Sol Campbell’s Bleeding Heart

Through a torrent of frustrated platitudes that constitute the vocabulary of the modern footballer, Sol Campbell appears to have made public how the Tottenham fans have finally made him crack.

Portsmouth’s former Tottenham, former Arsenal and still England, centreback phoned the BBC to complain about fans complaining about him (under the guise of abuse of all players). Does he have a point? Should players expect to ply their trade in an atmosphere of mutual respect and tranquillity? Or maybe how a player conducts their career, the decisions they make and deference or otherwise to the fans should be reflected in how they are treated for 90 minutes a week?

“We can all take the booing or light banter, but when it gets to the realms of verbal abuse it’s a bridge too far.”

So says the man who, when his contract was expiring at Tottenham repeatedly said he would stay at the club only to leave for their biggest rivals, Arsenal. It deprived Tottenham of at least a £10 million transfer fee and more importantly it showed the Tottenham fans that no matter how much they loved and idolise a player, that player could reciprocate that love and affection with complete disregard and leave for their fiercest rivals.

The abuse he still receives when he takes the field against Tottenham is not nice; I have not received that sort of abuse since I was at school. In a way there is little difference; one person singled out by a group who will say anything to get a reaction out of you. The differences are that groups of coordinated schoolchildren rarely number in the tens of thousands and the teased child is not getting paid £50,000 a week at the same time.

Let us not forget that those betrayed Tottenham fans have no other recourse for their unrequited love. Even now while Campbell can look forward to the most opulent of retirements wrapped in the money from the pockets of fans he showed such scant regard for, the Tottenham fans are still the ones who lost out. Their idol and player they took the most pride in became the biggest weapon of their enemy.

The moment he walked out of White Hart Lane for Highbury he did not merely stamp on the love that only they – the fans of the club he grew up at – could give him but he insulted and hurt them and their hopes and aspirations so badly that he guaranteed his pariah status for the rest of his career (and possibly life).

Perhaps, now that his career is coming to a close and he sees the adoration of players like Carragher and Terry that he now realises that status, the love of the fans that he so took for granted at Tottenham has been the one thing he never gained away from his first club.

If Campbell wants to see what love is then he need only look at his successor at Tottenham and listen to the noise the White Hart Lane crowd will make when the name “Ledley King” is read out on his return from injury. It is a noise Sol Campbell will never receive. A love that will never again be given to him.

In the forthcoming editorial Success: The False Virtue I write of how players believe that there is nothing more noble than to win and that if your team looks like it may never compete, there is no better reason to leave them than to go to a club that can.

I believe this to be fundamentally wrong. I believe that whether players realise it or not, the game is still about glory, adoration, love, hope and failure. I believe that success is not a right or the logical result of your skill. It is the domain of the dedicated and the fortunate.

Fans long since gave up hoping that their players represented their own community. As they have that the players live anything approaching the lifestyle of a common fan. The one thing left is loyalty – or at least honour – and that was the one thing that Sol Campbell showed less regard for than anything else.

He is of course fundamentally right – the game would be better without the abuse – however of all the people who should champion the toning down of it, Sol Campbell is not the right person.