The article is desperate to get people fulminating about spoilt football players in the wake of England’s World Cup flop, on the assumption that these football “legends” are heroes and idols for the nation’s kids who are betraying their legions of fans by going out and being normal. They are doing nothing of the sort.

British football has moved far too far away from the streets to be able to be seen as the people’s sport any more, and almost nothing of the millions being poured into people like Rooney’s pockets is coming back to the street to allow a new generation of great footballers to develop.

The media, however, still need to build these ordinary, fallible, serially overpaid people into heroes. However, whereas in the past they were built up to be perpetuated as idols (just look at the 1966 World Cup team, who shall forever be used as rods to beat the backs of any English footballers with even an ounce of talent), they are now being built up to be destroyed at the first sign of feet of clay.

The media need these modern footballers to behave badly, as the stories that sell papers are the soap operas, the tales of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. These are the stories that resonate most completely with the 21st century British public; they have been created only to be destroyed for the vicarious thrill of the tabloid- and website-reading masses.

The only extraordinary thing about Rooney is the amount of money he earns for being pretty good at striking a ball towards a net – in the usual run of things, this is a man who would be down the pub most weekends, having a laugh with his mates, not buying mansions. So next time you read an article full of outrage and disappointment, please remember that the media – be it tabloid- or web-based – thrives on badly behaved sports and TV stars and will do all that they can to manufacture the conditions in which said star can fail in style so they can keep on selling you papers.

What do we really expect, though, when the players have too much time, money and self-regard on their hands? Take Ashley Cole, for example: he’s being lambasted in today’s Sun for sending a message on his Blackberry stating that he hates “…England and the fucking people”. It’s not really surprising that a fuss is being made – this was sent before a game had been played.

The FA are taking flack too, which may explain the rumour that Wayne Rooney will be taking part in a fan forum discussion online to diffuse the ugly situation. I can’t imagine it will, especially since Rooney apparently booked himself a holiday in Barbados two days before the dismal match against Germany.

From a PR standpoint, I’d say the best bet would be to have a cooling off period before throwing Rooney to the ravening community of football fans. It seems too desperate and too soon to me.

A cooling off period is advisable – much like the one Capello has been given. Time heals all wounds, they say. Certainly, in this instance, time would allow the England team a chance to become suitably contrite. It should also stop the press and the fans from tearing them to pieces.

Just so long as none of them open their mouths in public for a fortnight, all should be well…

It seems likely that he will go, and soon, despite a few bullish headlines suggesting that we should blame the players rather than the manager. Capello’s struggles with English and his authoritarian regime will not stand him in good stead. And he is not an accessible man, which is utterly essential in a job like this.

Look at Simon Cowell, a man who is subjected to equally rigorous scrutiny. Despite employing the services of Max Clifford and having a bank balance that could be easily used to buy off damaging stories, he remains entirely accessible. That this accessibility is carefully structured is certain, but it is more than just an impression and it certainly appeases the media.

Whoever takes over from Capello will have to be aware of this and be able to manage the media as surely and subtly as he manages the players. Whoever it is will really need to be an Englishman, or at least someone who speaks English as their first language – it is essential, from a footballing and a PR point of view, that the new manager is a clear communicator.

The manager of England’s football team, like the CEO of a big company (who can see the correlation between Tony Hayward and Capello, both inexpert at getting a useful point across?), needs to be savvy and manage expectations, be they supporters’, players’ or the media’s.

I suggest Harry Redknapp, a manager who understands both front and back pages, has no truck with ivory towers and who would most likely instil a sense of discipline in a new set of players.

I think Redknapp could take the England football squad into a brave new world of carefully downscaled expectation. Ironically, this could lead to England doing rather better in future.

I’ve been drowning my ennui
in tequila, beer and noise,
trying to float the bubble
football blows and then destroys

I’ve been drowning my ennui.
I’ve been blotting the despair
that’s been welling up inside me
since England were laid bare.

I’ve been drowning my ennui
in lager laced with lime
and it tastes a little salty
but the drowning feels sublime.

PLAY THE GAME, LADS, AND LET’S TALK.

So then, after our completely predictable exit from Euro 2004 during the summer, England’s footballers are now trying to qualify for the World Cup in 2006, and what hard work they’re making of it. They didn’t play too badly against Poland and won the match 2 – 1, but then decided, in an act of childish petulance, that they weren’t going to talk to the spiky media because someone had written some shittythings about them since their epic draw last week against the steely might and legendary footballing skills of…Austria.

Come on lads… do we need another own goal? No we don’t, so please don’t create PR disasters off the pitch: your performance on it is too often quite sufficient to get the flak. Aren’t your fame and your money sufficient? Isn’t it enough that you’ll earn in a year more than most of your fans will earn in two lifetimes? No, you don’t understand, but perhaps we don’t understand you either.

