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Good morning.

The football transfer market is not something which is necessarily of very general interest; but this year, the news is not just about who is going where, but about the sums of money involved – the £85 million pounds paid as a fee for Gareth Bale is itself a new record in a record breaking season of deals totaling £630 million.

The sort of question which these number provoke – how can it be that a football player can be worth £85 million pounds? – is not very easy to answer. But I was struck by hearing on yesterday’s programme of a Roman charioteer, the champion of all charioteers as he was known, whose prize money amounted, in modern terms, to some 10 billion pounds – making our best paid sports stars poor relations in comparison. There is nothing new under the sun, as the book of Ecclesiastes has it – and we have always been willing, it seems, to reward very handsomely (to put it mildly), a few exceptional individuals whom we anoint as popular heroes to live out before us on the sporting stage, great dramas of vaunting ambitions and astonishing achievements. Why? – surely because we, at one remove, can share excitedly in their triumphs, and exult in their victories.

That record of £85 million for a football transfer is rather unhappily juxtaposed with another record announced a couple of days ago – that youth unemployment in Spain, where Gareth Bale is headed, now stands at 56%. The situation is so grim and optimism about any improvement is so low, that leaving the country seems to be the most popular option. Perhaps it is in just such times that the value of sports stars will rocket – when investing one’s hopes and dreams in totemic figures on the football field becomes the only investment in the future available to those who have been cut off from other futures by the failures of our economies over the past ten years...

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