Fulham's Michael Jackson Tribute Is an Insult to Footballing Legends

Johnny Haynes, George Cohen, Bedford Jezzard and Alan Mullary: All of these players are Fulham legends, immortals in Craven Cottage history, black and white heroes from the black and white era.

How fitting it is, then, that Fulham's controversial, colourful and—in many people's eyes—idiotic owner, Mohammed Al-Fayed, decided to overlook all of these footballing legends when picking who to immortalise outside Craven Cottage: Michael Jackson.

The late Michael Jackson had his own associations with Fulham’s famous black and white colour scheme, as his face morphed from between the two colours over the course of his career, but that’s not directly where the connection ends.

In fact, Jackson is reported to have attended one game at the Cottage in 1999—clearly this is enough to constitute the grandest of memorials to the King of Pop, unveiled yesterday by the Fulham owner.

It’s rumored that the infamous extremist Osama Bin Laden attended a series of games at Arsenal in his earlier years and was quite the fan.

It’s a real shame then that Mohamed Al-Fayed didn’t choose to invest in the Gunners instead. If that had been the case, maybe the new Emirates Stadium would have garnered a great individual distinction for different reasons than its current reputation as a giant effigy to the world’s most wanted man that may have cast its shadow over north London.

Had this have been the case, the global media attention would have highlighted to the world what the majority of us in the southeast England already know: Mohammed Al-Fayed is a moron.

Maybe it’s unfair to compare the King of Pop to the head of Al Qaeda, but the logic remains the same. The Jackson statue is an insult to all the great players who ever pulled on the famous black and white shirt.

Al Fayed claims that this vulgar £100,000 contraption will attract fans of Jackson from across England and maybe even the world—this may well be true, but what exactly does this mean for Fulham? Are people going to converge on Craven Cottage to look take in the statue and then buy season tickets as souvenirs to take home with them?

This ghastly piece of gratuitous garbage is nothing more than one mentally deranged man’s tribute to another.