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.

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Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.