Snippet

Comment

Economics

Football

Redemption

30 July 2025

3 min read

From transferring footballers to AI talent, we over-value each other

Building our value on cashflow crumbles our self-esteem

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Three Manchester United footballers with their arms around each others backs.

Mert0804, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Premier League footballers not only have millions of pounds, but millions of accountants. Yes, that's right: I've had my morning coffee and the editor didn't miss that sentence. There are millions of armchair accountants. You know, the bean counters many of us effortlessly transform into when it's transfer season.

Pick your channel - everyone seems to be asking 'is Rasmus Højlund really worth that much?' Your heart mightn't bleed for him - as he is handsomely compensated - but at least spare a thought for him and the crushing weight of critics and their expectations of his performance.

Footballers aren't alone. Whether it's bankers' bonuses, the excesses of the offers to top AI engineers… OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims that Meta have offered his employees bonuses of $100 million to recruit them. Other recent valuations of companies have raised $1 and $2 billion. The Economist says that AI valuations are 'verging on the unhinged’.

Armchair accountants actually look a lot like jurors. But who are we to judge? The figures might seem silly money, but the stakes are higher than fantasy football or Monopoly. In Build the Life You Want, Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey call out the way we objectify people at work over performance or pay:

'It’s pretty easy to see why we shouldn’t objectify others. Less obvious but equally troubling is when the objectifier and the person being objectified are one and the same—when you objectify yourself.'

Building our value on cashflow, Instagram likes and the like crumbles our self-esteem and all the health and social issues that come with that. In the arena of our own workplace, they write that self-objectification 'is a tyranny. We become a terrible boss to ourselves, with little mercy or love.’

You only have to peer into the comments section any any online article (not just sport) to see how callous and unforgiving apparently polite, middle-class society has become. It's hard not to have the sneaking suspicion that our devaluing of others thinly veils the way we've devalued ourselves.

The way out of this is to detach our value from our pay and work. So, take Rasmus Højlund, transferred to Manchester United in 2023 for £64million. I would argue his worth is a lot more than £64 million. But that is because his performance, for this exercise, is irrelevant. This is not a new notion. For millennia, the Christian notion of grace is not only the entry-point of faith, but the operating system, with perfect performance already having been achieved by a saviour. The 'ultimate price', paid by God, is of such immeasurable worth and value that Rasmus, or any of us, are worth significantly more than £64million.

But then the problem arises that Christians can still struggle with feeling like an expensive disappointment, unable to live up to the spiritual 'transfer fee'. Is it really worth me accepting the biblical claims of the price paid by Jesus on the cross if I just pile on guilt? Well, if you feel like a star signing, you've probably missed the point. But equally, if you feel like a flop, there's the need to recognise that value and worth was never rooted in your performance in the first place. There's a very different set of rules. It's not a zero-sum game of competition where players and managers are ruthlessly eliminated. The Bible paints the picture of a God not so much ruthless as he is reckless.

When Jesus tells the parable of the prodigal son, squandering his father's wealth, only to be welcomed, restored and celebrated with open arms, the word 'prodigal' that's been attached to this parable even more appropriately describes the father: 'recklessly extravagant' and 'having spent everything'. Whatever our own estimations – or those of others – actually don't matter. £64million might feel like an absurd and unreal amount of money – but it isn't Monopoly money. Those figures have actually been transferred. And just because we can't see or feel the price that has been paid, doesn't make it any less real or consequential. Not only is your guilt traded away from you, but your rights to self-judge.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge now

Article

Climate

Comment

Politics

22 September 2024

5 min read

Climate meets politics at UN summits, so who will save us?

It's that time of year when commitments to change are sought. Is there a different way to power the energy transition?

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A fallen statute with tyre tracks over it lies on the steps to a government building, in a form of protest.

Climate protest, Berlin.

Nico Roicke on Unsplash.

We’re coming up to a tipping point: the autumn equinox, when the balance of light and dark shifts. For some, this season change still carries the possibility of September – new term, fresh notebook; for others, myself included, there’s more a feeling of ‘here we go again’ with the nights closing in and the hurtle to the end of another year.

On the global scale, it also kicks off the pattern of international summits and negotiations to drive progress on making this world, our world, a bit fairer, safer, and more hopeful. World leaders gather in New York for the United Nations (UN) General Assembly; then it won’t be long until the next UN Climate Summit (COP29) in Baku, swiftly followed by discussions in Busan to create a new UN Treaty to end plastic pollution. Perhaps that draws another sigh; here we go again.

