Relatively recently, dozen years ago, a not-so-important piece of news regarding the island's favorite subject, football, appeared on the pages of the British tabloids - namely, that a certain Spanish player, now a former Liverpool FC player, managed to learn only two words of English during his two seasons at the famous Anfield...I don't know why, but after such a seemingly completely irrelevant piece of information, my humble brain started to create patterns that led me to think that an old saying that goes ``mother gave birth to me with sporting talent and threw me in the trash'' could be completely true.
Case in point - Wayne Rooney. This famous player of the even more famous club Manchester United could best be described as an extremely unintelligent piglet with likeness to an Irish peasant who constantly chews potatoes. And as such, he was taking a 300,000 pound (415,000 euro) WEEKLY salary, aside from money from sponsors and advertisements. He has a nice wife (who, if he weren't a famous player, wouldn't even look at him even if he threw himself in front of her windshield), a bunch of children, fame, popularity, and everything in between. Analogous to him, a similar case is the character Djokovic N. who looks more like an Albanian than a Chetnik, emanates some kind of agrarian-backward aura, can possibly connect two sentences without getting a migraine, but still takes three million dollars at a Grand Slam. And everything that comes with that...
But the culmination of the battle between sports talent vs. common sense is the aforementioned Spanish ex-Liverpool player named Iago Aspas, for whom I have no information on how much he was paid but he must have taken at least 20 to 25,000 pounds a week (if not more) despite the fact that he is not particularly talented and can even be said to be extremely bad even in that one profession to which fate delegated him - thus saving him from a home for the mentally retarded.
His `successes` in football are equivalent to his linguistic `feats` and the general impression he leaves as a phenomenon because he seems to have been washed up on a beach by the tide along with various rotten logs, dead mackerel and seaweed. It is true that the British tabloids have long been at odds with the accurate transmission of information and that their headlines should be taken with serious reserve. But no matter how suspicious one is of the tabloids, the impression of professional athletes as people with modest mental abilities remains. And here it is time to get to the point. The bizarre fact that Rooney earns as much per week as a top neurosurgeon in England - per year. Or as much per week as an average worker in England earns in 15 years. And how would that compare with his television fans?
A worker in the Republic of Khunzistan, with a monthly salary of 400 euros (4800 euros per year or 3400 pounds)...earns less than Rooney for couple of hours in a working year, and not a working hours but hours, any of the 24 in a day. Because Wayne, whether he is spreading his fat in an armchair, going to the toilet or sleeping...makes 1780 pounds - every hour. To earn Rooney's weekly salary, a local slob would need 88 working years. Assuming he entered the job market at 18, he would be at least 97 years old at the time of equalizing the weekly salary of the `Red Devils` striker. In reality, this means that at least two and often three lifetimes would not be enough to achieve Rooney's weekly income. Of course, it must be noted that there is a method in the madness, there are many rational explanations for why this is so, it is true that the market imposes valuation, one-on-one economy and those things, the neurosurgeon does not collect 75,000 souls in the stadium every round and the slag is not interesting for the lens of any camera in the world - but despite all this, I cannot get rid of the feeling that something is morbidly screwed up in the world with such a set of things...
And that is just Wayne Rooney, a superstar. As for the fact that Iago Aspas has a weekly salary that would save thousands of children from death every year - there is no rational explanation, logic is powerless here, economics and market principles are ashamed that they are not successful in trying to explain Iago, who cannot attract anyone to the stadium or attract a camera to himself, but for some mysterious and for ordinary mortals incomprehensible reasons is a fairly rich (though not particularly famous) man.
What can one say? Skibidi toilet.
(Roger Mortis, 108)
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