The last real human to play football.

That Charlie Adam meme. Where people laughed at him for looking like a person compared to an effeminate version of Barbie's dream hunk Ken. A normal slightly Shane Macgowan esque-bloke versus a plastic doll, with sprayed on hair, unrealistic muscles and probably a weird sexless groin.

Ken: Footballer Edition. £39.99

We're not going to think about Charlie's groin, that would be wrong.

We will think about:

 - his teeth *shock* HE HAS SOME MISSING AND THEY'RE A BIT WONKY
 - his hair *horror* IT'S A BIT MESSY AFTER RUNNING ABOUT AND THINNING A BIT COS HE'S IN HIS MID THIRTIES
 - his skin *outrage* HE DOESN'T EVEN SEEM TO HAVE MOISTURISED AT HALF TIME!!!

We will wonder how someone can even call themselves a footballer, without a dedicated personal grooming ritual and considerable amounts of cosmetic work. It's a fucking disgrace. It's like he thinks he gets paid to kick a ball about, score outrageous free kicks and belt them in from ludicrous distances like the football god he is. Who does he think he's kidding? This is FOOTBALL!

The museum of 21st century football. Exhibit A

And football is a lifestyle brand opportunity. His club could have probably got themselves an official men's grooming partner if he wasn't so busy running the midfield. He's letting them down. He's shaming them. By looking old. By looking horribly normal. By getting to early middle age and looking middle aged.

Ask yourself this: How are the heroic sponsors supposed to flog mens grooming products to other men, who aren't footballers, if their heroes don't play their part and appear as timeless, ageless, lithe, athletic specimens? This is the business he's in! Does he not know that? He's supposed to make men watching him feel inadequate, not look like one of them.

He's not supposed to go out there like some bloke from the factory with a bit of a hangover and score goals and spray 45 yard passes onto a 5p piece. That's no good. Not in the era of super modern football. 

Next we'll be back at the bad old days, where nearly all footballers looked like normal people and the ones who didn't were the ones who stood out. Where those who had a skincare routine and got their roots done were thought of as 'a bit vain' or 'a bit flash' - these are enlightened, metrosexual, gender fluid times, where we've reached a point of glorious equality. Men now share the same shame as women about their physical inadequacies and sales of cosmetic solutions are through the roof. Does Charlie Adam really want to endanger this glorious progress by his outrageous statement of having his own teeth?

Alan Cork. Your mate's dad. Circa 1996

Think of the dental technicians and the hairweave clinics. Where would they be then? Think of all the 'specialists' feasting on the worries of young and middled aged men who want to achieve perpetual youth. It would be like Thatcher and the mines all over again. These are people's jobs we're talking about here.

Do you want to go back to the 80s? Like some dewy eyed romantic?

They might cite: 'Jan Molby, facing up to Peter Reid in a Merseyside derby. A bloke who looks like he'd struggle to get round the golf course even with a golf buggy and a break for a Dunhill between holes versus a fella who looks like he's not only got rickets but he also does a cash in hand window cleaning round.

These weren't exceptions. John Barnes was an unbelievable player, but he got fat. Gazza was even better. He got fatter. Ian Rush looked like he worked at Pilkington Glass in St Helens. Pet Nevin seemed so skinny and underfed his shirt would billow behind him, like an orphan in borrowed clothing'.

An out of touch backward looking fool might suggest: 'Matt Le Tissier's skill was so out of tune with his wonky nose, crooked teeth, shit haircut and bulky squareness that anyone who didn't fall in love with the sheer improbability of his body producing the moment of sublime impossibility is dead to any poetry or art. If you don't adore Le Tissier you have no soul and you are dead to me.' 

I don't want to alienate younger readers, but none of these players even had sleeve tattoos.

I know! What were they thinking? Running around, looking average, winning European trophies and getting picked to play international football. All whilst looking decidedly everyday. All without even making a definable fashion statement!

A whimsical nostalgist might say: 'It was romantic to look on a football pitch and see blokes with bald heads and beer bellies from time to time. It meant that if you dreamed a little, you were out there playing, not some unobtainable ideal seemingly from another species, consisting of 30 hours gym work, plus a personal macrobiotic diet programme, plus 30 thousand pound's worth of cosmetic surgery, manicuring and eyebrow threading'.

That whimsical dewy eyed aging nostagist, feeling their own paunchy belly, running their tongue along their own crooked teeth, eyeing their screen through their own tired, baggy eyes, their own hair having long since thinned to non existence might say

"Go on Charlie lad." 

They might raise a pint to being the last of your kind. 'The last of the actual humans to play the people's game, before it was taken over by the fashion robots from another world. The last of the normal people who didn't care about pearly white teeth and just wanted to hear the roar of the crowd and lose themselves in the out of body experience of playing the greatest game in the history of all games.'

They'd of course be wrong. It is, of course, an absolute outrage, that a footballer hasn't presented themselves as a fashion icon. Utterly wrong.

The FA should intervene.

Still God.