Calling Mr. Vain: In Search of the the Ultimate Spice Boy

I know what I want, and I want it now, /
I want you, 'cos I'm Mr. Vain.

– Culture Beat, 'Mr. Vain'

Looking back on the 'Spice Boys' phenomenon, it's not hard to figure out how it came to be. In the mid to late nineties, with the upper echelons of English football awash with new television money and the country intoxicated on the success of the Premier League brand, footballers' pay packets bulged and swelled at a near uncontrollable rate. When the second Sky television deal kicked in in 1997, worth a mind-boggling £670m in total, it is estimated that the annual growth of Premier League wages came in at 28.52% for the season following. That represented record growth for salaries in the top flight, and so it is perhaps little surprise that, amongst the Premier League's callow and easily influenced young talents, this enormous influx of cash helped cultivate tastes for hedonism, debauchery and novel excess.

Of course, one man's hedonism, debauchery and novel excess is another man's average Saturday evening. For the human inclination towards pleasure to be relentlessly judged with the Old Testament rigour it so manifestly deserves, one has to have a moral arbiter on the scene. For the Spice Boys, that moral arbiter came in the form of the nineties tabloid press, whose ethical qualifications at the time included defaming those who died at Hillsborough, serial corruption and hounding one of their favourite public figures to her death. This was the other side of the Spice Boys phenomenon – not only did it require young footballers to have more disposable income than ever, it also required salacious hypocrites eager to print stories about the revels which came about as a consequence.

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With an abundance of cash and tabloid overexposure coming together to form the perfect storm, the age of the Spice Boys was basically inevitable. That said, the locus of the phenomenon was somewhat strange. The city of Liverpool in the mid to late nineties was an industrial hub and socialist heartland dominated by old-school Labour Party politics, and as such hardly the natural focal point of football's most garish form of celebrity culture. One might have thought that a team from London would have been the natural instigators of the Spice Boy movement, with even nineties Manchester and its Britpop boom more associated with hedonism and the high life than Liverpool. Indeed, as one former Spice Boy pointed out later on, "we were doing nothing more than the players at Arsenal or Manchester United." Even so, it was Liverpool where the Spice Boys stereotype was born, and Liverpool where a group of young players would be tainted by association forevermore.

Still, while Liverpool was an incongruous setting for the rise of the tabloid footballer – even more so considering that one major tabloid was actively boycotted and contemptuously shunned on its streets – there were several reasons that the Spice Boys tag came to stick at Anfield. The first, and most obvious, was that the contemporary generation of Liverpool stars allowed it to happen, and despite regularly professing their innocence repeatedly played into tabloid editors' hands. The second was that, unlike their counterparts at Arsenal and Manchester United, the Liverpool squad of the mid to late nineties were perceived as chronic underachievers. While this was arguably an excessively harsh judgement, a trophy return of a single League Cup between 1995 and 2000 was hardly a resounding riposte.

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