Google provides a ‘suggestions’ facility when terms are typed into their search engine. As you type, Google Suggest returns search queries based on other users’ search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms). The list below shows the top Google Suggest terms for the 23 England players that WCC thinks might make the Fabio Capello’s squad for South Africa.
‘Girlfriend’ is the clearly the most popular suggestion, with Frank Lampard’s TV-presenter girlfriend Christine Bleakley warranting mention by name. In total, 12 top Google Suggests (52%) relate to sexual partners with only 5 top Suggests (22%) directly linked to football. (It has been assumed that biographies and wiki entries combine both football and personal details.)
It appears that the players’ personal lives are of greater interest than their football careers. In our media-saturated, celebrity-orientated era we are not satisfied knowing players through their on-pitch endeavours; we must also take a voyeuristic interest in their relationships and personal travails. When media-propagated fame is sovereign, famous people exhibit the lifestyles to which we aspire. However, this vicariously intimate focus also erodes (or may even invert) the hierarchy between regular folk and the super talented/wealthy. John Terry and Ashley Cole may be world-class defenders, but we can still shake our heads righteously at their moral inferiority (top suggestions ‘news of the world’ and ‘affair’ respectively.)
In the contemporaneous era, footballers are celebrities first and sportspeople second. This is why a personal matter, which should have been dealt with between John Terry and his wife became a matter of feverish public debate. If we lived in a world where Google Suggest terms related to football rather than sexual partners, Fabio Capello might not have deemed it necessary to remove the captaincy from Terry for having an affair with a colleague’s ex-girlfriend. The potentially destabilizing effects of a change in leadership before a major tournament would therefore have been obviated. But we live in this world!