“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” —Albert Camus
It’s easy and facile to suggest that morality has no place in football, that ultimately only results count, that money talks louder than ethics, and that fans don’t care anyway. The furore over the hiring of Marlon King by Coventry City aside, it’s obvious that morality, both of the general type and of a more specific version relating to football, is at the heart of most interesting discussions about football. Fans care passionately about the nebulous quality “fairness”
, about the “right” way to play, and even to which values their club should aspire. Almost everything that makes people angry and passionate about football is to do with some kind of morality. It’s just that they rarely care about what two (or three) consenting adults get up to in a hotel room (allegedly).
However, the problem for morality in football is that it often does run up against the practical side of football. Chelsea and Manchester City fans have fairly quickly swallowed any ethical reservations they might have had about their new owners, and the anti-Glazer protests only gained traction when Man Utd had a little less money to spend and were a little less dominant in the Premier League. In that sense, it ought not to be surprising that Aidy Boothroyd would consider signing Marlon King, who is a capable Championship-level striker with lowered wage expectations, available on a free. In any other situation, Boothroyd would be mad not to sign King. However, King’s only available for free because he’s recently been released from an 18-month prison sentence for actual bodily harm and sexual assault. Understandably, the move has been controversial, but really, we ought to question why we think it is immoral for a football club to help someone to rehabilitate and consider whether this really ought to throw up any moral quandaries for Coventy City fans.
I was going to open this by saying that I’d be the one to defend Marlon King. Then I realised that I didn’t want to do that. There is no doubt in my mind that Marlon King is a nasty piece of work. Let me be clear about this. In spite of that, I feel the need to defend his right to work having completed his prison sentence. As such, this will be a defence not of King, but of the man who hired him—Aidy Boothroyd.
King, like all people, has the right to a second chance. The problem is that this isn’t King’s second chance, or even his third. He now has fourteen separate convictions, including for drink driving, receiving stolen goods, and two counts of assault, also against women. Some people therefore argue that King has no place in football, that no manager should think of hiring anyone with such a list of crimes to his name, that he has had his chances and thrown them away. To respond in this way, however, is to make a mockery of the British justice system and the idea of rehabilitation that is central to all modern justice systems. To oppose King’s return to work as a footballer is to require oneself to assume a position of hypocrisy.
That is to say: The issue brings into conflict our gut moral reactions and our rational system of morality. Our intuition tells us that Marlon King is a Bad Man (see above) and that he ought to be banished from football, and in particular from the clubs we love. However, the systems of morality and justice that we profess to adhere to suggest that what we feel is right may come into conflict with what is actually right. To wit, we think that “prison works,” that it prevents people from re-offending, and that the process of justice turns criminals into law abiding citizens. Except in extreme cases, we do not say that people are beyond rehabilitation and we claim that they can become full members of the community once they have served their sentence—that we can prevent them from re-offending. One part of being a full member of the community and being rehabilitated is having a job.
Obviously, this is all theoretically what we want to happen and does not reflect the full flavour of reality. Despite that, we ought still to ask why Marlon King ought to be treated differently to anyone else leaving prison, why we shouldn’t focus want him to get a job to help him to rehabilitate. There are some half-hearted objections—namely that people like doctors and teachers need criminal background checks, but these professions are ring-fenced for good, and obvious, reasons (don’t let sex offenders have positions of power etc.). Football, in all truth, is not like that—unless Marlon King is put in charge of the Coventry City Ladies team or employed as a club ambassador to kids, he is not really being put in a position of responsibility or power. The other objection is that King sets a bad example to children who might make him their role model. First, at the risk of being glib, Marlon King is unlikely to be a hero even for Coventry City-supporting children. Secondly, we have to accept that adults cannot control who children choose as their heroes and that children do not blindly follow their heroes in everything they do. If that were the case, we would have some real problems.
At heart, however, our objection to King lies in our desire to see him punished, or at least, to see him fail. It offends our intuitive sense of justice to see someone return to a life of comfort after committing a violent crime. We are unable to square King’s success and apparent happiness with our intuitive sense that Bad Men ought not to succeed. Moreover, while we might feel generally that many people receive sentences that are not proportionate to their crime (many sex offenders) and many are able to return to lives of comfort (many white-collar criminals), we pick out King because he is famous and visible. King is very much a scapegoat for our frustrations with a justice system that might be just, but does not provide us with true catharsis. We want all criminals to suffer forever, but that is neither practical nor logical. We cannot lock people up permanently for relatively minor offences, and we also ought to remember that the man who leaves prison is often very different to the man who entered, that having committed a crime once does not make one a criminal forever.
