Aidan Smith: ‘Obscene’ transfer fee is tattoo much for Craig Levein

Strong stuff, for sure, but while football is often really quite annoying, and while footballers right now are suffering in comparison with all those lovely, charming, tearful, smiley, polite, genuine Olympians, I’m wondering if obscene is the right term for football’s huge transfer fees, and in particular the £12 million Sunderland have splashed on – it’s that man again – Steven Fletcher.

I can understand how the word came out. Football folk are passionate people and respond instinctively to things. You or I might think that trying to con the ref with a dive is obscene, even that players who look straight ahead while plugged into their rubbish music and so avoid any contact with fans are obscene. And to a man, when John Terry quickly changed from his suit into the unique Chelsea strip with 2012 Champions League final insignia and even strapped on his shinpads for the victorious team photo now adorning training-complex walls and all merchandising, thus hoping it will be forgotten he was banned from playing through his own stupidity, we probably all choked on our macaroon bars and shouted: “Obscene!” But, when we analyse some more, this may be what we mean in these cases: “irritating”, “berkish” and “the work of a complete raving egomaniac who’s almost being reverse-Stalinist in his pathetic attempts to write himself back into history”.

What, on reflection, did Levein mean by calling Fletcher’s fee obscene? Just a guess, but it might have been: “Look, I’m fed up being asked my view on every single thing the guy does. I get asked what I think about his latest tattoo and I’m like: ‘Jings, another one? He already looks like the bloke from Prison Break with the map of the jail’s labyrinths inked across his back.’ And of course I get asked if there’s any breakthrough in what’s commonly known as The Steven Fletcher Issue and this one’s fired at me all the flippin’ time. To me, all of that’s obscene.”

Seriously, because it is a serious issue going into a World Cup campaign without the most expensive player in Scottish football history, I have some sympathy for Levein. The modern footballer can be a tricky customer, all the more so if you’re an international manager. He can sulk and flounce and just not turn up when it’s Georgia away in November. But I have also sympathy for Fletcher who, when it was the Czech Republic away at the start of qualifying for the last Euros, thinks that he’s the Premier League striker and Darren Mackie isn’t. That he’s had experience of wide left in the midfield before – at Hibs when Derek Riordan and Garry O’Connor couldn’t be budged from the forward positions – and Mackie hasn’t. That he’s probably the better player (and by the way he is). That, if Levein was trying to sneak a goal threat into the notorious 4-6-0 formation, then why wasn’t it him?

The Steven Fletcher Issue began that unfortunate night and it hasn’t gone away. Levein can’t get shot of it because even if Fletcher has done the most wrong, he as the manager is expected to be the bigger man and resolve the situation, smooth the path for an excellent footballer – one who certainly demonstrates rare intelligence out on the pitch – to return to the dark blue.

I can understand Levein’s frustration but voicing near disgust at that fee will probably be interpreted as an inference Fletcher is overrated, to justify the manager’s stance. To be fair to him, he questioned the going rate for strikers generally, though I wonder if he really expected Jordan Rhodes – a forward he is selecting – to be sold a few days later for £8m. Suddenly, £12m for a proven top-flighter – Rhodes is still not there yet – seems like a fair price.

I sincerely hope Levin has a terrific September with those qualifiers. But if he doesn’t, and Sunderland’s new recruit starts banging in the goals, then in the overheated language of football the intensity of The Steven Fletcher Question could well become obscene.