Please party properly

Paul Gascoigne has quickly taken the baton passed on by George Best. He was talking, or slurring, to Sky Sports News this week about his "chlose pursonal frend" who had passed away and how he'd had a double brandy when Callum Best phoned him on the morning of the funeral. Scuffling with photographers hours after the interview where he first denied drinking, then admitted having a glass of wine with friends, then denied he'd even swallowed, Gascoigne ended up in jail for the night. Another woman-beating footballer's descent will be chronicled in public.

It is, of course, in the public interest to see Gazza scuffle and squirm. After all footballers are owned by the public, like the Dublin footballers and the Irish rugby, team we own them all. Some time around the age of ten they made pacts with the devil to become famous and sell their souls to the public. It was the white-suited Liverpool FA Cup final team (ca 1996) who were the first squad to negotiate a group discount with Satan, though such deals are commonplace now.

The spice boy era was a personal favourite of my own. A quick refresher course for anyone wondering about this under-excavated period: think of the days of early Sky broadcasts around the time the Newcastle manager was having a breakdown before our very eyes. And think Liverpool. Stan Collymore lighting up nights at least once a year with a supporting cast of Jamie Redknapp and Louise Nurding (in the holding role), Robbie Fowler. Steve McManaman before he won the lottery at Real Madrid. Phil Badd at centre-back, carousing away whereever the music was good. I wasn't looking for moral fortitude in that Liverpool team, rather a sense that something different – anything different – might happen.

It's possible for revisionist Liverpool supporters to characterise this as a bleak period of profligacy, almost ruining the club's greatest traditions and highlighting the worst excesses of celebrity culture. Blame-gaming in the aftermath circled on Roy Evans. Apparently there was a generation gap between Evans, who spent his youth happy to suck it up as a Liverpool reserve, and the celebrity kids who were earning tonnes and getting in free to the hot places. Collymore wrote bigger cheques than the actual fines for lateness and slept with Evans' daughter while the gaffer and his wife slept next door. For non-Liverpool fans it was a funny, long running soap-opera with some brilliant football. It was the first proper Petri dish where the utterly talentless got paid as much as the mediocre and the very talented to become very famous. None of them has yet turned out to be a murderer, despite the prognostications at the time of many commentators who'd grown up on the cloth-cap era of post-War football.

The life of the former footballer Robbie Fowler isn't so bad. As he sits out games for Manchester City this season, watching Citeh run down his contract so they don't trigger another instalment of the fee they agreed to pay Leeds when he signed, he must, even occasionally be bored into reverie... In his lifetime in the game he's played with most of the best footballers in England, broken all sorts of scoring records, heard his own people chant his name. He's also been caught in an alleged sex-scandal where it was allegedly claimed he had an allegedly smaller cock than Steve McManaman (the allegeds are mine), so it hasn't been all plain sailing. He's also lost most of the last six seasons to injury. Now instead of his name the Manchester City fans sing to the tune of Yellow Submarine: "We all live in a Robbie Fowler house, a Robbie Fowler house..." Fowler is Britain's fourth-richest footballer, having earned around £28 million through shrewd property investment.

Phil Babb last crossed the consciousness of the Irish public when he bounced up and down on a cop's car. He never made any meaningful contribution for Ireland afterwards. He's now a big investor in GolfPunk magazine, a latter-day Loaded for the guys who were in their mid-20s when Loaded launched. Jamie Redknapp too has just gone into publishing. His Icon magazine offers footballers a new way to spend their money, with high-end advertisers paying loads to get distribution rights to bored footballers. Babb and Redknapp have cash and are trying to make it grow, like any sensible rich men in their 30s.

The Spartan approach to life is still demanded of footballers by fans and administrators, but it's an impossible dream for most ordinary humans. They just have to learn to party properly and leave it behind when the moment passes. Gazza will unfortunately be on our screens and front pages for as long as he's got left. You might want to look away.