Soccerphile Editorial - April 2013
PFA Player of the Year Awards
It is often said that professional football players, for all the adulation heaped upon them by their club's supporters and for all the glorious headlines that follow outstanding performances, crave the recognition of their fellow professionals.
Such desire for peer respect is frequently discussed around this time of the football season.
In England, for example, while recognition in the form of the Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year would obviously be gratifying, the pinnacle of the award season is clearly the PFA Player of the Year Awards, because these are the awards that are voted for by the professional players.
Those who really know the value of their counterparts across the league.
At the PFA awards dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel in Mayfair this week, Luis Suarez learned the depth of feeling outside the bubble of Liverpool FC - and you can bet that the boos of his contemporaries cut far deeper than any lengthy ban.
Twice, at the mention of his shortlisting for the PFA Player of the Year award and his announcement in the Premier League team of the season, Suarez was heckled. Not by publicity-seeking hangers on. By fellow professionals and their guests.
PFA chairman Clarke Carlisle, the Northampton defender, said after the glitzy ceremony that he regretted hiring comedian Reginald D Hunter to perform after a close-to-the-knuckle set that some attendees, according to Carlisle, found "highly offensive".
However, there might have also been a pang of regret about the organisation's failure to protect one of its own from the embarrassment of being heckled by its other members.
The PFA had already come under fire for not withdrawing Suarez's nomination for player of the year award after his 10-match ban for biting Chelsea's Branislav Ivanovic, following hot on the heels of another lengthy suspension for racially abusing Patrice Evra of Manchester United last season.
They could have prevented exposing the Liverpool striker to the sentiments shared by many inside and outside the game.
But they argued that after scoring 23 goals in the league for a team outside the top four, Suarez deserved his moment in the spotlight.
That decision spectacularly backfired, not only for the PFA, but also for Liverpool.
In a twist of fate, it might turn out that Suarez's nomination becomes the breaking point in the Uruguayan's combustible relationship with English football.
His long ban for biting Ivanovic would clearly have stung, particularly missing the opening weeks of next season when Liverpool's ambitions are certain to be sky-high as usual.
But the punishment's severity also left room for Suarez to be cast in the role of unlikely victim, with even Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers somewhat alarmingly suggesting that his player was being victimised by the FA.
Having your name jeered at the end-of-season awards ceremony by your colleagues leaves no such room for doubt about Suarez's standing in the game outside of the red half of Merseyside.
Given the depth of feeling in England and the contrasting high degree of love from potential suitors in Germany and Spain, the odds of Suarez actually completing his Premier League ban seem to be growing.
However, only the player himself will know just how much he craves true respect rather than faux and fickle love from the terraces.
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