Plasmas for Goalposts

It doesn’t need me to say that the lives of professional footballers are somewhat abnormal ones. So it should be of no great surprise to learn that along with contracts of tens of thousands of pounds per week, and the trappings that are inevitably indulged in as a result of that, other extras are also often included in their job offers. Like the odd house to live in, for example. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

One such house has been used by Manchester united for a number of years, nestled in the Cheshire countryside and sitting in a price bracket most of us would consider as a pretty decent lottery win. Man Utd and that house have parted company now and it is being sold by its owner, one Mr Morris, who is of sharp enough mind to sugar the sale up by revealing the fact that the house was once occupied by Ronaldo. That’ll be the dearly departed Ronaldo, who is now sunning himself in Spain, living his boyhood dream.

OK, so far so expected, but it’s when you get into the details of the house, so gleefully regaled by its owner, that we really get into the psyche of that strange creature that is the professional football player. “A shattered window from a kicked football still exists,” he claims, which says similar things about Ronaldo’s garden football skills as it does his own as a landlord. “Dart holes dent the back of the office door from Ronaldo playing darts,” is the next ‘selling point’, while the strangest is kept for last – “Broken parts from TVs are sprinkled around the cherry blossom tree from where Ronaldo would shoot footballs at TVs for target practice.”

Brilliant – not content with used tyres or even those fake men they have at the training grounds, the big R had to use plasmas for target practice, just to rub it in to us mortals just how bloody rich he really is. And in the cherry blossom as well! Isn’t that an endangered species or something? Still, quite how much these choice facts will bump up the price of this place remains to be seen. It’s on at around the £1.5 million mark. Sounds like it needs a bit of work on it to me.