Let's have real role models, not spoilt brats

In the playground this morning, before the whistle blew to start the day, almost all the boys at my daughters' primary school were playing football. Ask any of them what they most want to become when they're older - no,

So, to most young lads in Leeds, the footballers Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate - both on the fringes of the England team - represent what they themselves most aspire to. The status of Premier League hero is infinitely desirable. And not just the talent and the excitement, but the adulation, the clothes, the motors and the lifestyle. Footballers sell hair gel and trainers, software and underwear, magazines and dreams. You hardly need to ask whether they are role models for the young - of course they are.

Over the past year, two juries in Hull Crown Court have been discovering what role models do on a night out. And bear in mind that we are talking here about some of Britain's highest-paid athletes, men whose talent cannot outlast their physical fitness. The version the jury accepted was that - on a Monday night after midnight - Bowyer and Woodgate and friends were extremely drunk, and suspended in rowdy indecision somewhere between a nightclub and a lapdancing club, when a contretemps started with a smaller group of Asians. There then followed a confused series of runnings and shoutings, which culminated in a full England international injuring himself by falling in a pool of someone else's carelessly deposited blood.

The jury did find Woodgate guilty of a lesser charge of affray but they chose not to believe the horrific picture presented by the prosecution - namely that Bowyer, Woodgate and pals had chased and caught an Asian student, Sarfraz Najeib, and beat him to a pulp, jumping on top of him, biting his face, breaking his leg and fracturing his cheekbone. Or that they then hugged each other in triumph, phoned for a team-mate in a Range Rover to come and take them away, and subsequently lied to police and destroyed as much evidence as they could.

Leeds United are one of the success stories of the past three years. Their players have turned in performances abroad to rank alongside that of our great athletes. But Seb Coe and Steve Cram, Roger Black and Kriss Akabusi - some of them from backgrounds less promising than Bowyer's - did not look after their bodies by getting tanked up at nightclubs or after their reputations by being arrested for affray or GBH.

Continental footballers who come to play here are often astonished by the toxic combination of booze and brawling. Top clubs have long invested in providing pastoral care, education and advice for their young players - the former sports minister, Kate Hoey, used to lecture at Spurs and Arsenal. Most clubs also run programmes in which players visit local hospitals and are photographed smiling at young cancer victims. But these are veils that barely disguise the realities of the modern English game. Our football is also about the psychotic dads who swear from the touchlines as their eightyearolds play in junior leagues; it's about the absolutely routine abuse of referees by managers and commentators; it's about condemning the cheating of the other side, while condoning that of your own; it's about endless whingeing, posturing and sheer bloody ignorance. Above all, it is about the greed and hypocrisy of clubs and supporters themselves.

Take the testimony of Leeds player Michael Duberry. Duberry was not present himself at the scene of the alleged assault, but was thought to be instrumental in getting his colleagues away from the scene, and was charged with (though subsequently acquitted of) perverting the course of justice. During the first trial he wished to change his evidence to what he maintained was the truth - a truth implicating his team- mate, Jonathan Woodgate, in the attack. As it happens, his club's solicitor, Peter McCormick, is also a club director, and furthermore is the board director in charge of player discipline. Twice, said Duber ry, McCormick urged him to stick to the story that Duberry now said was false.

And what was in the mind of Bowyer's QC, Desmond de Silva, in his closing appeal to the jury in that first trial? "Bowyer," he told them, "may have a glittering future ahead of him in the great game of football, and the great prizes of life in that game may still be open to him." He added, as though in a Kevin Costner movie, that Mr Bowyer hoped to fulfil his dream of seeing England to victory by scoring the winning goal. "On the evidence you have heard in this case," concluded de Silva, "I invite you, ladies and gentlemen, to help him achieve that dream for himself and for England."

Was Bowyer not, de Silva seemed to be suggesting, athletically fragrant? Wouldn't we, as soccer supporters, want to extend as much latitude as we could to a man who could one day score the winning goal? We can only hope that this time the Hull jury confined itself entirely to the evidence, because not only does de Silva's argument stink, but the opposite is actually true: bad role models are worse than no role models at all.

The Leeds case reminded us, if we needed it, that we have a problem in this country, one not created by a few footballers but sometimes epitomised by them. It's the problem that causes many of us to vacate the streets on a Saturday night because the boys are in town. The boys with their violent, drunken code and their equally drunk and indulgent girlfriends.

Poor they're not. Nor unemployed nor yet financially deprived. Footballers are often the spoilt brats of modern Britain, but they represent a larger cohort of Kidults, lads and lasses with the bodies and bank balances of wealthy grownups and the outlook and mentalities of 10-year-olds.