On the day when Manchester and football lost a bona fide legend, a modern-day striking colossus, who plies his goalscoring trade in the very same area, signed a ten-year deal worth in excess of £200million.
It is absolutely not his fault but a lot of the discussion about Erling Haaland’s remarkable new contract centred on its worth, about the unprecedented largesse that comes with it. That is the way of modern football, that is the way of modern sport. The bucks matter, the bucks are big news.
And that is why the passing away of Denis Law is more than the end of a wonderful player’s life, it is another staging post on football’s journey towards the end of an era when money was largely irrelevant, when it was only maverick talent that captured the imagination. They had a few quid to buy a drink or three in that era, for sure. They were headline news, for sure.
Ladies and gentleman, I give you George Best, one of the Holy Trinity. And in his time at Manchester City, United and Torino, Law probably – hopefully – made a good few quid.
But Denis Law was of an era when image rights were not a thing. Sorry, Law was from an era when image was not a thing. Your image was your ability, not your social media profile.
And your journey to becoming an elite professional footballer did not take you through the hands of agents and the meticulous care of extravagantly-funded academies. Is it better now? Was it better then? The answer is largely irrelevant.
Will we get another Law, a world-class player raised in an Aberdeen tenement whose father spent huge swathes of Denis’s life out at sea as a fisherman and who had to play in spectacles as a youngster? Well, actually, we might.
But will we get a player who is not cosseted by agents and PR people, who is not afraid or not commercially savvy enough to speak his or her mind? Probably not.
And don’t forget, while Law was the polar opposite of the modern-day elite footballing character, he was the template for the modern-day player.
He scored, he linked play, he pressed (although I’m guessing they did not call it ‘pressing’ in those days), he worked tirelessly. And he was humble. He won a Ballon d’Or, for goodness sake, and he was humble.
But professional football was once, essentially, a humble business, players grateful for their talent and for the privilege of being able to express it in front of appreciative fans. Exemplified by Law, they were players of the people.
And those players were never resentful. They never wondered what the rewards would be if they were from a different age. A modern-day Law would probably command half a million pounds a week in salary. But they had something that money could not buy or could not sully.
The last of Manchester United’s Holy Trinity has passed … but their love of the game – and what that meant to the man and woman on the terraces – will never pass.
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