Offences against the dignity of work

REMEMBER Gianluigi Lentini? There was a time when he was the footballer whose name was on everyone’s lips; not David Beckham.

When Becks’ sarong was still years in the future, Lentini’s 1993 transfer from Torino to AC Milan landed him a hefty weekly wage somewhere in the £48,000-per-week-neighbourhood. A neighbourhood so leafy and upmarket, in fact, that the Vatican condemned the entire circus as ‘an offence against the dignity of work’ at the time.

It would be interesting, then, to see what Pope Benedict has to say about the wages Beckham is to receive from his new side, the LA Galaxy. His pay is reckoned to be approximately £25.6 million (€38.6m) per annum, or half a million a week. Tasty no matter how you slice it. If the Lentini neighbourhood was upmarket and leafy, Becks’ looks like a gated community with solid gold gates and diamond-studded doorbells.