Abou Diaby and My Fetish for Non-Playing Players

Even if you're an Arsenal fan, the news that the club may be about to offer Abou Diaby a new contract must sound totally, totally boring. Contract extension stories are the absolute worst kind of Sky Sports News spam, the sort of nothingy, ho-hum back-page items you literally force yourself to read when you're desperate not to do any work. But then something about this Diaby story jumped out at me. The midfielder has only made 22 appearances over the last four seasons. That's nothing. It's not the France international's fault – he's had a shit time with injury – but this information excited me. Really excited me. I mean, I could literally feel my brain pumping out endorphins as it processed it all. I located his Wikipedia entry, took a deep breath, and just allowed myself to sink serenely to the bottom, like Ewan McGregor in the bit where he goes down the toilet in Trainspotting.

I have this fetish for footballers who don't really play that much football. Like many fans, I have shitloads of these niche obsessions, from an affection for players who obviously write their own Wikipedia entries, to a morbid fascination with the desperately swaggering Twitter game of recently released youth team strikers. But this preoccupation with footballers who don't play very much has been one of the most enduring. For all that Diaby stoked up the embers of this fetish, I'm not really talking about crocks. I once interviewed the country's leading anterior cruciate ligament specialist, and he told me that he's had Premier League stars almost hysterical with grief at the news they'll be sidelined for 18 months. I'm not getting my weird jollies off that. It's more like, footballers who train and strive and compete from the age of five to make it to the top of one of the word's most unforgiving professions, only to get there, look around and for whatever reason just think… nah.

So I'm talking about players like current Leeds United reserve keeper Stuart Taylor, a 34-year-old former England youth international who has made just 72 first team appearances since 1997. He's been on the books at clubs like Arsenal, Aston Villa, Man City and Reading, but for one reason or another just… doesn't play. It's mad. "I expect people do think 'backup keeper' when they think of me," he said in 2013, which would have been spot on if he'd actually said: "I expect people do think 'really weird and psychologically opaque backup keeper' when they think of me."

Goalies, admittedly and for obvious reasons, seem more prone to this than anyone else. In a career spanning three decades, Guadeloupe-born keeper Pegguy Arphexad managed 39 appearances, despite being deemed good enough to play for clubs including Leicester and Liverpool. He actually – technically – won a shitload of medals too, including half a dozen on Merseyside. "All," as his Wikipedia entry notes with devastating economy "as an unused substitute". Maybe it was just the case that football wasn't ever really where his heart lay. There was a rumour going round last year that following his retirement Arphexad had tried to break in to acting, and ended up working as a porn star with the stage name "The Stopper". I guess that, along with your UEFA Super Cup winner's medal, it's something to tell the grandkids.

What about the other merry benchwarmers and reserve team legends? It depends how far back you want to go. There is the case of Ipswich Town midfielder Tommy Parkin, who played just 70 times in a spell that lasted from 1973 to 1987. Imagine all the time that passed between Aladdin Sane and Appetite for Destruction, and still not scoring a single fucking goal? More recently, it's hard to see past David May. Here's a man who spent nine glory-filled years at Old Trafford throughout the 90s and early 00s, happily hanging round like someone who's walked into a private party, but a private party where nobody has the heart to ask him who in the room he actually knew. More recently at Man Utd, Brazilian midfielder Anderson seemed pretty chill about wearing those big puffa jackets players not even in the match-day squad had to wear. He'll probably be buried in one.

But who else? You can probably think of loads. There's there semi-mythical Fumaça, another Brazilian who notched up one appearance for Colchester, none for Barnsley, three for Palace and then, (weirdly), five for Newcastle before being binned off into obscurity. There's David Bentley, obviously. The post-Everton career of Michael Ball. Even Micah Richards seemed in danger of drifting slowly away from the record books until he made the most romantic decision available to man and joined Fiorentina on loan this season.

But it's impossible – it's indecent – to talk about this subject without bowing to the absolute Daddy of non-playing players. Step forward Winston Bogarde, you magnificent bastard. The story of the Dutch defender is written into Premier League lore. He joined Chelsea on a free from Barcelona in 2000 and was given a four-year contract worth a then eye-watering £40,000 a week. Almost immediately, though, the club changed managers and Bogarde was told he was surplus to requirements and should find a new team. At which point Bogarde simply lit a Cohiba, sat back and laughed. Nowhere else, he said, would pay him nearly as much, so he was going nowhere. Even though it meant he would barely play a game, and would eventually be forced to train with the kids in an attempt to prise him out of the club, he simply honoured his ridiculous contract by showing up to training every day and then going home to practise his Scrooge McDuck swan-dives. In four seasons, he made nine appearances. And rather than rounding on Bogarde for his greed or lack of desire, I remember thinking that it was the most gangsta thing I'd ever heard. He would not be moved. As one friend put it, he was the Rosa Parks of super-remunerated athletes.

"This world is about money, so when you are offered those millions you take them," he explained of his decision. "Few people will ever earn so many. I am one of the few fortunates who do. I may be one of the worst buys in the history of the Premiership but I don't care."

Taking a step back, it's pretty obvious that the case of Bogarde represented a turning point. The advent of big, big money at the top end of football meant that, in short order, players could survive without really playing that much. In the past, it was about soldiering-on until your body physically couldn't take it any more in the hope of staying at a club long enough to be rewarded with a tax-free testimonial, the proceeds of which you could then use as a deposit on a pub or sporting goods shop. In his excellent autobiography, Full Time, plastic Paddy target man Tony Cascarino describes doing everything he possibly could to eke out an extra year or two as he saw-out his career in the French leagues during the 90s. He talked about dying his hair to hide the grey and lying about his age so that the club chairman might think he was worth a contact extension. These are not considerations that, say, Raheem Sterling will ever have to make. Cascarino, incidentally, made almost 650 career appearances, more than Stuart Taylor, Pegguy Arphexad, Tommy Parkin, David May and David Bentley combined.

And with one eye on the future, fetishists for non-playing players probably have a lot to look forward to. Or at least on paper. FA Chairman Greg Dyke's recent proposal that a club's 25-man squad should include a quota of at least 12 "home grown" players presents the possibility of a hot market for young British players, bought and sold at a premium to tick boxes rather than to win games. It's not hard to imagine top Premier League squads comprising dozens of Scott Sinclairs, shepherded onto the pitch for the first ten minutes of games or for the odd League Cup quarter final. It's a joyless prospect, cold and transactional. These would not be the non-playing players I first fell in love with. Where's the weirdness? Where's the defiance? I can't see any of them ending up a cult figure like Bogarde. I can't see any of them ending up a porn star in Guadeloupe.

@ben_machell

Previously – The Sad Decline of English Football's Knucklehead Centre Backs