I would love to know the reality of wages at that level to make an honest assessment of whether they really can or can't afford petrol to drive to training.
You might find this from The Athletic interesting; especially as it's about one of our, ahem, former stars...
‘I was an unemployed footballer at 41 – going into the real world is daunting’
Simon Hughes Sep 26, 2020
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“He went flying backwards and cracked his head on the pavement, so they rushed him to the hospital in an ambulance and he was straight into a coma.”
Kevin Ellison is explaining what happened to his father, also named Kevin, on June 25 — the night Liverpool became English champions for the first time in 30 years.
Ellison Sr lives in Anfield, not too far from the stadium. Sixty years old, he had worked as a labourer as well as a demolition man before retiring, “so he thinks he knows a thing or two about awkward climbs.”
When a Chelsea goal against Manchester City sent Liverpool to within 12 minutes of the title, he decided to hang some red and white bunting across the street. This required a ladder. That was when he fell and went out like a light.
The final whistle had still not been blown at Stamford Bridge and he entered a world of darkness without knowing whether Liverpool
were champions. Doctors had told Ellison’s family to prepare for the worst — even at best, his life could have altered forever because nobody really knows with brain injuries. It was obviously a good sign when some of his first mumbled words having woken up in hospital almost a month later were, “Did we win the league?”
Not everyone will be able to relate to the sort of pressure the Ellisons have been under this summer, particularly Kevin Jr, who was released by Morecambe in the middle of a pandemic and with that became an unemployed footballer at the age of 41, carrying limited qualifications and zero experience of working as an adult in any other industry.
Given that he was one of the first players in the lower leagues to speak about his battle with mental health in 2018, you believe him when he fixes his eyes on you with a penetrating stare and says, “You never really know for certain where your mind will take you.”
It had not helped that his exit from Morecambe — a club he’d represented for nine seasons — was so painful.
Jim Bentley was the longest-serving manager in English football and Ellison had been his first signing in 2011. When Bentley resigned in November to take over at AFC Fylde in the National League, Ellison says “it felt like a death for the club”. He was walking around Conwy Castle, on the north Wales coast, during a late October day out with his daughter, Ava, when he received a call from Morecambe chairman Rod Taylor, asking him to succeed Bentley as caretaker manager. He would work alongside Barry Roche, the 37-year-old goalkeeper whose time at the club exceeded both Bentley’s as manager and Ellison’s as a player by three seasons.
In his first meeting with the team the next day, Ellison admitted that his neck was on the line. He was desperate to carry on playing but figured that if another manager came in as Bentley’s permanent replacement, he would probably now be considered as a potential threat to his control considering his age and status. “That’s how football works. A new gaffer comes in and gets rid of people who are closely associated with the old gaffer,” Ellison, who scored 88 goals in 388 appearances for Morecambe, tells
The Athletic. “They never think, ‘I could lean on some experience here…’”
The first offer of help came from another manager he knows well. Ryan Lowe also grew up in Liverpool, near Anfield, and at Plymouth Argyle he had already beaten Leyton Orient, so he told him how he thought Morecambe could break the Londoners down that Saturday. Ellison enjoyed the role, which lasted only two games, because he was warned someone else would be appointed as permanent manager so was able to work without pressure. The experience was enough, however, to make him realise he would prefer to be an assistant or a first-team coach in the future.
“I hated having to leave the WhatsApp groups and the car school in the drive up from Liverpool,” he admits. “It’s impossible to laugh and joke with lads in cars and then tell them you’re dropping them.”
After beating Orient in the league and losing at Blackpool in the FA Cup, Derek Adams was appointed as Bentley’s successor.
In Adams’ first meeting with the squad, Ellison says he stood up and told him that he still considered himself a player and would do everything he could to help ease Morecambe’s relegation concerns, but Adams did not seem interested in discussing his role.
“To me, that meant, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t be here for long’,” Ellison thought. Across the next two months, he featured in seven games but after an 86th-minute substitute appearance in a defeat at Bradford City on New Year’s Day, his career at Morecambe was unofficially over. Adams made seven signings in the January transfer window and this meant Ellison was no longer making the bench.
Ellison was told to train with Morecambe’s youth team players each Saturday morning. When he asked Adams why he had taken a decision he considered to be disrespectful, “he brushed me away — I’d rather he’d admitted that he just wanted me out of the club in January.”
Three months slipped by. Ellison had gone from being one of the main players in the team, to taking over as manager, to getting frozen out of the squad. He picked up on how staff members were cooler with him in their conversations. Some players appeared reluctant to talk to him, “maybe because of what it might mean for them”.
He says he was mostly separated from the rest of the squad and trained a lot through this period alone at the gym in Lancaster University. “It was very isolating. I didn’t want any special treatment. I didn’t ask for any time off or anything like that. I wanted to train more, because I didn’t feel like I was doing enough.”
He became aware of loan approaches from non-League sides Hartlepool United and Chester but he is still unable to figure out why Adams did not tell him about them straight away because he might have made compromises to ensure they happened. Ellison says that when he confronted Morecambe’s manager the day before a game at Cheltenham Town in February, Adams admitted there had been inquiries but the interested clubs did not follow up with further calls to discuss payment plans around wages.
www.theguardian.com
