Tweet smell of success is not enough, Rio

Published: August 11, 2011
SUMMER DIARY by RICHARD OSLEY

OI, you little dodgers, don’t hate life, don’t smash up shops and steal sneakers – just be like wise old Rio Ferdinand.

When you riot, he tweets: “I grew up on a council estate and know what it’s like to want things you can’t have. I then worked to become successful and rich. Fact.”

Hear that? Rio is successful.

And rich. Both ‘facts’ you probably already knew, but a nice reminder nevertheless for the naughty jacks out there as they crashed through Camden’s shops and burned down parts of Croydon and Enfield. And then he went back to a game of computer football.

For all his best intentions, the big man was unwittingly reminding them of the gulf between themselves and their role models.

A lot of these kids can’t even afford to go and watch him play let alone buy a shirt with his name across the back.

In one thumbed message, he perpetuates the dream that anybody through simple hard work can become as rich as Rio.

You can have that superfast car. You can have a Jacuzzi. A swimming pool. And lights in your penthouse flat (I think the young man called it a ‘crib’, m’lud) that come on when you just burp the words ‘lights on’ into the air.

If only, hard work was a guarantee to be as rich as Rio. For his own success he tapped his natural talent, a fine footballer, in a sport we all love and will pay over the odds to go and see. Good for him, seriously good for him. I admire his ability – heaven knows, Arsenal need a player like him – and I like the jokes he tells. I also know he does a lot of work for charity.

But surely it’s unrealistic to tell the rioters to just stop because they can all get to his stratospheric salary by just going out and working hard.

Some kids around here could take two or three jobs, study real hard and not ever earn £100,000 a week.

The same actually goes for the kids who don’t go out looting and take two or three jobs, study real hard and then end up getting reasonable work through a friend of their father’s. They will never earn £100,000 a week either.

Some will dismiss the idea that awful behaviour is rooted in a growing world of consumerism, where we’ve all got to have the closest thing to what Rio has, jacking up the credit card debt in the process.

And, let’s be clear, nobody is excusing the looting of businesses, there’s never a call for that.

But kids aren’t born looters. They grow up, they see, they want stuff they can’t have, lots of which is flaunted by super-salaried Premiership footballers, those most perfect of role models, every day. Not all of the troubled youth can play football like Ferdinand and hardly any will make it to the penthouse.