Manchester City's Wayne Bridge joins the non-playing footballers' club
Wayne Bridge has become one of the forgotten men of football, living a celebrity lifestyle but rejecting the chance to move and play
Daniel Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 September 2011 23.16 BST
On the face of it, it is not a bad life. Wayne Bridge has all the star footballer's accessories: the pretty girlfriend, the designer labels, the big house on millionaire's row, with the big drive and big gates.
He lives in Alderley Edge, Cheshire's equivalent of the Hollywood Hills, and there are enough paparazzi around to let him know he is still news, at least for the gossip pages (he dates Frankie Sandford from the Saturdays).
They reckon Alderley Edge has more millionaires per square mile than any other part of the country. It is a place, according to one Daily Mail article, where the Oddbins sells upwards of 150 bottles of Cristal every week and the local charity shop is "filled with last season's Versace, Armani and Cavalli". Bridge's salary of £90,000 a week, or £4.7m a year, makes sure he fits in with the crowd.
But it is a strange existence. Bridge trains alone at Manchester City these days. He has not played for the first team since last December and is not in the 25-man squads for either the Premier League or Champions League. He has become one of the forgotten men, lost in the small print of the story that is unfolding in east Manchester.
Except it did not have to be this way, and it is here that we see why, behind the scenes at City, one member of the football staff talked this week of someone who had become "more interested in what he's doing on his Saturday nights rather than Saturday afternoons".
Then we come to Roberto Mancini's weekly press conference and the blank look when he was asked whether he understood the player's decision to stay put when he could have left during the transfer window. "I don't," he replied.
Mancini spoke of a "good player, a good guy" but it inevitably came back to a question of the player's priorities. "I'm not disappointed but I think he should be disappointed," he said. "For every player, it's important to play. If you have [the chance] to go and play somewhere it's important [to take it]."
Newcastle looked at Bridge at the start of the summer until it became clear the money involved was out of their reach. Two clubs from Turkey contacted City, and one from Russia. Then Celtic came in for him.
The proposal was a season-long loan, with European football and sell-out crowds. Bridge had the chance to re-establish himself, demonstrate his ambition, prove he still had a competitive spirit. He said no.
His motives have not been explained and, until we hear from him, we can only speculate. At City, though, there is a feeling among the coaching staff that this is someone who has lost his drive and is endangering whatever is left of his playing days.
Bridge has been on the wane for a couple of years. To put it into context, he went through a full season for City, playing 1,897 minutes, without a single cross, out of 47 attempts, going to a team-mate. He was loaned to West Ham in January and, on his debut, was at fault for every goal in a 3-0 defeat to Arsenal ("defending conspicuous by its awfulness", one match report said). He played 18 times for a club that was relegated.
Yet his last England cap was only 22 months ago. He has won 36 in total. There was a league championship medal for him at Chelsea, plus glories in the FA Cup and League Cup. City, then managed by Mark Hughes, paid £10m to sign him in January 2009, with a contract that runs to 2013.
City will investigate whether he will drop down a level. "It would be better for him if he finds a good solution in the Championship," Mancini says. "It's important he can find a good solution for the next four months." But any loan arrangement would mean City have to subsidise the majority of his salary. And what a salary it is. In total, Bridge's earnings at City stand at £12.5m so far and rising.
For this, the responsibility falls on City and their now-departed chief executive, Garry Cook, for handing out so many over-the-top salaries in the first year of the Abu Dhabi United Group regime. Craig Bellamy and Roque Santa Cruz were also earning around the £90,000-a-week mark, while Emmanuel Adebayor was on £150,000.
All these players, like Bridge, were excluded from first-team training in the run-up to the transfer window closing. Everyone bar Bridge moved on. What we have now is a non-playing football player.
Bridge has been frozen into a gulag of indifference at City, albeit one where the club pay enough into his account every month to make sure he can enjoy the life that has taken him off the sports pages and into the gossip columns. And there are still the footballers' perks, as his girlfriend explained to one newspaper last weekend.
"We booked a last-minute holiday to Cannes but I was in Manchester and didn't have anything with me. So Wayne was like: 'I'll ring up Harvey Nichols and see if they'll open late for us.' We were shopping by ourselves drinking champagne. I felt like a princess."
It is a life many would envy. But what price the thrill and adrenaline of running on to a football pitch, hearing the crowd, beneath the floodlights, the noise, the colours?
That, perhaps, is the most appropriate question for a man who does not seem to comprehend, a few weeks after turning 31, that it is far too early to find his career being spoken about in the past tense.
Considering they're such a small club