When Will People Wise Up About Manchester City's Robinho?

As news that Turkish club Besiktas are prepared to take Robinho off Manchester City’s books for a cool 16 million British pounds with ten million more on offer in performance-related payments, it raises an important question.

Just how poor does your form, commitment and professional behaviour have to be before a football club will stop spending stupid amounts of money on you?

Behave like a selfish, spoilt child, storm out your club, play like a drain away from home for a year and half and pick up an enormous six figures weekly sum as wages while doing so is all apparently fine and dandy in the world of football because there’s always some other mug who will cough up more money to you in the hope that you might deign to play well for them in a few games.

But we all already know how this will work. He’ll be ok for a couple of months then go missing and the whole tortuous process will begin again. The only winner is Robinho who seems to think a football club owes him a living whether he plays to standard or doesn’t play at all. And of course, he’s right. They do. They’re contracted to pay him whether he’s good, bad or indifferent – a fact he seems to have sussed out all too early in his career.

When will clubs learn to take the hard line with wasters like this? By all means play for our club, son, but you will be paid per game. If you break any club rules you don’t get any money. We reserve the right to jettison you where and when we choose. Your previous behaviour means you have forfeited any trust or respect. You have to earn it. Get your head down, keep your nose clean, shut-up and play well. That’s all we ask. In return you will receive more money than most humans can conceive of.

Why do serial trouble-makers always get taken back? Clubs behave like abused wives who keep taking their violent husband back on one last promise that he’ll never beat her again.

Robinho is more trouble than he’s worth. It’s pointless to think he’ll play a few seasons for your club at the peak of his not inconsiderable talents; he just won’t. He’ll more likely get arrested in a night club with his hand up a girl’s dress, disappear for a few weeks back to Brazil and return two stone overweight with an unpleasant social disease.

Blessed with the kind of sulky face that you’d really like to slap very hard, how many of us think his career at Besiktas will be a long, fruitful one? Exactly.