PREMIER league footballers remain utterly ghastly despite their multi-million pound salaries, research has found.
Experts say the huge sums invested in top players have failed to alleviate their violent, working-class horridness and may even make it worse.
Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: “Most remain largely unintelligible. When not buying clothes or punching people, they sit on cream leather sofas eating Pringles.
“Even the foreign players, who you would expect to be naturally more sophisticated, wear trainers with suits and attend sticky nightclubs frequented by DJs, fitness instructors and moderately successful plasterers.
“Remember those nasty boys in school who were gratuitously violent, foul mouthed, disruptive and cruel? Now imagine them with an annual budget of £5 million.”
The Institute has proposed a block release system where footballers would spend eight weeks a year at Cambridge reading George Bernard Shaw quotes instead of stamping on someone’s forehead.
They would also attend dinner parties and be rewarded for holding conversations about Bernardine Evaristo and Marina Abramovic by being allowed to look at photographs of especially shiny cars.
Educated, middle-class footballers did emerge in the late 1980s when Chelsea winger Pat Nevin was seen enjoying Doonesbury in the Guardian, but ended in 1993 when England full-back Graeme Le Saux was branded homosexual for using the word ‘eclectic’.