Rich aren't evil, just uncool

Schadenfreude is not very nice, but it's good clean fun when it is about the woes of the filthy rich. Who can blame the entire (non-News International) British press for flying into mass ecstasy over the misery of the Murdochs?

All the real news of the week - famine in the Horn of Africa, the EU debt crisis - was ushered off to page five and beyond. Should a gigantic asteroid raze New York today, the Guardian may still lead with the next twist in the hacking scandal.

And there's no denying that the parliamentary interrogation of Rupert and James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks made for wonderful theatre - and not just the devastating right hook of Wendi Deng. Somehow the schadenfreude was mixed with a little sympathy, because all three witnesses came across as surprisingly three-dimensional human beings, trying their utmost to get through the crap-storm with both dignity and humility.

However power-drunk and mendacious they may be, the Murdochs and their acolytes still appear to be equipped with functioning souls. They're not evil people, they're just hopelessly uncool.

Superstar footballers also have functioning souls, however dim-witted and greedy they may seem.

For the man in the street or the gutter, it's hard to believe a guy is genuinely unhappy when he's trousering hundreds of thousands of pounds a week to kick a ball about, but it does happen.

For example, who will come to the rescue of poor old Carlitos Tevez? He's trapped in a half-time job that pays him only £250000 (R2.8-million) a week, in a soggy English city he doesn't like.

At the time of writing, Corinthians' cheeky effort to recapture their dikbek idol is failing due to lack of funds. Now Inter Milan and Real Madrid appear to be his only remaining exit routes. Tevez may even be willing to take a major pay cut to escape Manchester City, supposedly because he wants to live within one flight of his daughters in Buenos Aires. But after that less than triumphant Copa America campaign for Argentina, he can't be worth his wage.

The same goes for almost everyone else at Europe's elite clubs. Disproportionate incomes of players at the pinnacle of the game pose not just a financial risk, but a moral risk too. Football is supposed to be the people's game. In these hairy economic times, it's grotesque that even mediocre players like Milan Jovanovic earn sums hundreds of times the incomes of ordinary people in the cities where they work, let alone the developing world.

Only a strictly enforced wage cap will restore sanity to the industry. Uefa's new financial fair play rules may indirectly arrest wage inflation, but the big-spending clubs will inevitably find ways to circumvent them. City's owners, the Abu Dhabi royal family, appear to have done so already by arranging a patently inflated £300-million Etihad stadium sponsorship deal.

This kind of stunt is not technically evil, but it ruins the fun for everyone else.