There is a morality in professional football. It may be immersed deep in the pysche of the game, but it is there.
The difficulty you may have in accepting this statement, especially on the back of the rather large amounts of money spent by English clubs last week-end, is perhaps due the modern tendency to concentrate on the hysterical and zanier aspects of the game.
Headlines are now as important, and sometimes more important, than the actual reports on the game. A good headline writer can cover a multitude of journalistic ills.
Morality begins with respect. The plain and simple truth is that to receive respect one must offer respect. But in professional football this simple fact is almost swept away in the torrent of emotion that encourages those involved not to exhibit any hint of inferiority because this may be interpreted as weakness.
This thought process encourages the consequent demeanour of toughness to proliferate throughout the game, which in turn offers another one of those delicious ironies that appeal to me so much because, how can toughness proliferate in a game that contains so much insecurity?
Insecurity has always been rife in professional football. The pennies that buy the bread are ensconced in the contract of each performer. But the pennies to buy the cake and then the cream depend on that performer being successful.
The pursuit of success is all too often the harbinger of insecurity, essentially because the pursuer becomes embroiled in the achievement and there can only be one real achiever every season.
Well, there used to be only one. In modern professional football many journeymen professionals are amassing great financial success without ever achieving real success.
A Professional Footballer can have a good season, attain a clever or even an unscrupulous agent, and gather a small fortune. What is wrong with this? Well, nothing really in the overall scheme of things. I mean, you would do the same yourself, wouldn't you?
But in much the same way that headline writers can cover a multitude of sins, greedy agents and selfish players force respect further into the background and morality becomes even more reclusive.
Even for the good guys in professional football, morality can be a difficult proposition. Over the past two decades the League of Ireland's professional footballers have displayed a distinct adherence to the finer aspects of respect for the game.
Under the most trying conditions for both training and playing, the League of Ireland footballer showed honesty and commitment which, to a certain extent, maintained the credibility of the domestic game.
During this difficult period however, success was essentially achieved by curtailing the imagination and restricting the technical abilities and progressions of the players. This was in some ways understandable and even acceptable, due to the conditions that prevailed up to three or four years ago.
But the move to Summer Soccer and full-time football almost immediately elevated the performance level of the players to an impressive degree. The subsequent success in European competition not only enlarged the confidence of those involved but dramatically increased the profile of the domestic game across Europe and especially so in England and Scotland.
Thus, we are experiencing a renaissance in Irish professional football that has, sadly, produced something of a sting in the tale.
Some of the better players have recently left Ireland to ply their trades across the Irish Sea and a small few of these have been encouraged to, overlook shall I say, the silent, unwritten morality clause contained in their contract.
But this is merely proof of what I have been saying for the past 15 years or so. Irish Professional Footballers are very talented and at the same time, extremely ambitious. As a manager I admit to using not just the talent but also the ambition of the individual as a serious factor of motivation.
Hence, I could not really complain when the occasional player allowed his sometimes naked ambition to dictate.
However, in the midst of all the insecurity, ambition and large amounts of money, there is an underlying decency that is attractive to work with but many times not attractive to report.
Decency, like respect, is somewhat mundane; it is not a headline grabber. Criticism is easier to pen than praise because it sometimes allows the journalist to act like the footballer, to emphasise his own toughness and thereby hide any sign of insecurity.
