James Lawton: New values and not old habits lead to threat of meltdown

If the publishers HarperCollins had not announced their decision to pay David Beckham £3m for his latest stream of semi-consciousness, Peter Osgood, the old Chelsea star, would have had a fair claim to centre stage in the latest weekly edition of the wacky world of big-time football.

"Ossie," of beloved memory at Stamford Bridge for his thoroughbred grace, if not thoroughbred speed, still earns an honourable mention, however, for his straight-faced advice to John Terry and Jody Morris that, having survived their brush with their law, they must now "grow up and face their responsibilities."

Osgood, whose own approach to personal discipline during his time at Chelsea in the1960s and early 70s left his manager David Sexton in a state of more or less permanent rage, added: "They must realise they can't go out drinking at night and behaving like normal fans."

This, Sexton may have reflected upon with some feeling, was quite something coming from the spiritual leader of a dressing room which, though showered with football gifts, had achieved most distinction for its ability to drink the King's Road dry.

Osgood, Alan Hudson and Charlie Cooke were hugely popular among denizens of The Shed. They did thrilling things. Osgood was imperious in his authority around the box. As a teenager he once ran through almost an entire, and decent, Burnley team to score an unforgettable goal. Hudson at times suggested he could achieve anything. Cooke dazzled with his dribbling. But they were a coach's torment, and the situation was not eased when Tommy Baldwin arrived at the Bridge. A talented player, Baldwin also liked a drink – to the point of being christened 'The Sponge'.

The position got so trying for the Jesuit-educated Sexton, whose father Archie was an excellent middleweight of the 1930s who took the formidably tough Jock McEvoy 15 rounds in his challenge for the British middleweight title, that he offered to lock his office door and throw away the key before settling his dispute with Osgood in the most basic way. Osgood, with rare wisdom, declined.

Still, Osgood can resort to the old standby that Terry and Morris should do what he says not what he did, which included being nicked for public drunkenness on one of those King's Road forays. He can also say that the rewards at Chelsea today, for the moment at least, make his old wages seem like a raid on the poor box.

Certainly Osgood's point was worth making – perhaps by chairman Ken Bates, who preferred to have a go at the police and the Crown Prosecution service for bringing the assault charges against Terry and Morris. At no point did he speculate on what some of his millionaire players were doing in some fancy drinking dive in the small hours of the morning. But then, all round, Bates has not been displaying the sharpest sense of what has been happening on planet football. Faced with a closing down of Chelsea's capacity to spend, spend, spend, he says that the situation will ask most of the skills of his coaches, especially Claudio Ranieri, the recipient of a long-term contract despite his failure to produce compelling evidence that he is the man to finally carry the club on to the highest ground.

Whatever Chelsea's performance against Manchester United last night, it was going to be hard to see the club doing more than create the odd shaft of optimism. Bates's argument that it is now the time of the coaches is, of course, a football illiteracy. It is always the time of the coaches, hand-picking their players within agreed budget limits and shaping a team capable of a consistent challenge for the highest prizes. It is only when money becomes tight, as it now is at Stamford Bridge and all those places outside the élite circle of United, Arsenal and Liverpool, that somebody like Bates recognises the supreme role of the football man.

He variously bad-mouthed Hoddle, Gullit and Vialli, and now he has committed himself to Ranieri. It is an alliance that cannot be helped by the latest career projections of Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, who this week picked up his stock speech, dusted it down, changed the club name to Barcelona, and announced how the Nou Camp was the new repository of all his football dreams.

Such are the values and the loyalties which have carried English football to its current threat of meltdown. But then if football is in a mess, financially and morally, what about publishing? Osgood's lecture may have shook Dave Sexton to his bones, but the effect of the Beckham deal on toilers in the literary vineyard can only be the bleakest of guesses.

HarperCollins say that they have paid for the "real autobiography" of a 27-year-old footballer of modest achievement who claims to have led an "interesting" life. We surely can be the judge of that after having every trivial detail of it rammed into our subconscious. The Daily Mail yesterday offered a spoof version of Beckham's memoirs and complained that it had been a push stretching it to 1,000 words. Does this mean they will not be among the bidders when the serialisation auction starts? It's a pretty thought, but perhaps no more than that.

When news of the deal came in, a literary rumination by the fine novelist and boxing aficionado Budd Schulberg sprang to mind. In his youth Schulberg – author of What Makes Sammy Run? and The Disenchanted and an Oscar winner for his screenplay for On the Waterfront – watched the great F Scott Fitzgerald drink himself to death. It was an experience Schulberg recalled when, a few years before the birth of David Beckham, he wrote a haunting study of great writers who quickly fell out of fashion after their first blazing success.

Schulberg, who with a bit of luck will never find out about the scale of HarperCollins' generosity to a young man whose literary track record may not include even the writing of a note to the milkman, concluded his piece on the Fitzgeralds and the Steinbecks like this: "Perhaps we will begin to mellow, mature, to find that there is a new world richer than any we know, beyond fame and fortune and the institutionalising and the worship of fame and fortune, that have clouded our vision, raised havoc with our artists and driven some of the very best of them to failure..."

Maybe Budd, maybe, but I really do not think we should hold our breath.