But there’s something new this time on the agenda in New York: the UN’s Summit of the Future on 22-23 September. It is being touted as a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to forge a better way forward. Will this be the moment that saves not just us, but future generations and the natural world too?

A few years ago, I was involved in organising an event that brought together experts in sustainable development from science, government and civil society. To get the conversation going, we wrote this question on a flipchart: What will save us over the next decade? We asked people to cast their vote with a sticker, giving them just three options: government; society; technology.

As people gathered around, we noticed a general pattern emerging:

the scientists voted for government
the civil servants voted for society
people from civil society voted for technology

There seemed to be subtext to all this:

‘Who will save us?

Not me.’

I wonder if in that moment, the people voting – knowledgeable and connected, experts in their industries – were feeling the limits of their power.

When we brush up against our own limitations, it can be tempting to look elsewhere for reassurance. I find hope in a too-little-known story of change, a kind of David and Goliath story , that cuts across government, society and technology. A story that has seen leaders held to account, voices heard and literally billions of dollars shifted out of fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence.

People said it was impossible, because no one had ever done it before. For decades, the UK and other wealthy nations provided billions in taxpayers’ money for fossil fuel projects in other countries around the world. People’s taxes were spent on a gas plant in Mozambique, oil fields in Brazil, thereby fuelling the climate crisis and risking locking low-income countries into using fossil fuels for decades to come instead of investing in the clean energy transition.

This is a transition that has begun. In most places around the world, solar and wind are cheaper and more easily accessible than oil, gas or coal. Power is transformational; it fuels homes, schools and hospitals, it unlocks jobs, education and healthcare. And it’s getting to the point where there’s little reason it can’t be renewable.

With the technology getting there, it became time for the political will to shift too. So, a few years ago, a small group of campaigners came together to push for an end to this funding in the UK. They built relationships with MPs and civil servants, they got the media interested in this fairly niche issue, and they worked with the communities affected by UK-funded projects, coming with a straight-forward message that got to the heart of the injustice: stop funding fossil fuels overseas.

And it worked. In December 2020, the UK announced an end to all taxpayer support for overseas fossil fuel projects, the first high-income country to do this. But not the last. In the run up to the 2021 UN Climate Summit, campaigners and civil servants worked to get 38 more countries and large banks to make the same commitment to end funding for fossil fuels and shift it into renewable energy projects. With Norway and Australia joining at COP28 last year, that group now numbers 41, and represents over $28 billion a year that could be shifted from fossil fuels and into clean energy.

It’s not been plain sailing, and it’s not fully in the bag. For a few years, I got work alongside the incredible advocates at the frontline of this work. A few weeks ago, some of them published a new report which found good progress on the fossil fuels part of the pledge but much more work needed from governments on getting that money into the renewable energy projects that could be transformative for the 685 million people who currently don’t have access to electricity.

This story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years.

One of the hot topics at the Summit for the Future, is whether the leaders can agree to transition away from fossil fuels in a new ‘Pact for the Future’, echoing language that was fought for, weakened, then mostly put back into the final commitment made at COP28 last year. (This counts as a high stakes drama in the climate policy world). It might seem distant from our day to day lives, such wrangling over exact punctuation at global summits. But these commitments can have long-lasting influence. For nearly 80 years, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been protecting people – or showing the gap when their rights are being violated.

And really, this isn’t just about words, it’s about power.

Part of the problem with our question on that flipchart was that it divorced people and opportunities, rather than bringing them together. The best way of driving change is to build collective power, holding each other and our decision-makers to account.

Perhaps thinking of the future brings more fear than hope. But this story reminds me that ‘saving us’ isn’t a once and done thing. It’s bigger than that; something to be lived out, imperfectly, with others, over the years. And lived out with God. This is a partnership that he invites us into: to join in his work of seeing a world full of potential being nurtured and restored. We might not see the whole change we hope for, but sometimes we’ll get to see the scales tip.

The energy transition has begun – but it’ll take the collective influence of a movement of people to ensure that it’s fast, fair and serves those who need it most. With a big gap remaining between the finance needed and the finance pledged, all eyes are on this year's COP29 in Baku to see tangible progress.

Here we go again.