IAN LADYMAN: Loyalty gets you nowhere in football, so why should ...

A story goes that during Tottenham’s pre-season games, new manager Ange Postecoglou took a look at midfielder Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg trying and failing to take a ball on the half turn in midfield and decided there and then the Danish player wasn’t for him.

The chances are the truth is a little deeper and more nuanced than that. But the point remains. Postecoglou – on the basis of his selections so far this season – feels Hojbjerg is not someone to build his midfield round. The 28-year-old has played 44 minutes as a substitute in the Premier League this season and Spurs have made it known that he is for sale.

And this, in a nutshell, is how quickly it can turn in football. Hojbjerg has been one of Tottenham’s steadier and more reliable players in making 109 Premier League starts in the three years since the club paid Southampton £15million for him. During the ups and down of the Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte years, the Dane was one player on whom you could generally rely.

But now he is on the outside looking in just like another team-mate Eric Dier.

Dier’s history with Tottenham is longer than Hojbjerg’s. He has been at Tottenham for nine years, having joined from Sporting Lisbon. Dier is a bright, articulate and steady man and was at the very heart of all that Spurs achieved in the enthralling years of Mauricio Pochettino. He was an effective central defender and a good holding player too. He has 250 league games behind him and 49 England caps.

Ange Postecoglou has been ruthless in his treatment of some of Tottenham's most established players this season

The likes of Pierre-Emile Hojberg and Eric Dier have struggled for game time despite being well-established at the club

For Ian Ladyman, this is the nature of modern football, where loyalty means very little

But Dier has not made a single Postecoglu squad this season. He was not even included in the much-changed party that lost to Fulham in the League Cup this week. On social media, meanwhile, he is criticised by Tottenham supporters for having business interests away from the field (Dier runs a travel app with a friend) – the insinuation being that he is no longer focussed on his primary career.

So this is life in the professional game. It’s not a story about Postecoglu or about Tottenham. The club’s new coach is entitled to pick whoever he wants, especially when his team is playing as well as it was in winning at Bournemouth last weekend.

No, this is a story about loyalty and how it gets you nowhere in professional football. More evidence? Try Sheffield United. The Yorkshire club were not doing terribly well when Paul Heckingbottom was promoted from his Under-23 role to become first team manager in November 2021. Yet they finished fifth in the Championship that season and last time round he got them up.

This year was always going to hard. The Blades sold good players over the summer and have started with three defeats. And all the while the club’s owner Abdullah bin Musaid Al Saud is telling a Sheffield United podcast about how much he still admires the last manager to keep the club in the top division, Chris Wilder.

Fancy being in Heckingbottom’s shoes ahead of games against Everton, Tottenham and Newcastle over the coming weeks? No, me neither. The 46-year-old has given three years of good service to the club and if he feels he perhaps deserves a little better than this then he is probably right.

This is the reality of football and this is in part why I don’t care much for talk of loyalty and honour and of a moral code. I would like to believe in it. Of course I would. I would like to believe that good men and women will always be treated well but I would wrong about that if I did.

So why should Mo Salah stay at Liverpool? Why should he turn down the riches on offer in Saudi Arabia that have thus far proved too great for players like Riyad Mahrez, Aleksandar Mitrovic and Jordan Henderson to say no to? What makes Salah so special that he must live by a different code and adhere to a different set of principles?

Mohamed Salah has been linked with a £118 million move to Saudi side Al Ittihad

He has won everything at Anfield and owes the club very little after six years of service

Leaving this late in the transfer window would be a nightmare for Jurgen Klopp's side, but Salah doesn't need to stay

Ideally, the Egyptian should not leave now. He should not go in this window simply because we are so close to the end of it. Liverpool and their manager Jurgen Klopp would have no time left in which to find a replacement. That would feel wrong.

But to expect Salah, at 31, to extend more than what is simply decent courtesy towards his employer is unrealistic. Since joining in 2017 from Roma, Salah has helped Liverpool win every single trophy available to him. He has kept his part of the deal and more while the Liverpool squad has become steadily weaker around him.

In a perfect world he would care about his legacy and his place in the hearts and minds of Liverpool supporters. He would want his face on a banner on the Kop for ever more.

But this is not a perfect world. This is football and as sad as it may sound, the rules are different here.

Gabriel Heinze was a good left-back for Manchester United for a time but became less useful to them after he did his knee ligaments in 2005.

Sir Alex Ferguson agreed to sell him in 2007 but just not to Liverpool. Heinze took United to a Premier League tribunal claiming Liverpool had matched his £6.8m buy out. The Argentinean lost the case – and with it his move to Anfield – when he was reminded by the Premier League that United had stipulated he would never be sold to a rival.

Highly-rated youngster Cole Palmer is set to join Chelsea from Manchester City for £45 million

He will improve under Mauricio Pochettino, but the deal suggests City do not see the Blues as a threat

I thought about that this week as Pep Guardiola green-lit the second transfer of one of Manchester City’s players to Chelsea in the space of just over a year. In the summer of 2022 it was Raheem Sterling. This time it’s young Cole Palmer.

Chelsea will surely improve under Mauricio Pochettino this season but does Guardiola see the London club as genuine title rivals? He didn’t last year and clearly still doesn’t now.

In 2013 a senior member of Tottenham’s recruitment team watched a 16-year-old play for Coventry’s reserves in a game at Queens Park Rangers and immediately recommended the club buy him as soon as possible. Ten years on James Maddison has finally become a Tottenham player and, at £50m, already looks as though he may be worth every penny.

I never expected the second-best team in Scottish football to beat the second-best team from Holland in Champions League qualifying but there was something about the manner of Rangers’ 5-1 defeat at PSV Eindhoven this week that made me worry even more about the direction of the game north of the border.

Last season there were 30 red cards scattered across the duration of the Premier League season. Already this term we have had nine. This means that there will be inevitable push back against new directives asking referees to clean up the ills of the modern game. 

Premier League officials have already given out nine red cards already this season, compared to 30 in all of 2022/23

And our match officials may well buckle. They may well waver in their support of instructions to book players for time wasting and cheating and the like. They did this ten years ago when a collective effort to clamp down on pushing and pulling at corner kicks led first to a raft of penalties and then a torrent of criticism. 

The referees got jumpy and an opportunity to rid football of that particular type of nonsense was lost. This must not happen this time.

 Referees must stand firm because if they don’t change then our players and coaches will realise that they are the ones who have to. At the moment we are suffering some short-term pain for some long-term gain and it must be viewed as such.

Mauricio Pochettino was told by Chelsea not to pick Romelu Lukaku. He probably could have worked that one out for himself. Lukaku is now back in Italy with Roma, Serie A’s sixth best team. Once again, the Belgian has found his natural level.