Filthy rich footballers deserve a kicking, as well as billionaires | Simon Carter

But not just an unfortunate deflection; no, this was the equivalent of Virgil Van Dijk saying to Allison Becker ‘come on, give me the ball’ and then whacking it straight back past him into the net. A stunning own goal, for sure, and totally out of the blue

Well, that was the case when Liverpool Football Club – the seventh richest in the world and owned by an American billionaire – announced it was to furlough some of its non-playing staff, while at the same time continuing to pay its players tens of thousands a week.‘We believe we came to the wrong conclusion,’ said CEO Peter Moore a few days later and after a tumult of criticism had forced LFC to stage a whopping great big U-turn. True, but would the club have come to ‘the wrong conclusion’ if nobody had complained? Exactly.But LFC are alone among Premier League clubs who have furloughed non-playing staff to reverse their decision.

Others, including Tottenham – LFC’s opponents in last year’s Champions League final – are among those who haven’t. Yes, the same Tottenham owned by Joe Lewis (estimated worth £4.3bn).Julian Knight, the chair of the digital, culture, media and sport committee, was among those to hit out at English football’s elite for using government money to pay non-footballing staff.‘It sticks in the throat. This exposes the crazy economics in English football and the moral vacuum at its centre,’ he said.

And he is right. That chomping sound you can hear in the distance is football eating itself; it’s not a new sound, it’s been omnipresent ever since our leading clubs voted to start milking Rupert Murdoch’s cash cow in 1992. This country’s elite sold football’s soul to Sky TV almost 30 years ago, and for many it will never be the game it once was.Others were quick to jump on to Knight’s bandwagon, metaphorically kicking Premier League footballers out of the way as they leapt onboard in search of an easy headline, such as health secretary Matt Hancock. The same Matt Hancock who has hardly covered himself in glory during the coronavirus crisis.But hang on a minute? Why do some wealthy people seem to escape the government’s criticism, while footballers are singled out?Yes, our Premier League players can afford to take a cut, of course they can. And they are doing just that. It’s not the players who have created the ‘moral vacuum’ Knight mentions after all.But look, here’s billionaire Richard Branson asking for government cash to bail out Virgin Airlines. Yes, the same Richard Branson who owns his own island somewhere in paradise. Branson, a man of the people? Possibly when he signed the Sex Pistols for Virgin 43 years ago, but now? Leave it out.Here’s Mike Ashley, an odious person and another billionaire. The chairman of Newcastle United, the first Premier League club to furlough non-playing staff and claim government subsidies. We should have expected nothing less from him.And here’s Philip Green, furloughing 14,500 of his Arcadia Group’s 16,000 employees. Yep, yet another billionaire. And, like Ashley, a man with a dismal PR record to his name.They are the ones that ministers should be going after.Greed, sheer avarice, has destroyed our national sport at the highest level and many critics are well placed to give it the kicking it deserves for that.

But a government minister, especially one who can’t even run his own department that well, is not the person to stick the boot in.