Inside football there’s always been an attitude that if you’ve never actually played the game at the top level, you’ll never really grasp it, or the way players think about it. To be trusted you need to have been bloodied by the relentless pressure of the professional game, and that’s where Sven Goran Ericsson scores so highly with his England squad. While sports correspondents and fans may see the players as bit part actors in an on-going soap opera, the Head Coach has to concentrate on balancing them as competitive footballers, trying to make the best of their individual traits and ball-skills as he merges them all into a winning team.

High-minded stuff, all concentrating on what happens on the pitch and at the training ground. The trouble is that nowadays so much of the life of a footballer is lived elsewhere. In restaurants, in bars, in public and in front of the TV cameras, and how few footballers are able to cope. But Sven, need we be reminded, has been coping with his own media-management challenge. When the England manager’s sex life becomes the story, as it did over the summer, you know there’s a problem.

In the USA they understand this. Their hugely-paid black, urban basketball stars have professional media coaching like politicians or pundits, so instead of being either cliché-spouting ‘over the moon’ parrots or completely gauche and tongue-tied youths, any comment they might be asked to make in public, win or lose, appears thoughtful, sincere, and contributes to the overall PR of their team. They’re taught to respect the media’s role in the whole picture, to keep good-humoured, win or lose, and let their position as flawed gods work in their favour by the simple use of charm.

So the England team need a bit of help managing their media profile. The days of football journalists researching stories about football and having them appear on the football pages are fast disappearing. The Game is front page news now, yet beyond Beckham, Owen and a handful of others, the cast don’t think of themselves as responsible role models, hence the thoughtlessness of their press boycott on Wednesday night.

And you can hardly blame them when, behind their club gates, they’re shielded and cosseted and rewarded beyond their wildest dreams. Just occasionally you might be bollocked by the Assistant Coach for staying out too late, or by the Head Coach for getting into the tabloids for some non-footballing reason, but it’s hardly parenting. It’s not what your father would say if you started behaving like a prima donna around the house and refused to speak to your granny.

I realise it’s not exactly relaxing being an international footballer, but perhaps they need reminding of the mechanic by which they’ve been elevated to such eminence in this celebrity-struck society of ours. It’s because fans pay money at club and league level, and pay it through the nose. Their fans pay their salaries, week after week, funding the exotic lifestyles of this squad of young men who took it upon themselves to deny those same fans access to their feelings immediately following a most welcome England victory. We urgently need to talk.

One sacking, several arrests (ambush marketing being illegal in South Africa) and a barrel-full of free publicity for Bavaria later and the only clear winner is the beer company, although the attractive young ladies – already described as ‘blonde bombshells’ in tabloids and blogs – will probably enjoy their day in court.

Anyone wanting to manage a crisis should never have let this get to court, of course. The great American publicist Jim Moran, who I wrote about in The Fame Formula, always wanted to get his stunts to court so as to achieve maximum notoriety and ability to push out sound bites on behalf of his clients. This is the man who said “It’s a sad day for American democracy if a man can’t fly a midget on a kite over Central Park” after the police stopped him from executing that stunt in the 1940s.

The biggest loser in all this is, of course, Robbie Earle, who has hired Phil Hall to help massage any potential long-term career damage and who should take more care about where his largesse is actually going in future. I doubt he actually knew that the tickets he passed on were going to a guerilla marketing company but regardless.

But I can’t imagine that the sponsors will be too happy that FIFA, instead of starving the incident of oxygen actually fanned the flames of publicity by letting it get to court. A big company’s sponsorship is dependent on exclusivity – but enforcing the law rigorously with a group of attractive women is always going to attract further, and unwanted, interest.

TV learned the lesson with streakers – ignore them and the tendency to seek publicity by stripping withers and dies. Had FIFA done this, and had ITV waited a while before ousting Earle, we would likely not have heard of Bavaria beer except as a passing reference, an arcane trivia quiz question in years to come. But thanks to the manhandling of the situation, the midgets are flying over New York for all to see. Jim Moran would have been delighted.

Still, at least Green is English, where all he faces is ridicule and crushing, sweaty disappointment. In 1994, Columbian footballer Andrés Escobar was murdered after scoring an own goal in the World Cup. If England fail to progress, Green is likely to be vilified by the myopic soccer tribe in full rhetorical flow and be verbally lumped in with paedophiles, murderers and rapists in bitter conversations down the pub.

This despite the fact that, post-match, Green fronted up his error and bravely faced the media, admitting to the gaffe whilst attempting to take control of the narrative. In PR terms, it was a flawless effort in damage limitation. But, reading the papers today, the media continue to sadistically throw salt onto his open wound. We need a scapegoat and Green is the man of the hour.

