Long-term view: My kingdom for some insight

What’s going on, in football teams? It’s a question that, if you have only what Savage, Keown et al tell you to go on, will drive you wild. You could read an attic’s worth of football autobiographies (English ones at least) and still feel no closer to an illumination of character and experience than you’d get from the tepid banter in the first hour of enforced after-work drinks. So I’ll guess. And if I’m wrong, which I may be, cos I’ve never been there, sue me.

First up, they’re young. I don’t think it can be overemphasised or underappreciated, how young some of them are. Football at the top level offers this singular phenomenon, that if at 25 a player isn’t showing the right signs, you can make a reasonable judgement he never will – there aren’t that many other jobs where 25 is past it.

And yet this provides a monumentally distorting perspective, in terms of where that player is spiritually at, which is potentially still frozen at a precipice somewhere around GCSEs, when he would have been told that it was time to focus on one thing and one thing alone. Making your perspective more sophisticated takes effort for any 19-year old; but imagine if at the same time £10,000 was arriving into your account each week as a reward for staying away from education. What, truly, would seem the point of thinking about anything other than football?

But young psyches are fragile, and there can’t be much better evidence of what happens when you throw a load of them together and turn up the pressure than in that game against Iceland. Nobody could find the cool head to remember they were professional footballers who were generally about four leagues better than their opposite number, and that passing a ball square over five yards isn’t actually that hard. Basically, when your mind isn’t anchored, it’s pretty easy to lose it. I’m trying to think of a single English player who strikes me as a fully fledged adult, in the manner of Xabi Alonso or Per Mertesacker or Juan Mata or Petr Cech, and I can’t. Peter Crouch? Jermain Defoe, at a push, as a man whose encounters with life’s harsh realities make a hardened perspective inevitable.

But you could ask, why should they seem like adults, these men in their mid-twenties? And it’s a fair question, even if it relates to a reality so distorted it’s hard to still grasp why it is ‘fair’; that is, a reality where a 22-year-old who kicks balls at the top end of the Premier League is as far as I can tell the highest potential earner in that age group in this country.

Which is pretty effing distorting, and throws a massive spanner in the works of considering them ‘young’; in a year they could earn a sum that someone else could easily have to wait until 60 to amass. I truly pity managers, who have to deal with players with the outlook of a 16-year-old but the purchasing power of a world-conquering colossus. Sometimes the control you can exercise over them must seem pretty limited. But we’ve all heard enough stories about the ‘liaison services’ clubs lay on to ensure that players get the house they want and don’t end up putting red socks in with the whites – recognition that these players still need looking after with the softest of kid gloves.

Out on the pitch – does it feel like a team? On the BBC’s NFL Show I was interested to hear both the ex-NFL pundits admit that as a player your mind was always on your personal stats, as they would be the leverage you brought to contract negotiations. I also remember when watching the 21st Century Portrait film about Zidane a few years ago how palpably you were aware of players needing to get the ball, because this was their job and if they didn’t get a chance to shine they were essentially just sat idling at their desk, in full view of the boss.

Witness how Sergio Aguero played, brought on recently against Bournemouth for an injured Gabriel Jesus after his sudden bursting onto the scene, like he had to try to score every time he got the ball. It is something that the teeth-grinding media training has taught these players to declare the opposite of – most important thing is the three points, that the team wins etc etc – but I feel like there’s actually an unspoken swarm of microdynamics going on where players are most keenly aware of their personal stock, quite apart from what the team is doing. Most credit then to managers like Diego Simeone and Mauricio Pochettino, who seem able to genuinely convince their players of a team ethic taking precedence, and thus that they can worry less about individual performances.

Occasionally, though, it being football and it being lovely, a move so flowing in spirit happens that leaves no time for anyone to think about how much they’re getting paid or whether they’re in the manager’s good books, and if it is finished you see them all revert to the 10-year-olds that they were and we were when we fell for the game, and that’s why we love it. Because it finds a way to defy the harsh realities and greasy expediency of this planet we inhabit.

The ones I’m most interested by, and wonder how many there are (because rarely do you get to hear from them unless some hero like Benoit Assou-Ekotto lets slip that quite often this is just another Monday morning at the office for him) are the reluctant footballers. It seems so antithetic, given the emotion we as fans invest, that amongst the team could be guys whose minds are on other things, and frankly I think it makes the whole thing a more fascinating business than talk of how Harry Kane won’t leave a training pitch until he’s worn his right foot down to a nub with shot practice. I like to think of Benny sailing off in his Porsche the moment the clock hits noon.

The one thing I wish they could talk of, actually articulate – and it’s only them who could do this – is the fear of the great blue yonder that waits for them, when even the teamsheet for a League Cup third-round tie at Hartlepool no longer features their name. The money, of course, has changed the nature of that fear; but to go from walking out every week into the kinds of stadiums the biggest band in the world would be lucky to grace, to a world of after-the-show silence must be frightening. Like knowing that the best drug you’ll ever encounter has only a finite supply in the cupboard.

I wish I could hear them talk about that, but instead you just get Martin Keown saying “he’ll obviously be delighted to score”, and I for one can live without that now.

So who knows, ultimately, what is actually going on in their heads? They’ll never tell you, at least not in a way that fires your imagination, so for your pleasure that’s my best guess.

Toby Sprigings – follow him on Twitter