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Fabio Capello has confirmed that Wayne Rooney will definitely play against Switzerland this week, despite widely reported allegations about his personal life across the tabloid press – which is good, because if every wealthy professional Englishman who had ever been accused of anything untoward in their private life, had cheated on their wife, or had visited an upmarket prostitute was suspended by his boss then the whole of British industry would grind to a shuddering halt. If everyone who had ever made a stupid mistake deserved to be torn apart in public, the likes of Jeremy Kyle would cut a far more sympathetic figure.

Rooney is the latest victim, like John Terry, Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole and even Peter Crouch before him, of a projected sense of morality we reserve, oddly, only for sportsmen and politicians.

Every time a pointless micro-scandal like this erupts in the press (which, for my money, has nothing to do with football and is frankly none of anyone’s business – despite being the only time footballers ever make it onto the front page of a newspaper without a trophy in their hands), ostensibly sport-related TV, radio and written press is flooded with pundits reminding us that sports stars, particularly those who represent their country, have a duty as role models to children and society as a whole – as well as being ambassadors for England to the rest of the world. In the case of modern football (and indeed in many other sports), I can’t see why anyone tries to make this argument any more.

Footballers – professional people who perform a job we, as fans, like to watch them perform – have no more moral obligation to us than musicians or actors; and yet we don’t demand spotless professional and personal lives from rock stars. In fact we often enjoy quite the opposite.

I say “we” here, when really I mean the “we” that the press likes to imagine for us – a kind of national moral compass that doesn’t really exist. I don’t think I would be completely wide of the mark to suggest that football fans, on the whole, don’t really care about players’ sex scandals. They’re nothing new and have very little bearing on the game itself – save for making funny new additions to time-tested terrace chants. Rooney’s alleged infidelity, like that of any other player, is first and foremost funny, if it is worth considering at all. Beyond this, it is tomorrow’s chip paper.

An interesting thing about the relationship between football fans and players (rather than that between the press and players or people with no interest in football and players – who, of course, take far more interest in what Rooney’s up to when it doesn’t involve a ball) is that we often like to talk about players we actually like, as people.

We hold up as icons those players who have a clean disciplinary record, have stayed with clubs for a long time or come home to play for their local team having had success elsewhere. We like fast, fresh-faced young wingers who play with smiles on their faces and we like tough, rock-hewn defenders with the bearing and morals of well-drilled soldiers. And – more than anything else, in this country at least, we love hard workers. We value effort over ability, loyalty over ambition and heaven help any player who quite fancies earning a lot of money for being better at what he does than lots of other people who do the same thing.

We like Wayne Rooney more than we like Dimitar Berbatov because he works harder and shows more outward passion for what he’s doing – not because he’s a more accomplished footballer. We like Steven Gerrard more than we like Robinho because he’s not a “mercenary” footballer and he’s a “one-club man”.

What’s interesting about all this, I suppose, is that the players we hold in the highest regard are those whose perceived attributes we would most like to imagine in ourselves, were we in their position – while the truth of the matter is that the more flawed, inconsistent, more human players are those we have more in common with. No one, when asked which player they would like to compare themselves to, in terms of personality, would answer ‘Cristiano Ronaldo’. It’d be much nicer to be able to say ‘Paul Scholes’ or ‘Ryan Giggs’ – loyal, humble, hard-working, not-in-it-for-the-money and so on.

The truth is that in our actual professional lives, the majority of football fans, of people, are nothing like these demi-gods we’ve crafted from the rose-tinted highlight tapes in our heads. Most of us work – and move on to a new job if it offers more money. If we are better than anyone else in the world at what we do, we expect more money for doing it than anyone else. We don’t expect to work for the same company all our lives – I doubt many prospective employers would consider me a better person if I had been at the same company since I was 16, for example. But I suppose I might go down in history as a “company legend”.

What I’m getting at is that raking over the private life or the relative good bloke/bad bloke status of a footballer is a construct of the press designed to spark interest where there is none, and destabilise teams where there is a story to be had from its instability.

I remember the brief load-of-bollocks “news” story involving Frank Lampard “forcing” his recently departed wife and kids to stay in a small flat while he probably sat on a throne made of Ferraris in his enormous mansion on the moon. Bad bloke, right? Not for long. The next day, having been labelled a “scumbag” by some odious London radio presenter, Lampard phones the radio station and makes an impassioned, rational and eloquent defence of his position and his right not to be called a scumbag on national radio. Standing up for himself in the face of problems many, many other men have to face? Good bloke.

Footballers are just people. They will do stupid things. It’s the same as it ever was.

Tags: Wayne Rooney