Having given up £1million of his salary, England manager Gareth Southgate must have been rather surprised to end up as the villain yesterday. So too Eddie Howe and Graham Potter, managers of Bournemouth and Brighton, who have also elected to go short.
This is how warped the rhetoric around coronavirus has become. This is the extent to which altruism has been reduced to another banal round of point-scoring. According to the logic of the Professional Footballers’ Association, those in the game who have volunteered to forego salary in this time of economic crisis are depriving the NHS of vital funds through tax revenue.