Arsenal’s Ben White isn’t the first player to dislike football - step forward ex-Spurs man Benoit Assou-Ekotto

The Arsenal defender is not the first Premier League footballer to express lack of love for the game.
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Ben White doesn’t like football. Or rather, he doesn’t like it enough to pay any real attention to the sport when he isn’t playing it himself.

By his own admission, the Arsenal defender is not one to flick on Super Sunday or pore over the transfer gossip columns with his morning cuppa. Even when he joined the Gunners and assumed the famous number four shirt once worn by Patrick Vieira, White confessed to knowing nothing about the towering Frenchman - which in some regards is arguably more impressive than knowing at least something.

Content in his wilful ignorance, the 25-year-old is certainly a rarity, but by no means is he a lonesome pariah in the footballing world. There are others who have played the beautiful game without ever truly caring for it, and one grand example who, like White, made his living in north London - albeit on the other side of the great red/white divide.

They say that if you find a job you love you never have to work a day in your life. Most of us aren’t so lucky, instead consigned to a bleak, rolling horizon of meaningless spreadsheets and office Secret Santas, of mortgage repayments and refrigerator warranties, of parents’ evenings and routine dental check-ups, all dancing before our eyes with kaleidoscopic monotony - blurring, gathering pace with cruelty and the passing of each year until we turn around to find ourselves wrinkled, podgy, and bowed, waiting for the sweet, imperturbable, velveteen release of death.

The alternative for most of us has-beens and daydreamers, the unrealised stuff of absent-minded delirium, was a life in football. To be free of these wretched, clumsy limbs, to wake up daily in your gated mansion in the leafy suburbs and kick a ball about with your mates every morning, maybe coming home and playing some FIFA (which you’re in, by the way - and not like some weird, unlicensed replica version of you that you tried to make yourself one night after a couple of cans - actual you, with that 3D scanning technological magic they used to make Andy Serkis into Gollum), knowing that come Saturday afternoon you’re going to have thousands of strangers screaming your name in adulation, all while being paid mind-altering sums of money with more zeroes than a Scholastic book fair shipment of Louis Sachar’s Holes. What’s not to love?

Generally speaking, the players we come to idolise are mostly, and understandably, satisfied with this existence of sleeve tattoos and personal nutritionists, happy to while away their 20s, and some of their 30s, in the cloistered bliss of Croesus-like financial security, waiting calmly to be taken to the glue factory of cliched punditry or backroom staff appointments.

There are some, however, who yearn for more. David James always had pretensions of being an artist, for instance. Andrei Arshavin started his very own women’s fashion line back in Russia. Joe Allen has, willingly, appeared on the cover of Chicken & Egg magazine. But beneath the bizarre layers of amateur impressionism and farmyard ornithology, at least these lads still held something of a flame for the sport that made them household names. For former Tottenham full-back Benoit Assou-Ekotto, however, this couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The Cameroonian, like White, was something of a footballing Sisyphus, damned forever to run up and down a touchline to no avail, getting to the byline only to see a ball booted brutishly back from whence he’d just came in a never-ending cycle of crestfallen toil. Simply put, Assou-Ekotto just wasn’t bothered about football.

The full-back was always a striking figure - wiry and solemn with a mushroom cloud afro occasionally tamed into intricate cornrows that resembled tributaries in the delta of a mighty river. On the field, he was a player; not an exceptional player, but a player nonetheless. After starting his career at Lens in 2004, Assou-Ekotto secured a move across the Channel, rocking up at White Hart Lane two years later with a bright reputation and a scowl etched adamantly into his brow. Over the better part of the next decade, the forlorn defender amassed 155 appearances for Spurs, glumly chipping in with the occasional screamer when the mood took him.

Benoit probably wouldn’t approve of this mindless reeling off of his on-field exploits though, mainly because he himself seemed to care so little about them.

Footballers are often accused of being too out of touch - isolationist, brattish Rapunzels who watch the world with insensitive bemusement from a bubble nestled high atop the spire of an ivory tower. Assou-Ekotto had no such affliction. He was well aware of the bigger picture and he didn’t like what he saw.

Articulate and philosophical, blunt and searingly candid, Assou-Ekotto spoke often and with little hesitation of his disdain for the trappings of the modern game. He was almost anarchical in his rhetoric - a moralistic hippie cult leader rallying against the evils of ‘The Man’ and the bogus, self-aggrandising ways of the benighted masses.

Above all else, the defender raged at the hypocrisy that he saw plaguing his sport. Paradoxes that others embraced as accepted truths jostled uncomfortably inside of his cramped skull. Whereas others were willing to jump through the hoops, Assou-Ekotto asked why they were there at all.

Speaking to The Guardian amidst the pomp of his North London existentialism, the full-back took aim at the cowardice pervading English football - the dishwater dullness of post-match interviews, censored and scripted by scrupulous media officers, mimicked faithfully parrot-fashion by sheepish players; marauding heroes transformed into magnolia marionettes for fear of the backlash from a baying tabloid freak show.

