By Dennis Konyang’o
I am gutted about the story about Eboue’s troubles. I am angry at Arsenal!
When you are an employer, your relationship with the employee shouldn’t be strictly contractual: you should not just care about the service he provides and the money you pay to him.
A good employer should be concerned about the employee’s welfare even after retirement. It is a moral obligation.
For soccer stars or sportsmen in general, it is even more fundamental that an employer should ensure they live a good life when they retire. It is because a stars productive years are not many: they are mostly productive between 20- 32 years of age, which is just about fifteen years on average.
A soccer star retires at a young age when most folks haven’t even married and settled down with a family. They earn good money when they are hardly past adolescence and are vulnerable and unwise in the ways of the world. At that age, they require a lot of guidance, counseling and good advice.
Such guidance, apparently are not offered by Arsenal and so Eboue finds himself in a situation without any hope for the future at a tender age of 34! Arsenal isn’t intervening even when it is reported that Eboue has contemplated suicide!! If that isn’t a crisis, then I got no idea what a crisis is.
Eboue epitomizes everything that is wrong with Arsenal and it shows both on the pitch and off the pitch. If it isn’t Jack Wilshere smoking, it is Ozil flying out to meet some woman in Austria or wherever when he should be in camp and the list goes on and on!
It is why any promising star and especially the Kenyan stars must stop dreaming of playing for Arsenal. It is these that Wanyama considered and decided to sign for Spurs instead. Wanyama is a wise lad!
