"It's inevitable now, because everyone is a superstar, even if they're just an average player, and maybe that was part of the process set in motion when I signed that contract in 1994"
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There is a quiet guilt baked into Fowler's line, the kind that only shows up once the sport has caught up to the consequences of its own money. He is not complaining about fame so much as tracing a causal chain: the superstar era is "inevitable" because the incentives now manufacture stardom the way clubs manufacture content. The sting is in the aside "even if they're just an average player" - not a dig at individuals, but at the inflation machine that turns competence into a brand asset.
The 1994 contract reference matters because it pins the shift to a moment when English football was rapidly professionalizing into the Premier League's TV-fueled economy. Fowler, a local-hero striker who became one of Liverpool's first modern celebrity players, is effectively naming himself as an early data point in the sport's transformation: wages balloon, attention follows, and the public relationship to players flips. They stop being workers you watch on Saturday and become protagonists in an always-on narrative.
The intent is self-aware and slightly rueful: he positions himself as both beneficiary and accidental accelerant. "Part of the process set in motion" is carefully passive; it admits responsibility while acknowledging that no single player authored the system. The subtext is a critique of what fame does to evaluation. If everyone's a superstar, then superstardom stops signaling excellence and starts signaling visibility - and football, like everything else, begins to confuse being seen with being great.
The 1994 contract reference matters because it pins the shift to a moment when English football was rapidly professionalizing into the Premier League's TV-fueled economy. Fowler, a local-hero striker who became one of Liverpool's first modern celebrity players, is effectively naming himself as an early data point in the sport's transformation: wages balloon, attention follows, and the public relationship to players flips. They stop being workers you watch on Saturday and become protagonists in an always-on narrative.
The intent is self-aware and slightly rueful: he positions himself as both beneficiary and accidental accelerant. "Part of the process set in motion" is carefully passive; it admits responsibility while acknowledging that no single player authored the system. The subtext is a critique of what fame does to evaluation. If everyone's a superstar, then superstardom stops signaling excellence and starts signaling visibility - and football, like everything else, begins to confuse being seen with being great.
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| Topic | Sports |
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