http://www.mirror.co.uk/2009/06/07/dole-queues-just-get-longer-the-public-is-angry-players-like-you-with-huge-wages-are-in-the-firing-line-115875-21420623/</p> </p> </p> Dear Gareth Barry,</p> That went well, then. You turned a World Cup match into a sideshow with the worst PR stunt since Gordon Brown frightened the children on YouTube.</p> Your open letter to Aston Villa fans omitted to mention the £30million that you’re guaranteed at Manchester City, but deserves the courtesy of a reply.</p> They identify with people like you here in Almaty, Kazakhstan.</p> It’s a frontier boom town, a modern Klondike.</p> Policemen do a roaring trade in confiscated passports. The former head of Kazakhstan’s nuclear power agency has just been jailed for stealing 60 per cent of the state’s uranium deposits, worth tens of billions of dollars.</p> It’s every man for himself.</p> You now work for Sheik Mansour, who made £1.5bn by selling his stake in Barclays on the day you signed.</p> Isn’t capitalism wonderful?</p> It’s not your fault that you inhabit a parallel universe of elastic principles and institutionalised indifference to the little man.</p> Football has a tainted love for a fast buck. It’s a game of Russian roulette, played by men with the morals of an MP and the self-regard of a talent show host.</p> Someone, somewhere, some time soon is going to take a bullet, and slump to the floor in wide-eyed surprise. There’ll be few mourners at the funeral.</p> Premier League clubs are £3.1bn in debt, but happily pay their players in excess of £1.2bn a year.</p> Fifteen clubs rely on benefactors, if that’s not too flattering a description for a bunch of vain, calculating chancers.</p> Men will walk on Mars before Chelsea break even.</p> Liverpool and Manchester United are being slowly sucked dry by superannuated leeches.</p> Money may have lost its meaning at City but never forget, Gareth, your weekly wedge would buy the average house in the North-West.</p> Dole queues are lengthening. People are scared, angry. If we’re honest, they’re envious.</p> They’re seeking someone to blame, someone to punish. So don’t dare fall below your usual standards.</p> Footballers – with their WAGs, wages, and naked self-interest – are in the firing line.</p> Whoever suggested players should avoid the new 50p income tax rate by asking clubs to pay their salaries as interest-free loans tattooed a target on your forehead.</p> The prospect of multi-millionaires paying as little as 2.5 per cent tax on their earnings is an affront to common decency.</p> But then, look at the people who have shaped your world, one which is blind to common sense, and to the common man.</p> Sir John Hall, the hypocrite’s hypocrite, believes that Newcastle players are now “morally bound” to accept self-imposed pay cuts.</p> No mention of him donating a few coppers from the £95m he “earned” from the car-crash club. What a surprise.</p> Let’s hope that his butler informed him Newcastle made more than 100 staff redundant in the wake of relegation.</p> Good people consumed by small, private tragedies.</p> No headlines, no loyalty bonuses, for the anonymous majority. Southampton staff were paid only because Nathan Dyer joined Swansea City for £400,000.</p> Dyer, remember, had to do 60 hours’ community service after being convicted of theft but, in these times, we’ll take our heroes where we can find them.</p> No one batted an eyelid this week when Denilson, once the world’s most expensive player at £22m, signed for Vietnamese side Hai Phong Cement.</p> But we were pulled up short when Kaka, football’s most conspicuous Christian, pledged allegiance to AC Milan even as his father was haggling for more money from Real Madrid.</p> I hope his conscience can handle the contradiction, but honesty has become an optional extra.</p> Come clean, Gareth.</p> You’re not the first to be seduced by City’s grotesque wealth, and you won’t be the last.</p>
