Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
I think relatively few people believe that.
It's an asset - a probability distribution over set {0, 1, 3} that gets more valuable as you move up the table, and three points become increasingly likely. I don't think most people think about it quite that cleanly, and thinking about it as the average of the distribution is a very bad way to think about it, but I think most people recognize that it's not a guaranteed three points.
One of the ironies of the general media policy of not wanting to perpetuate or reward the behavior by repeating its content is that it's impossible to evaluate whether or not actual racist abuse occurred without wading through the sewer of social media's darker corners. Personally, I'm not doing that, and that leaves me taking Tottenham's proclamation with a grain of salt.
I blame the referees not only because of VAR's failure, but also because they alone have the power to largely curb this nonsense. If they banded together and simply refused to ever award marginal calls to players with Son's discipline record or Neymar's history of going down easily, you would rarely see players engaging in this sort of behavior except in the most impactful of games because it's not in their interest to get tarred with that brush.
That problem has its own remedy - simply agree and make clear to the players that you will take an extremely harsh line on any incidents in a game with major implications, rather than taking the current coward's line of not wanting to affect a major final with a sending off. Do that, and things like de Jong's karate kick on Alonso or Ramos braining Karius would rarely happen, because they would outright lose the game. (I won't say 'never' because moments of madness such as Zidane's infamous headbutt can't really be prevented.)
I think those things don't happen for two reasons. First, the leagues don't want to get accused of racist behavior and risk boycotts over targeting players such as Son and Neymar explicitly for their behavior (even if they could defend it as consistent and not racist by also taking a hard line against players such as de Jong and Ramos). Second, the leagues actively want the free publicity that comes from the controversies.
That's disgusting, wrong, short-sighted and a failure of real leadership, but if you look at how the game is governed it's not a surprise that those systems return the leadership we get. In candor, it's the leadership we deserve until we stop watching en masse.
