Uninformed critique of footballers

ONE wonders why the Irish Examiner was so desperate for content in Wednesday’s paper (April 26) that it felt it necessary to dedicate a third of a page to Suzanne Harrington’s article, “Outrageous fortune”.

I find Ms Harrington’s reaction to this new niche magazine bewildering.

Does she not realise that there are such magazines for the top professionals in a range of different industries? Why should footballers be any different?

Ms Harrington makes fun of speculating (and what glorious speculation about a publication she admits she has not even seen) with regard to the type of advertising that would be shown in this magazine. Would she be happier if companies such as Aldi were to market its brand to this target market? Would that be more acceptable to her?

For an individual working in the newspaper industry, she shows a remarkable lack of understanding of the advertising industry which pays her wages.

“What’s happened to football?” Ms Harrington asks. To answer one question with another, “Why do you care?”

As a long standing Irish Examiner reader, I do not recall a previous mention of football in any of this writer’s articles.

Footballers, according to Ms. Harrington, are “young and brash”, “itching” to spend money. One wonders how many footballers she has actually met.

Having stated her belief that footballers do not earn their money, one has to ask why Ms Harrington has not looked around her at other industries.

Footballers provide us with a minimum of 90 minutes’ entertainment a week. Movies stars, making an equivalent and often higher wage, provide us with that much entertainment in a year. I assume we should believe they have not earned this either.

Even the facts Ms Harrington presents are incorrect. According to her, Premiership footballers make £4,000 “before you probably even woke up this morning”. In fact, the average wage for a premiership footballer is £676,000 annually, or £2,000 a day, a dramatic reduction on the writer’s figure.

Many may ask “so what?” to this information, and rightly so as this is still a very large sum of money, but this is just an example of the so called facts scattered throughout the article without any hint of professionalism.

“Perhaps it’s ingrained middle-class prejudice, but it’s awful …,” Ms Harrington states. For once, she has her facts straight, that “was” awful.

Brian Marrinan

49 Kenilworth Square

Rathgar

Dublin 6