Football Manager Earning Thousands a Week Has Not Heard of Mobile Data

It’s been a while and the #oddities section here hasn’t received sufficient attention.

Yet, when this morning I woke and grabbed the first of three cups of coffees which allow the brain to properly wake — no, those are not cases of brain haze — as well as opened the BBC app, I immediately knew that today I was going to post here. Because... well, just because and also because I can.

Not to forget, because of Ralph Hasenhuttl. Which is actually a brilliant name for a subject of an essay, or a quick item, and that not because it sounds that great but mostly because contrarily to many other Austrian or German names it doesn’t require copying and pasting when you’re to lazy to add that umlaut with Unicode due to lacking German or Austrian keyboard.

But I may have gotten sidetracked there. Especially, because in all honesty, that name does require copying and pasting lacking an Austrian or German keyboard.

Ralph Hasenhüttl.

The sympathetic Austrian football coach, whose image we totally found online on a site which probablyy doesn’t have the rights to it either since it carries Skysports in the image’s filename, has announced in his pre-match interview that he has taken preventive measures to avoid that the Southampton F.C. — that’s a soccer club in the English Premier League btw — players could get addicted to gaming.

His careful fatherlike measure isn’t the first time he implements it either, as he already did so for his previous employer, RB Leipzig — yes, that’s in Germany and no RB is not Red Bull but dierotenbullen.com, although officially the RB stands for RasenBallsport or grass ball sport. They just happen to play at the Red Bull arena and are also sponsored by Red Bull. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, back to our dearest Ralph — he with the Umlaut.

So earlier today, while I was still in autopilot mode and the brain hadn’t fully been turned on yet, I was given the pleasure to discover that he with the Umlaut had decided that there is a risk his players may become — or even be — addicted to mobile gaming. Yes, mobile because soccer players earning thousands and thousands of british pound every day prefer gaming on a small screen and not on big screens thanks to a console. FIFA2019 is not their thing obviously.

Luckily Mister Umlaut cares.

"I did it in my last club. We had also problems with players - they were playing until three o'clock in the morning before a game.

"You have to help protect them because it's not a small problem. If you are honest it's the same as alcoholism or getting addicted to drugs.

"To protect them means helping them not to spend so much time there. We block the wi-fi in the hotel, for example, in the evening so they can't play any more."
— Der gentle man with the Umlaut

Because, obviously those players earning thousands and thousands per day and preferring to play on small screens... may not have a phone with data plan.

Right?