An unacceptable price tag

I am a sports fan. I watched Edinburgh beat Castres 32-14 in the Heineken Cup at Murrayfield last night in a superb match with 4 excellent Edinburgh tries. I encourage my kids to play sports and I know what a successful team can do for the mood and the soul of a community and even the economy.

But sometime we forget that sports are just that, sports. Which is why I find the idea that a football team, in this case Manchester City, can even contemplate handing over £107m for one player morally repugnant. We are in a time of financial crisis, people are loosing their jobs, debts are growing and families are hungry. across the world, poverty grows and the poor are dying. And then a sports team spends £107m on one player. This cannot be right. I know that that £107m would be available for other purposes, nor would it solve all the poverty in the world. But is deeply sadness me that we have created such a system that means it can, even at a time when others are starving, produce sums of that quantity for the sole purpose of buying a footballers talents.

This isn't Manchester City's fault as such. They are simply part of the system. Something is not right with the system itself. These price tags for players demean sports and demeans all of us as human beings and that means no-one wins.