Johnson was sacked by Sunderland after admitting on the first day of his trial that he had kissed the girlAs
Adam Johnson begins his six-year sentence after being convicted of
sexual activity with a child, having also pleaded guilty to one count of
grooming and one count of kissing the girl, there is an understandable
desire to make sure football is doing everything it can to stop such a
crime happening again.If it is a worthy aspiration, the sport has
been here before; in March 1999, another former England winger, Graeme
Rix, at the time assistant coach at Chelsea, was sentenced to 12 months in prison for having unlawful sex with a 15-year-old girl.That
it could easily occur once more is explained for some by an easy if
unsavoury equation: a lifestyle of entitlement and avarice, a moral
black hole when elite players should be role models.Except this is about more than just football, and more specific
than some ethical malaise among millionaire young men and those who
advise them.You may or may not be comfortable with footballers,
Johnson among them, who earn three times as much in a week as the
average annual wage in the town where they play, or who choose to spend
some of that on blinged-up luxury cars, or who have sexual relations
with women who are not their partners.To conflate a materialist
lifestyle or promiscuity between consenting adults with what Johnson
did, however, is to ignore the very clear distinction between what one
individual might consider distasteful and what society as a whole has
deemed illegal.To blame football for Johnson, one would equally
have to blame the public relations industry for the indecent assaults on
young girls carried out by Max Clifford, or the teaching profession and
television industry for the two indecent assaults on teenage boys
committed by former weatherman and biology teacher Fred Talbot.