King is certainly no angel, but if we are to remain true to our principles, we ought to treat him no differently to any other ex-criminal and that means preventing him from re-offending. Here one might suggest that King’s position as a highly paid and (to an extent) venerated footballer led him into his crimes by giving him an inflated sense of privilege, making him arrogant. One could argue that removing King from this job might cure him of his superiority complex and make him a more rounded human being.
Leaving aside the fact that King committed a number of his crimes before becoming a professional footballer, we ought to ask if depriving a man of his dream career will really help to rehabilitate him. While King might benefit from being forced to eat humble pie and work as a regular person, he might as easily become deeply embittered, sink into debt, and suffer family problems as his salary no longer matches his expectations. Seeing as none of us can know how King would react, we must leave it to him to decide and hope that what pleases him psychologically is more likely to keep him from re-offending.
Even so, can Coventry fans feel genuinely pleased about signing King? The problem is that although it may be generally right for King to return to football, it is not incumbent on any one club to employ him. Few people are likely to want King playing for their club, just as few people would want to work with a sex offender, even if they were fully rehabilitated and were now nice, responsible members of society. Again, this is only a moral intuition, something that make us feel uncomfortable. It is not wrong for Coventry to sign King nor for fans to be pleased that they have a good striker. Aidy Boothroyd has most likely performed a social service by giving King a job, but has done so simply by following the logic of football—he needs a striker. Boothroyd’s decision (and the overall action of King coming to Coventry) was in this sense non-moral (as opposed to amoral), as it was a business transaction that was facilitated by the morality of society.
Moreover, Coventry fans ought, in reality, to be able to distinguish between the man and the football player, and know that liking and endorsing one does not mean liking or endorsing the other. While many seem to think that cheering a Marlon King goal is morally abhorrent because of his criminality, that opinion doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It is perfectly possible to hold the opinions that Chinatown is a brilliant film and that Roman Polanksi is a child molester who ought to have been punished without contradiction. Although the same man did the both acts, the acts are not the same, neither were the intentions and nor were the results. Similarly, with King, we can easily hold the opinion that he is a good footballer, which we can be pleased about, and a bad man, which we are not.
Despite this, there would probably still be some lingering distaste about having King play for your club, and that’s probably right. It’s because we feel that our clubs do in some way represent us and our community. Therefore, accepting Marlon King into our community and seeing him represent it in some way understandably feels wrong. To repeat, however, that’s only if Coventry fans cannot distinguish between the man and the player, and cannot express their separation. In short, it’s right for King to be allowed to play, OK for Coventry fans to celebrate his goals and dislike him, and more than OK for everyone else to hate him.
Shane Murray is a freelance journalist. He can be found playing football in small Warwickshire villages.
This sentence, I’ll admit, is particularly hard to stomach.
When he’s fit, of course.
Read More: Annals of Crime, Marlon King
by Shane Murray · October 18, 2010
Marlon King has no more right to be a professional footballer than Mel Gibson has the right to be a Hollywood film star. The powers that be will calculate what the public will stomach, and the answer in football seems to be pretty much anything, apart from (possibly) paedophilia, though this has yet to be tested.
It’s also remarkable the extent to which when a player commits an offence the football community rallies round, with much talk of second chances, he’s not that sort of lad, and players being the victim of predators these days. Titus Bramble for example, who is on his second brush with sexual assault. To be charged once with rape is unfortunate, but twice looks like carelessness.
It’s just yet another an example of football’s misogyny. Ron Atkinson uttered (off mic) a racial insult and has disappeared forever from mainstream sports coverage; meanwhile several figures who’ve physically abused women occupy high profile positions in the sport, the hierarchy in football being blacks>dogs>women.
this is rather timely considering my past few weeks have been wrought by furious debate with my girlfriend concerning Michael Vick’s resurgence and whether or not he should be allowed to play professional football for a living. Bravo.
How does one square one’s naturally liberal inclinations with the partisanship of football support? Grown men who will stand on street corners handing out Green Party leaflets and enjoying the films of Alain Delon will just as likely turn into gurning madmen at the sight of Joey Barton or Lee Bowyer.
On balance, the laws of this land, ass that they occasionally may be, have freed the man and hence, we reluctantly need to give him the benefit of the doubt. I may be at the middle of an uncomfortable conflict of emotions as a fan of an opposing team, but let’s leave King to get on with it for the moment. That shouldn’t cover his multitude of sins, but he’s now out of the lock up and I for one have allowed my bleeding heart take over, although kts’s point on misogyny is on the nose.
