“The greatest steriliser of inspiration, the greatest deadener of originality, the greatest destroyer of talent.” Proust on snobbery

On May 18, 1922, a dinner party was held at the Majestic, a hôtel de grand luxe on the Avenue Kleber in Paris. The guests included Igor Stravinsky, Serge Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. It is a safe assumption, then, that the party was not organised by Rio Ferdinand. There was no Barry White music.

Joyce was drunk and out of his depth socially; Proust, turning up late, charmed everybody except Stravinsky, whom he expected to share his worshipful admiration for Beethoven’s late quartets. “ Pire que les autres,” Stravinksy snarled (Worse than the others). Reasonable to surmise that no such conversation took place at the Manchester United Christmas party at a hôtel de grand luxe in Manchester.

Mind you, the United do was exclusive in its way. It’s not everyone who can afford a £4,000-per-head bash. Well, it’s not so extravagant really, is it? Not if you are getting 15 and 20 times as much every week. That sort of money gives you a taste for champagne at £500 a bottle.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: would they actually notice if the hotel swapped the bottles of Cristal vintage for a few cases of cava from the Co-op? Oi, you! Pint of Cristal ’53 with a lemonade top! And a packet of diamond-encrusted salt and vinegar crisps an’ all!

Oh, how we resent the fortunes made by footballers. There are few subjects more certain to cause waves of righteous indignation the length and breadth of the land than the salaries of leading footballers. Use the word obscene, mention the nurses, and off we go: overpaid louts without taste or any sense of real values, insulated from the real world, think they’re God Almighty and they can’t even win us the World Cup.

It seems absurdly inappropriate, does it not, that these men, horribly young and seldom from anything even approaching a middle-class background, should have all that money. You or I would make much better use of it, buying first editions of Ulysses, hiring a band to play the late quartets at a truly exquisite party and really, truly appreciating the Cristal. Even if our tastes are less highfalutin, we would surely carry off vast wealth more stylishly than your average millionaire footballer.

Whenever we make judgments about people for the crime of having more money than us, envy is never far away. And whenever an English person criticises anyone for the way he spends his fortune, be sure that the envy is mixed with snobbery.

Which of us did not look at the pictures from the Beckhams’ wedding and, like Eliot’s eternal Footman, “snicker”? We had a right to: it was hilarious and quite mind-bogglingly vulgar. It made us all feel (a) superior and (b) poor. But David Beckham did look such a prat sitting on his throne in his white suit, it would have been a crime to withhold a snicker.

We don’t resent other classes of rich people quite as much as we resent rich footballers. We wag our head in bewilderment at teenage internet millionaires. We respect the force of the rich buggers on Dragons’ Den and comprehend that it was not money that made them forceful but vice versa. We accept that pop musicians get money for catching the present fashion in noise.

But it’s a different matter with footballers. We hate their wealth because it is a comparatively recent phenomenon, as any former footballer in his late forties will tell you at length. The maximum wage was abolished only in 1961. We hate their wealth because they are so young. We hate it because they get the money for playing a game, which is supposed to be fun, which many people pay subs in order to play.

But above all, we hate it because footballers are working-class. The do in Manchester was a working lads’ night out: a piss-up, a knees-up, transmogrified by the magical power of money, so that Cristal replaced lager, a hôtel de grand luxe replaced the pub, hand-picked girls replaced the local slappers and security men kept the door. But it was still nothing more nor less than a lads’ piss-up.

And this offends us. The money hasn’t changed the working-class blokes into something else, it has just made them rich. This destroys our sense of what is fitting in life, it attacks some ancient, atavistic feeling that good taste is something to do with good breeding, and that both are something to do with money.

The incongruity of possessing both considerable wealth and the tastes of the poor throws our class-conscious English souls into perplexity. English literature is full of people who have money and, sometimes, achievement, but who can’t throw off their essential vulgarity. You find them in Jane Austen and James Bond, in Kingsley Amis and Charles Dickens, and, for that matter, in Proust. Sir Hugo Drax and Madame Verdurin are brother and sister.

We have to find a reason for resenting the amounts of money that footballers get paid, or we would have to come to terms with our own snobbery and envy. So we like to come to the conclusion that these “pampered” and “cosseted” and “precious” people are lesser footballers because of their wealth; that they are prepared to settle for less because footballers are no longer “hungry”.

That may be true of mediocrities. It is not true of genuinely good players; not true of genuinely good athletes in any discipline, starting with Michael Jordan. Ferdinand may have a magnetic attraction for sleaze, but no one who saw him play for United last weekend would call him smug or sated or complacent as a footballer. He had a towering match.

Beckham was a millionaire many times over even when he played that famous match for England against Greece. He didn’t give up when things got difficult; he didn’t tell himself that it didn’t really matter, he had enough money anyway.

Footballers get paid vast sums of money because that’s the going rate. You can hardly expect them to haggle to get paid less. Football is a rich sport (at least for those on the top), and so footballers themselves are rich. Deal with it.

Money itself is not evil. It is people who are evil, not the stuff they put in their pockets. All the same, money does affect people: it can make you feel so special that normal rules don’t apply to you. The temptation to treat other people indifferently or badly is always there and you can find it in rich people of exquisite taste and impeccable family trees, as well as in footballers.

Perhaps there was a rape at the United do, and perhaps this kind of financially fuelled arrogance has something to do with it. We don’t know yet. But if rape is wrong, wealth is not wrong. It is merely enviable.