Gordon Taylor somehow ended up with an OBE

The 2008 New Years honours list was chock full of professors, researchers, emergency services officers, philanthropists, and many other folks whose time and effort have contributed to making the nation a better place in the past year.

Also in the list sits Gordon Taylor, Chief Executive of the PFA and the highest paid union official in the world. Taylor earns a £1million yearly salary - five times the remuneration of the second highest-paid union official and around ten times that of the average League Two player. For this money, the former Bolton player does not contribute to the welfare of society, but blindly defends the rape allegations, prison sentences, two-footed tackles and unabashed steamrollerings of the country’s finest professional football players. By this logic, every lawyer in the country should have made the list.

In a nutshell, the man who doesn’t have a bad thing to say about Joey Barton’s antics and who claims Steven Gerrard is over-worked (“if he were a racehorse, the RSCPA would be involved”) is deemed to be among the highest-regarded members of society by the Head of State. Pete Doherty’s ‘contribution to hard drug supplies’ OBE and Calum Best’s ‘contribution to high-end night entertainment’ OBE can’t be far off…