Funny to think that Mark Clattenburg inking a sponsorship deal while still a serving referee once felt like a harbinger of the endtimes. O Premier League, what hath you wrought? These days, alas, you get an altogether more worrying class of harbinger. Take the starstruck member of Donald Trump’s gopping Floridian private members club, Mar-a-Lago, who spent the weekend filling his social media with insanely revelatory posts about the presidential entourage. “This is Rick … He carries the ‘football’. The nuclear football (also known as the atomic football, the president’s Emergency Satchel, the button, the black box, or just the football) is a briefcase, the contents of which are to be used by the President of the United States to authorise a nuclear attack while away from fixed command centres …”
Ooh, we didn’t know we were born, did we, when Clattenburg refused to follow the precedent set by Pierluigi Collina, and resign his career in officialdom in order to monetise an advertising opportunity. Mark simply unveiled a commercial for a hair‑loss clinic – “the hardest decision to make is to pick up the phone and make that call” – and sauntered right back into making far easier calls on the pitch. He bestrode the worlds of plugging hair plugs and calling players “mate” like a Colossus. As he once explained, “the players identify with me”. (But do they want to? I suspect players want to identify with referees about as much as ladies want to date a man whose best friend is his mum.)
Related: Mark Clattenburg says he would consider move to Chinese Super League
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