They manage artists and athletes, produce TV shows and films, and run a music label. Founded in 2008 by Jay Z, Roc Nation has since washed into every cove in the modern entertainment industry. That’s where Roc Nation Sports International’s headquarters is based.
The answer, at least partially, lies in an office on Great Titchfield Street, Fitzrovia. Success brought English players an earned prestige, even an authority, that they hadn’t enjoyed since Italia ‘90. In 2018, led by Gareth Southgate, their impeccable manager, they reached the semi-finals of the World Cup - a moment of full-spectrum, flags-out, boozy national unity that most fans, inured to washout after washout, never thought they’d experience. England’s players are a source of pride rather than embarrassment. God only knows what the Right Reverends would have thought if they’d seen Footballers’ Wives. “Morally corrupt” was how a group of bishops described the New Labour years in 2008. They were no better, and not much worse, than anyone else in public life at the time. If they were trashily materialistic, it was because England was too. If England’s footballers were hideous in the 2000s, it was because England was. The reputation of its players had never been lower. The game, through the Premier League, had never been more lucrative. They burned up at tournaments in 2004, 20. England played like a scratch team dredged from the remedial unit of a Victorian institution. On the field, if you can endure the recollection, they were even worse. Was there a nadir? Was it the WAG parade at the World Cup in 2006, when Victoria Beckham drank bottles of Veuve Clicquot through a straw? (“We became a bit of a circus,” one player sagely reminisced a few years later.) Was it Ashley Cole’s admission, in 2006, that he nearly “swerved off the road” with anger when Arsenal offered him a new contract with a £55,000 weekly wage? Perhaps it was Wayne Rooney’s “romp with a granny” - or was it a naked Frank Lampard, jeering at grieving Americans in a Heathrow hotel bar on September 13, 2001? England expected that most footballers would try and sleep with their teammate’s wife. Tumbling out of nightclubs, having affairs, selling the FA out to the ‘Fake Sheikh’ - that was just Sven-Göran Eriksson, England’s manager at the time. Their real game was scandal, not football.
They were a gift to comedians and red-top editors, and a reliable disgrace to their country. Back then, English footballers were greedy, horny and vulgar. In the noughties, they were tragic heroes, with an emphasis, strongly placed, on the tragedy rather than the heroism. They never thought they’d see them do anything as heartwarming as Marcus Rashford: Feeding Britain’s Children, broadcast last night on BBC One. Until recently, the English did not expect much from their footballers.
0 kommentar(er)