Is this continued hysteria evidence of our collective derangement? And if so, what will come of it? The media sustain an overbearing optimism that this wretched bunch of sporting icons can somehow fulfil the nation’s sporting dreams. It reaches such a pitch that one might be easily convinced that winning the World Cup glory would somehow cure cancer.

The repetitive conjuring of the spirit of 1966 is damaging overkill. The pressure fashioned by an unhinged media every four years (assuming that England even manage to qualify, of course) becomes a onerous burden that suffocates any prospect of glory. How can intense media scrutiny be a good thing? It is, without doubt, the single biggest destroyer of any promise of success. The American approach – a few lines on the front page and a bigger report in the sports section – seems a lot healthier.

Alleviating the phenomenon of hype might just might give the team a chance to forget themselves on the pitch and put in a World Cup campaign performance that will surprise and delight. Footballing glory used to be as much about unplanned serendipity as anything else. Can anyone remember that time? It seems an ever more distant memory nowadays and would most likely appear miraculous if it happened in the current media climate.

His departure, from an extremely well paid job, sends the clearest possible signal to the paper’s editorial – and to the paper’s readers – that he is serious when he says: “I think this story goes against the national interest because the country is behind the 2018 bid, in which a lot of people invested a hell of a lot of time.”

Gary Lineker has revealed himself as a British sporting hero once again, thanks to his actions. I wonder if the Mail on Sunday will run the next part of its story about Lord Triesman this coming weekend. Can they really allow themselves to be seen to be going against the national interest? I can’t wait to see…

It’s worth bearing in mind that, had this been a high-ranking politician, people would be doing all they could to find out whether Jacobs had planned this and would be doing all they could to destroy her. As it stands, it is unlikely to get investigated fully and the only true losers will be football fans – particularly if Triesman’s unguarded slurs on the Spanish and Russians lead to the UK not hosting the 2018 World Cup.

Nobody in the media will follow this through to the bitter end – and certainly no one will investigate Max Clifford’s role too deeply, as he’ll surely be coming with another story that packs the same sort of carefully gathered emotional punch that sells shedloads of papers.

It’s an absolutely shocking state of affairs if we have come to a point where everyone knows the value of kiss and tell and where anyone who wants it has the know-how to leverage the most amount of money out of the media, regardless of the damage it could cause. Even those that do not know what to do know where to turn to get it done: Max Clifford’s door.

But it’s a terrible, self-defeating state to be in if the media and all the people feeding it such choice titbits are concerned about is a quick profit without any consideration for the good of the nation as a whole.

This is a story that highlights the lack of investment in PR at the highest level. There’s an awful lot of bollocks talked about stories that are ‘so important’ that you can do trades with the papers on them, with shadowy publicists portrayed as Fagin types hand-rubbing and smirking in the background. This is mostly absurd – an exercise in scapegoat making.

A good publicist is counsellor and conscience – a Hollywood hybrid of shrink and media hound – and should protect their client. They have always been looking to the long game rather than the easy buck; the reinvention of the client to keep them in the limelight for years rather than to just take a cut from one hefty payment and then move on.

The media is profit-driven – these stories would wither up and die if people simply stopped buying the papers that carried them. People have complained that the Mail on Sunday is ‘ruining England’s chances’ in the World Cup and of hosting the World Cup in eight years’ time. The papers are after a profit; they would be forced to write something new if the people who complained stopped buying the tabloids, instead of moaning and then meekly buying up the next salacious crumbs of gossip.

The power to stop this is in the hands of the public – you choose what stories you want to read. I expect that circulation will creep up in the wake of this story, however – despite the litany of complaints.

It is depressing, too, that people are willing to go to the lengths that Jacobs has – what was she thinking? What possessed her? The “flame-haired 37-year-old with an impressive academic background” will surely rue the day she sold her story. Football tribalism carries a long collective memory for hurts and she has been set up as cannon fodder for this story.

If the FA’s spin-meisters don’t get the World Cup bid back on track, she will surely end up being seen as Eve to Triesman’s addled, buffoonish Adam and will end up suffering the same fate as Faria Alam.

It’s sad that old men, going into high office, still let power rush through them like a particularly potent, heady aphrodisiac. Perhaps they should be castrated before they take the role – or at least be forced to take bromide tea for the duration of their roles. And if that’s too extreme, perhaps they should have a good PR person embedded with them whilst they operate in public life.

The phrase ‘public life’ is a misnomer if ever there was one – the more one is in it, the less one knows about the lives of the public, which allows the sort of foolish mistakes that Triesman has made to thrive. The corridors of power are dark and shadowy. A good PR person could throw light on the way the world works and, most importantly, protect the power-crazed duffers from themselves.

And if that seems too much of an expense, why not just bring more women into such positions of power? I am certain that far fewer stories like these would crop up if there were more women as chief execs. But can you imagine the faces of the FA if you tried to push more women into their corridors of power? Not to mention those of the journalists at the Mail on Sunday…