Besides, since most of the rest of us try to screw as much as we can from our employers, it is hypocrisy to criticise footballers for doing the same.
Those arguments made sense when only the top footballers had mansions and Ferraris and the rest of them had mock-Tudor estate houses and two-year-old BMWs. But the Dean Richards story is an alarming tale of how the game is becoming completely unhinged.
Richards is an okay defender. He is big and strong and very competitive, but he is not exceptional.
When he was a little lad ? a big, little lad, admittedly ? his local team were Bradford, who were then in the old Third Division.
He was lucky enough to sign professional forms for them in July 1992 and, although he loped forward occasionally for set pieces, he scored only six goals in 102 appearances and seemed an entirely unremarkable, jobbing centre-half.
Wolves paid £1.85m for him in May 1995, although they had him on loan for two months before being sufficiently convinced of his potential to shell out the fee.
Richards stayed in the First Division for five seasons, playing in a very average Wolves team. His defensive duties were helped by the fact that most opposition strikers were keeping a watchful eye on Kevin Muscat.
Richards was selected for England Under-21s, but only four times.
Eventually, he made use of the Bosman legislation to walk away from Molineux on a free transfer and join Southampton.
He only had two years in the Premiership with Southampton, although the last campaign was not really a full season because injuries restricted him to 28 appearances.
So his CV was not terribly impressive. He had played for three ordinary teams and looked like any one of dozens of similarly large central defenders up and down the land.
Glenn Hoddle must have seen something which the rest of us were missing, however, because soon after he moved from Southampton to Spurs, he started making offers for Richards.
In August, Tottenham put in a bid of £4m. At the start of this month Hoddle persuaded them to offer £7m and a few days later the bid increased to £7.5m. Finally, they paid £8.1m.
So, in six years, the player?s apparent worth had increased by more than 300 per cent and he was able to forgo a golden handshake worth almost as much as the entire fee Wolves paid for him.
I wish Richards well at Tottenham. They need him and he may blossom into a very good defender.
It is not his fault that the game has gone utterly, barking mad.
