Oyster Card to Zone Three: The Ballad of Benoit Assou-Ekotto

Sisyphus angered the gods. Time and time again the King of Ephyra, drunk on a bullish cocktail of haughty arrogance and naive self-assurance, laughed in the face of the divine.

He cheated death, he broke out of the Underworld, he even starved the almighty of their tributes – and if there was one rule of thumb in Ancient Greece, you didn’t piss of Zeus and his boys.

Eventually enough was enough, and the god of sky and thunder, fed up with the pesky hindrances of a petty mortal, came down on Sisyphus like the fraught parent of a petulant toddler.

The iron-fisted king was banished to the naughty step of Hades for eternity and, in punishment for his disrespect, was damned to roll a very big rock up a very steep hill until the end of days. As an added kick in the teeth, every time Sisyphus got to the summit, the boulder would slip from his grasp and hurtle all the way back down to the foot of the slope.

Sisyphus and his rock. Photographer unknown.

They say that if you find a job you love you never work a day in your life. Most of us aren’t so lucky, instead consigned to a bleak, rolling horizon of meaningless spreadsheets and office Secret Santas, mortgage repayments and refrigerator warranties, parents’ evenings and prostate examinations, that dance before our eyes with kaleidoscopic monotony, blurring, gathering pace with cruelty and the passing of each year until we turn around to find ourselves wrinkled, podgy, and bowed, waiting for the sweet, imperturbable, velveteen release of death.

The alternative, the holy grail, the stuff of daydream delirium, is a life in football. To be free of these wretched, clumsy limbs, to wake up everyday in your custom-built mansion in the leafy suburbs and kick a ball about with your best mates every morning, maybe coming home and playing some FIFA (which you’re in by the way – and not like some weird, unlicensed replica version of you that you tried to make yourself one night after a couple of cans – actual you, with that 3D scanning technology stuff they used to make Andy Serkis into Gollum), knowing that come Saturday afternoon you’re going to have thousands of strangers screaming your name in adulation, all while being paid mind-altering sums of money with more noughts than the binary code alphabet. What’s not to love?

Generally speaking, the professionals we idolise are mostly, and understandably, content with this existence of sleeve tattoos and personal nutritionists, happy to while away their 20s in the cloistered bliss of Croesus-like financial security, waiting calmly to be taken to the glue factory of cliched punditry.

There are some, however, who yearn for more. David James always had pretensions of being an artist, Andrei Arshavin owns his very own women’s fashion line back in Mother Russia, and Joe Allen has, willingly, appeared on the cover of Chicken & Egg magazine.

Remarkably, not photoshopped. Note the look of instant regret on the face of the chicken. The look of chicken who has just realised that for the rest of its life it will be known as ‘That chicken who knocks about with Joe Allen’. Poor thing.

But beneath the bizarre layers of impressionism and farmyard ornithology, at least these lads still held a flame for the game that made them household names.

For Benoit Assou-Ekotto, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Cameroonian, you see, is professional football’s Sisyphus, damned forever to run up and down a touchline to no avail, getting to the byline only to see a ball booted brutishly back from whence he’d just came in a never-ending cycle of crestfallen toil.

Simply put, Assou-Ekotto does not like football.

The full-back was always a striking figure – wiry and solemn with a mushroom cloud afro occasionally tamed into intricate cornrows that resembled tributaries in the delta of a mighty river.

On the field, he was a player – not an exceptional player, but a player nonetheless. After starting his career at Lens in 2004, Assou-Ekotto secured a move across the Channel, pitching up at White Hart Lane two years later with a bright reputation and a scowl etched adamantly into his brow. Over the best part of the next decade, the forlorn Cameroonian amassed 155 appearances for Spurs, glumly chipping in with the occasional screamer when the mood took him.

Cheer up, Benoit, could always be worse. You could be Pascal Chimbonda.

Benoit would not approve of such mindless reeling off of his on-field exploits, however, predominantly because he himself cared so little about them.

Footballers are often accused of being too out of touch – isolationist brattish Rapunzels who watch the world with insensitive bemusement from a bubble nestled high atop the spire of an ivory tower. Assou-Ekotto has no such affliction. He’s well aware of the bigger picture and he doesn’t like what he sees.

Articulate and philosophical, blunt and searingly candid, Assou-Ekotto has spoken often and with little hesitation of his disdain for the trappings of the modern game. He is almost anarchical in his rhetoric, a moralistic hippie cult leader rallying against the evils of ‘The Man’ and the bogus, self-aggrandising ways of the benighted masses.

Above all else, the defender rages at the hypocrisy that he sees plaguing his sport. Paradoxes that others take as accepted truths jostle uncomfortably inside of his cramped skull. Whereas others are willing to jump through the hoops, Assou-Ekotto asks why they’re there at all.

Speaking to The Guardian amidst the pomp of his north London existentialism, the full-back took aim at the cowardice pervading English football – the dishwater dullness of post-match interviews, censored and scripted by scrupulous media officers, mimicked faithfully parrot-fashion by sheepish players. Frenzied, foul-mouthed, physical specimens are neutered and sanitised – marauding heroes transformed into magnolia marionettes for fear of the backlash from a baying tabloid freak show.

