there is perhaps no profession less analogous to society as a whole. Even children quickly learn the difference between sporting success and cultural currency.

If youth is spent dreaming of becoming a footballer, then adulthood is spent in quiet gratitude that we never made it. UK Telegraph