Consider this: you take a group of young males, and despite being one I will readily admit we not the pinnacle of responsible behaviour as a group, and put them together. Not just a group of males, but the most highly testosterone charged, competitive young males you can find – intelligence optional.

You, at an impressionable age, place them all together to bond in a testosterone charged environment. You then give them enough free time to do whatever they please within legal boundaries.

Throw in a whopping pay packet, and spend your time telling them how much you want and need them so they won’t go to other clubs or codes.

Then you splash their face across an adoring media landscape, just to make sure that every young woman they meet is likely to want to sleep with them, no strings attached with barely a conversation.

I know, I think it too.

Why don’t these 18-35 year old males behave like elder statesman of society? Why do they treat women with such disrespect? It just doesn’t make sense.

I just can’t figure out why these men would behave this way – drinking in bars, sleeping with young, good-looking girls. Surely you can’t have as much fun at a nightclub with legions of adoring attractive girls as you could at the park on a Sunday next to a 90 year-old woman called Ethel.

Don’t kid yourself; sport is essentially thuggery, which would be illegal in normal society, barring these obvious examples:

  • Shoulder charging a Nun out from in front of a bus
  • Slide-tackling a wild hog before it gores an old lady
  • Leaping onto the shoulders of a man with his back turned in order to rescue a kitten from a tree, before ‘niggling’ a bee off his face
  • Piling on top of a man and raking him with your shoes because he is on fire

Respective leagues can do a lot to stop this, but it will never fix the problem. The problem is modern professional football; testosterone charged men with media glare and money.

What do you get?

Very rarely an Adam Goodes or a Hazem el Mazri. Most likely you’ll get a Jason Akermanis, an Anthony Watmough, because that’s what the situation calls for.

It’s not the reaction to the idiocy that annoys me, most of them deserve it, it’s the “Why are they all behaving this way? It must be the team/league isn’t doing anything about it”.

So I’ll give you a solution:

1. Don’t let footballers hang out together. Ever. No training in groups.
2. Make sure through testing that any footballer has the same level of testosterone as the rest of the male population.
3. Stop them from getting “revved up” before, after or during a game.
4. Ban any woman who wants to sleep with them from going near them through punishment of hearing the vast array of opinions that Jason Akermanis has.
5. Make them play for the exact average wage. Less if they complain.
6. Make sure they are all at least 40. 30 if they have settled down and only drink on occasion.
7. Ban from planet Earth and the surrounding atmosphere anyone who is, or has ever been Anthony Watmough.

Clubs and leagues are foolish not to consider these measures.

Or you could accept that clubs, leagues and players are generally trying very hard to curb this culture, if for nothing else but financial reasons. But it is an almost impossible battle.