Pinpoint. He’s done his bit of prison-time and he’s just getting back to his job/work/employment. No arguments there.
An integral aspect of following football is taking irrational likes/dislikes to players. There is however nothing irrational about disliking or hating Marlon King. He has walked from a sentence of sexual assault into an exceptionally well paid and privileged position. Square that with liberal sentiment
Whatever his merits as a footballer, what we do not need are defences that hint that forcing King into life as a “regular person” (the horror) could present fresh dangers to women or freshly stolen cars
Although I largely agree with the Chinatown analogy (AKA The Wagner Paradox – in reference to the title of a lesser Robert Ludlum novel), the fact remains that footballers and other “sports personalities” today are as much role models as they are athletes. Right, Tiger?
Like it or not – and, belonging to a generation for whom the term “a Manchester United player” means Bill Foulkes rather than Nani, I personally don’t – football is now as much about Wazza and Colleen’s wedding on the cover of Hello! and whether John Terry truly merited his Daddie of the Year award as it is about Mou’s 4-2-3-1 or Iker’s attempts to calculate the UFO-like flightpath of the Jabulani. You know what they say: follow the money – and the money’s increasingly to be found nowhere near the stadium.
And, unlikely though it is for Marlon King to be shooting grainy blue commercials with Zizou Zidane any time soon, what if he were a much better player, recently snapped up by a much better club? Or would he even be snapped up by a much better club if he’s carrying that rap sheet as his baggage? Wouldn’t the club’s very large arrays of image consultants and brand-development gurus be sure to tut, “Are we quite sure this is strategically on-mission?” or “Have we considered how this will play in Singapore?” long before the chairman ever gets to pluck his Mont Blanc from his top pocket?
It’s increasingly not what you do but the way that you do it. And, ulimately, whether Ronald McDonald is a funny clown or not is neither here nor there. All that’s required is for him to be squeaky clean.
Those of you who think he shouldn’t be allowed to play: From where, and how, do you think the ban should come? Do you see it as a league-policy issue, or a matter for government intervention?
@Brian Phillips Well, if we’re not relying on club chairmen to do the right thing (hah!) then why not allow the FA to censure or ban players who bring the game into disrepute through committing serious crimes? We already have a ‘fit and proper’ test for those who sit in the directors box, just extend a modified version to those on the pitch
@Brian Phillips Before the who, shouldn’t we address the what? Let’s not forget that Mike Tyson was banned from boxing for biting a very large man’s ear, not for being a convicted rapist. If footballers are to be banned for off-the-field activities, how do we decide where should the line be drawn? Should “serious crimes of violence” include, say, reckless Ferrari-driving?
It was telling how quickly Chelsea offloaded Adrian Mutu – it would have been interesting to see how the club would have reacted had it been Frank Lampard who had been caught doing cocaine. Mutu was a player they had tired of and his misdemeanour provided the perfect excuse to jettison him – and subsequently to go after him in court for money.
This is all well and good but I wonder if the writer has visited Coventry to gauge the effect of Marlon King’s arrival?
The facts are that the children of the city have given King the affectionate nickname of MK9, pigtail-pulling is up over 25% in both Coundon and Bedworth, and t-shirts printed with the words “Don’t you know who I am? I’m a multi-millionaire,” are widely available from impromptu street traders, with particularly brisk business being done in youth sizes. How does the writer respond to these home truths?
And isn’t Clive Platt a more effective player anyway?
@Disgusted of CV6 This tears it. The scourge of pigtail-pulling must be stopped at any cost.
There is no answer to Brian’s question IMO.
Fast Eddie: “He has walked from a sentence of sexual assault into an exceptionally well paid and privileged position. Square that with liberal sentiment”
So do you think criminals who have served their time are not allowed to use their talents to the best of their ability? How much he earns is irrelevant in the issue. Would you stop Marlon King taking a top job in a Cambridge laboratory where he would earn £1m a year given his expertise in genetics (a well-paid and privileged position), simply because of the sentence?
FE: “why not allow the FA to censure or ban players who bring the game into disrepute through committing serious crimes? We already have a ‘fit and proper’ test for those who sit in the directors box, just extend a modified version to those on the pitch”
When has the game ever been in repute? We already have something which deals with serious crimes – the justice system. That has done its work, so there’s no reason why the FA needs to get involved any further.
And a ‘fit and proper’ test? Seriously? Some of the best players in the world are, to my knowledge, complete arseholes. That’s just who they are and we can’t discriminate who plays the game on some snobbish notion of character.
Marlon King returning to football, I’m okay with that. The problem is many others have been released from jail from far less serious offences than Marlon, and they have not had a chance to get a job because of the stigma of a criminal record.
