Spectator Sport | 19 September 2009

In a recent issue of the brilliant weekly glossy magazine produced by the French sports paper L’Equipe, there is a picture that tells you all you need to know about modern football. It shows the owner of Manchester City, Sheikh Kaldoon al-Mubarak, leaving the stadium after the home game against Wolves. He is being driven away in his Bentley; all around are the black-suited muscle. To the left are a few fans, pale, slightly plump men and women in light blue replica shirts. They are on the same page, in the same place, but light years apart.

And it’s only in the context of this absurd, corrupt, narcissistic world of extremes that you can begin to understand the behaviour of City’s excitable new star Emmanuel Adebayor in their enthralling 4-2 victory last weekend. His journey to Eastlands, via Metz, Monaco and Arsenal, began in extreme poverty in Lome, Togo. He is very close to his mother and surrounded by relatives, family and hangers-on, some well-meaning, some not so. It is up to him to look after them, which goes some way to explain why he is famously keen on money. As Adebayor himself remembers when he was just 15, ‘At the airport, my mum said “Go to France and you can change the way this family lives”.’ And that’s not just African: remember how Michael Owen bought houses for himself and his seemingly endless extended family all in the same street in Hawarden, North Wales, when he first went to Liverpool? What a nightmare.

Adebayor is a product of the French soccer academies which cost E80 million a year. Out of the countless youngsters in the Francophone world, 350 make the academies and only 100 or so go on to make the grade in pro football.