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.

However, chances are there won’t be any suggestions that Becks’ back-breaking pay packet is the latest sign of the apocalypse to visit us. We’re all a little jaded thirteen years on, for one thing; for another, the goalposts have shifted somewhat.

It’s unlikely, for instance, that the Beckham deal will draw much criticism in the US. In San Francisco, just up the coast from Beckham’s new manor, baseball player Barry Bonds is negotiating a one-year $16m (€12.4m) contract with the San Francisco Giants — with the Giants reportedly seeking to insert contractual provisions to safeguard their investment if Bonds misses games due to legal problems.

Those legal problems, by the way, arise from ongoing accusations of steroid use by Bonds, but if he can hit home runs then he’ll get his $16m.

Beckham’s latest team are located in Los Angeles, where a wage packet big enough to choke a donkey isn’t something to hide under a bushel, if you’ll pardon the mixture of metaphors. Beckham long ago left the realms of the ordinary behind but if there was ever any possibility that he might resume life in the Premiership, that was surely squashed when he reported discussing his demotion from the England squad with that well-known soccer expert Tom Cruise.

At the time Beckham said: “When I got to America I phoned Tom. He’s a great guy to be able to speak to because he is a very positive-minded person.”

The fact that Beckham would take Cruise to be a “great guy to be able to speak to” about anything other than Scientology and jumping up and down on couches is a shock, but hardly a surprise.

Fair enough. Expect the usual eye-rolling pantomime of mock outrage over the next couple of days. The usual suspects will be rolled out to hymn the corruption of modern sport, and a fiver to the first sighting of ‘why, in the off-season Tom Finney was a plumber, can you imagine what he’d have earned if he’d etc etc’. (A waste of time; citing the Cruise story covers all those sins).

In truth the only real surprise of yesterday’s events is imagining a football league actually exists which regards a slow 31-year-old celebrity as a worthwhile five-year investment for £128m (€99.3m). Still, far better economists than this column have always pointed out that the market pays what the market can support.

For example, Gigi Lentini still plays professionally, at 37, for Canelli in Serie D, where he probably isn’t regarded as an offence against the dignity of work any more.

He probably isn’t viewed as an offence against the work of dignity either, of course. Not sure you could say the same about the LA Galaxy’s new winger and his pay packet.

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