You can see how this duality could begin to seep into his perception of the game, how it might stain the edges and crack the lenses in his rose-tinted spectacles.

And once you stop caring, anything goes.

Without question, Assou-Ekotto is a shameless mercenary, a self-serving gold-digger with no semblance of loyalty to the badge – and it’s refreshing.

The lad is so uninterested in his profession that he’d often turn up on Saturday morning without the foggiest of who Spurs were up against, counting down the minutes like a schoolboy in detention until he could go home and do something, anything, else.

His prematch meal would usually consist of a croissant and a packet of Walkers nonchalantly slung in a Tesco carrier bag and devoured with the matter of fact resentment of an apathetic office worker. It’s the professional equivalent of the hungover tab and Red Bull combo that sustains pub league wingers up and down the country every Sunday morning, and it’s probably just as nutritious.

When Spurs signed Rafael van der Vaart from Real Madrid in 2010 – the kind of pulsating, nonsensical acquisition that those in the know refer to as a ‘statement of intent’ – Assou-Ekotto breezed into training on the Dutchman’s first day entirely oblivious as to who he was.

Rafael van der Vaart, wet look prince.

Just let that sink in. Assou-Ekotto, a professional playing at the highest level of English football was so completely unaware, so willfully ignorant, to the hyperbolic glitz of the modern game, that he had no idea Rafael van der Vaart, a man so entwined with the collective popular culture consciousness of the sport that he had his own OK! Magazine cover shoot, existed.

It may be absurd to the everyman supporter, but the full-back’s logic is simple: a plumber doesn’t get home on an evening and obsess over pipes, a neurologist doesn’t lie in bed at night with brains on the brain, so why should he let football envelope his life? At the end of the day, the game is a job – nothing more, nothing less.

And without that infatuation that we as avid followers presume to be universal, the Cameroonian’s life off the pitch during his time in London was markedly different to that of his colleagues. He would work hard in training, he would stifle a rotating cast of flamboyant tricksters and have-a-go heathens every weekend, and as soon as the final whistle blew, he wandered off into his own unorthodox world where football was irrelevant and his Oyster card was his best friend.

Benoit’s stay in the Big Smoke was that of an urban nomad, rootless and sequestered, a stranger in the city he lived in. Superficially, his time at Tottenham was a lonely one. A bachelor in a foreign country residing in a faceless, hulking menace of a city like London, the only two professionals he bothered saving to his phonebook were Sebastien Bassong and Adel Taarabt.

Whereas his colleagues would go home and roll around in their gigantic piles of money like Scrooge McDuck, or whatever it is wealthy people do in their spare time, Assou-Ekotto became a perpetual tourist, filling his afternoons by traipsing around galleries and dining out in desperate search of some kind of stimulation. Most days he was just another anonymous sightseer, a filthy rich nobody. He was Bill Murray in Lost in

Translation, Ferris Bueller on his day off.

And yet, to see him interviewed is to be pleasantly surprised. Shy, humble and unexpectedly affable, the Cameroonian is clearly happy with his peculiar working arrangement, and a far cry from the outspoken poster boy of antiestablishment football hipsterism that he is so often portrayed as being.

In various clips and conversations littered around the internet he speaks fondly of the standard of English football, the importance of African solidarity, his passion for anything with a motor, and the boyish trepidation of hiding his first, and only, tattoo from his disapproving mother.

Benoit’s just out of shot. Probably.

He is human and self-aware and genial and kind of dorky, and he does what he does, in spite of his displeasure, because he’d be mad not to. I am a talented masseuse – my healing hands are both a blessing and a curse – but I find the act both tiring and laborious, so I tend to hide my gift away. If I could get £50,000 a week for rubbing knotty shoulders, however, I’d be massaging like a motherfucker.

Assou-Ekotto’s career has been a 15-year exhibition of pure, uncut, unadulterated pragmatism and it’s given him a life that the rest of us could only long for.

Now turning out in the French second division for Metz, the Cameroonian continues to collect his wage for a dream job he cannot stand.

The obvious question to ask, as his career begins to dim towards extinguishment, is whether or not you can put a price on happiness. Is an adulthood of unfulfillment worth a swollen bank balance and a retirement of wild comfort?

Only Benoit could tell you that, but for a man of such philosophy and culture, he must glean a certain subversive hilarity from the absurdist path of his career. Albert Camus, the father of absurdism, once wrote about the risk of ostracisation we all face by refusing to conform. The novel he produced? ‘L’Etranger’, or, ‘The Stranger’.

Few footballers have ever been more of a stranger than Benoit Assou-Ekotto. An outsider who preferred the periphery, a deep thinker with an innate rebellious streak that we should all admire, he has played a game without joy for a decade and a half and is on the cusp of the great unknown of retirement that he must have thirsted for for a lifetime. But when he does go, maybe with little more than a BBC Sport live blog post and a nostalgic tweet from Tottenham’s media team, he should not be forgotten.

Because perhaps it is too simplistic to say that Benoit dislikes football. Perhaps it makes for a catchy tagline, a curious subplot to draw in an audience. Perhaps he would hate this article. Perhaps, Assou-Ekotto doesn’t so much hate football, as he hates what it has become. And at the end of the day, we can all relate to that, even just a little.