That’s the real problem with the justice system. There is only a second chance if you have the money for it.
What an excellent article.
As Coventry fan my opinion is probably biased but I am of the opinion that when you’ve done your time then you are free to return to society. If you don’t like that then your issue is with the justice system and no-one else.
It’s much like the sex offenders register, I’m sure people want to know if they live near or work with a sex offender, but maybe I want to know if there’s any car thieves or burglars in the area as well, yet we have no lists for these.
Either someone has served their sentence and is free or we may as well bring back the death penalty as obviously some people can never be reformed and we should just wipe them from the earth.
@Fast Eddie
I’d agree there’s nothing irrational about hating Marlon King and I’m definitely not trying to defend him. My argument is that there’s no easy way to square our (justified) revulsion with our liberal sentiments.
As for introducing a “Fit and Proper Players Test”, I can see a few problems. Mostly, I think the problem would be that it would either be too subjective or too objective to be accepted. The first case would be if the FA expanded their already nebulous “bringing the game into disrepute rule”. That’s a problem because, quite frankly, there are many things that bring the game into disrepute that aren’t necessarily major crimes. These include, as mentioned by kt, football’s problems with misogyny and homophobia – the FA could have charged all of the footballers who refused to take part in their anti-homophobia video, as the failure of that certainly brought the game into disrepute. Moreover, there’s the problem of what constitutes a major crime. Any crimes that we would agree on as sufficiently major (rape, murder) to warrant bans should have sentences that would prevent footballers from playing again anyway (although, disgracefully, this is not always the case in the UK for rape).
On the other hand, too objective a rule would also seem unfair. Take the example of Lee Hughes. On the one hand, he seems like he ought to be allowed to play football again – on exiting prison he apologised sincerely and wholeheartedly for his crime, and called it a mistake “that will live with me for the rest of my life”. Since, he has worked hard for charities and has focused on “community work centred on the mistakes I have made, in the hope that it can go some way to preventing another tragedy occurring.”
On the other hand, Hughes’s crime was death by dangerous driving. Surely causing the death of another person counts as a serious crime? And yet, we might conclude that Hughes had certainly already made amends for his crime, and even if he had not, he was attempting to do so personally.
At any rate, it wouldn’t be simple, and the FA would probably react by and large to public anger, rather than on fairness.
Well done for not bringing race into it ,that wouldn’t happen in America.
Why shouldn’t he go back to playing football if someone is willing to employ him?
Should there only be certain jobs that ex-cons are allowed to do? Or maybe they should never be employed ever again.
What ever happened to doing time, as in FULFILLING your debt to society? He “paid the consequences” why shouldn’t he be able to find work?
http://aidyboothroyd.com/soundboard.htm
Some of the comments in regards to image and branding are curious, suggesting Marlon King will never be in an Adidas ad next to Zizu. My personal opinion is that he will never be there because he is not good enough, but if he was as skilled as CR or Messi or whatever…I can see it happening.
Here is some food for though in support of my statement: Snoop Dogg killed a cop and rapped about doing it many times (although he was acquitted, probably because he had the best lawyer in the country) and Ray Lewis (of the Baltimore Ravens) was involved in a murder (also acquitted, in a plea deal)…years later both of these celeberties represent their respective industries prominently. Snoop has went on to become a legend in American pop-culture as a rapper and and an actor, and Ray Lewis is a football superstar on the cover of video games and magazines with many lucrative sponsorship deals. I think people hold morals/ethics or whatever you want to call it higher than the dollar, which is not where the real world places them.
This post is spot on regarding the issue of why it’s ok to like someone on the pitch and dislike them off it. I think there is a parallel between King and with Michael Vick in the NFL. There are types of crimes that the public finds particularly abhorrent including crimes against women and crimes against animals. Vick has obviously returned to professional NFL football post prison time for his dog fighting convictions to great success on the field. He is playing well above what his detractors would prefer. However, it is likely that allowing former prisoner success upon reentering society reduces recidivism. A steady job that allows for aggression to be worked out through sport (ie professional football) has simply got to reduce some of the negative urges. In the true spirit of this, it’s the idea that having Michael Vick on a fantasy football team is ok, even if you despise him personally. It’s ok for him to help your home team win. As a fan you can celebrate the on field success, and be damned happy about it. You can still wear your “Watch your beagles, Vick’s an Eagle” shirt to show disgust at his dog fighting past. Coventry City finds themselves in a very similar position. King is good to have for your team on the pitch, but outside of that? Reprehensible human.