It is quite striking, though, to note that there are those in the football industry who will say — whether publicly, like Ferdinand, or privately — that a player in these circumstances has to do whatever it takes to get the move he wants.
It wasn’t like that in the summer of 1998, when Pierre van Hooijdonk failed to report for pre-season training at Nottingham Forest, citing broken promises about investment in the squad since winning promotion to the Premier League.
Van Hooijdonk’s failure to return to training sparked fury in the dressing room. It worsened when he stayed away and his team-mates made it abundantly clear he would not be welcome to come back — which made things strained when finally he did three months later. As manager Dave Bassett colourfully put it not long after Van Hooijdonk returned, “If he thinks we’re going to offer him an olive branch, he knows where he can stick it.”
However, as former
Forest full-back Alan Rogers explained here, the lore of the dressing room has changed significantly since those days. “It’s almost accepted now,” Rogers said. “I’m not saying it’s like what we had with Pierre at Forest, but it seems to be pretty much accepted now that players will play up to try to get a move. The players have so much power these days. You look at certain players where they’ve made clear they don’t want to be at a club and they seem to be taking the tinkle, but in a lot of cases now their team-mates just seem to put up with it.”
This is true. When Thibaut Courtois stayed away from pre-season training at Chelsea in the summer of 2018 to try to force his way to Real Madrid, there were collective shrugs from players and supporters alike as if to say, “This is just what happens.”
Even when Diego Costa went AWOL from Chelsea at the start of the 2017-18 campaign after a fallout with Antonio Conte, accusing the club of treating him “like a criminal”, Eden Hazard described him as “a top guy, a top player” and said he hoped to see him back on the pitch soon.
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