“I say: ‘Come on, you have two personalities?’” he griped back in 2010. “I can’t listen to people when they speak like that. I know that they lie, and I hate lies. Me, I am not like that. I am honest all of the time, although the truth is not always good to say.” You can see how the constant duality might have begun to seep into his perception of the game, how it might have stained the edges and cracked the lenses in his rose-tinted spectacles. And once you stop caring, anything goes.

Without question, Assou-Ekotto was a shameless mercenary - his words, by the way - a self-serving gold-digger with no semblance of loyalty to the badge. And it was refreshing. The lad was so uninterested in his profession that he’d often turn up on Saturday morning without the foggiest idea of who Spurs were up against, counting down the minutes like a schoolboy in detention until he could go home and do something, anything, else.

His prematch meal, according to Peter Crouch, would usually consist of a croissant and a packet of Walkers nonchalantly slung in a Tesco carrier bag and devoured with the matter of fact resentment of an apathetic office worker. It’s the Premier League equivalent of the hungover tab and Red Bull combo that sustains pub league wingers up and down the country every Sunday morning. Probably had a similar nutritional value too.

When Spurs signed Rafael van der Vaart from Real Madrid in 2010 - the kind of pulsating, nonsensical acquisition that those in the know refer to as a ‘statement of intent’ - Assou-Ekotto breezed into training on the Dutchman’s first day entirely oblivious as to who he was.

Just let that sink in. Assou-Ekotto, a professional playing at the highest level of English football was so completely unaware to the hyperbolic glitz of the modern game, that he had no clue Rafael van der Vaart - a man so entwined with the collective popular culture consciousness of the sport that he had his own OK! Magazine cover shoot - existed. Like Ben White and Patrick Vieira, it’s almost impressive.

It may be absurd to the everyman supporter, but the Cameroonian’s logic was simple: a plumber doesn’t get home on an evening and obsess over pipes, a neurologist doesn’t lie in bed at night with brains on the brain, so why should he let football envelope his life? At the end of the day, the game is a job - nothing more, nothing less.

And without the infatuation that we as avid followers presume to be universal, Assou-Ekotto’s life off the pitch during his time in North London was markedly different to that of his colleagues. He would work hard in training, he would stifle a rotating cast of flamboyant tricksters and have-a-go heathens every weekend, and as soon as the final whistle blew, he would wander off into his own unorthodox world where football was irrelevant and his Oyster card was his best friend.

Benoit’s stay in the Big Smoke was that of an urban nomad, rootless and sequestered, a stranger in the city he lived in. Superficially, his time at Tottenham was a lonely one. A bachelor in a foreign country residing in a faceless, hulking menace of a city like London; the only two teammates he bothered saving to his phonebook were Sebastien Bassong and Adel Taarabt.

Whereas his colleagues would go home and roll around in their gigantic piles of money like Scrooge McDuck, or whatever it is wealthy people do in their spare time, Assou-Ekotto became a perpetual tourist, filling his afternoons by traipsing around galleries and dining out in various eateries in desperate search of some kind of stimulation. Most days he was just another anonymous sightseer, a filthy rich nobody. He was Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, Ferris Bueller on his day off.

And yet, to see him interviewed during this period is to be pleasantly surprised. Shy, humble, and unexpectedly affable, the defender is clearly happy with his peculiar working arrangement, and a far cry from the outspoken poster boy of anti-establishment football hipsterism that he was so often portrayed as being.

In various clips and conversations littered around the internet he speaks fondly of the standard of English football, the importance of African solidarity, his passion for anything with a motor, and the boyish trepidation of hiding his first, and only, tattoo from his disapproving mother.

He is human and self-aware and genial and kind of dorky, and he did what he did, in spite of his displeasure, because he would have been mad not to. Assou-Ekotto’s career was a case study in pure, uncut, unadulterated pragmatism, and it’s given him a life that the rest of us could only long for.

The obvious question to ask, now that his boots are hung up and his penance is finally through, is whether it was worth it or not. Can you put a price on happiness? Is an adulthood of unfulfillment worth a swollen bank balance and a retirement of wild comfort? The answer, you would imagine, will differ from person to person.

Because perhaps it is too simplistic to say that players like Benoit and Ben White dislike football. Perhaps it makes for a catchy tagline, a curious subplot to hook an audience, and little else. Perhaps both of them would hate this article. Perhaps, in Assou-Ekotto’s case, he didn’t so much hate football, as he hated the efforts it made to strip away any kind of personality or individuality. Perhaps, where White is concerned, he just can’t be fussed with the constant, furious hurricane of content and discourse and analysis for the sake of analysis. At the end of the day, I think we can all relate to that, even if it is just a little.

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