WHEN I was a young pro at Watford, my manager Gianfranco Zola, told me: “You’re a footballer, you are paid not to have feelings.”

Those words were true, but never easy to accept, and they came back to me when I heard the sick abuse being chanted at Phil Foden by hundreds, if not thousands, of Manchester United followers during Sunday’s derby at Old Trafford. 

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Their grotesque chants targeted Foden’s Mum – whose only ‘crime’ has been to raise an exceptional footballer.

Those who sang about the Manchester City star’s mother are senseless morons and they are cowards too. 

How many of them would have made those comments to Foden’s face if they met him in the street? But it’s safety in numbers, the anonymity of the crowd. 

It says a lot about the sickness in our society that a large number of grown men can go to a football match and get their kicks from aiming horrible chants at a young man’s mum.  

Foden was one of only three Mancunians to play in Sunday’s match. His family lives in the area, so they are going to be affected even more by such behaviour because they cannot escape it. 

We talk a lot about wanting local heroes. We talk about wanting ‘proper derbies’. We talk about wanting big English clubs to be in touch with their roots in a globalised, cosmopolitan Premier League.

And then Manchester produces a player as good as Foden – a working-class, council-estate lad with a supreme gift who is the reigning Footballer of the Year – and Mancunians treat him like that. 

I suffered plenty of abuse from the terraces during my playing days – some of it racist, some of it aimed at my family, even my children. 

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It is not something you ever really get used to. Depending on the individual, it will make you angry or sad or vengeful – but it always stings. 

Zola told me I was ‘paid not to have feelings’ when my daughter was born, not long after I had come out of jail.

I was receiving a lot of stick from supporters and in the media. 

I wanted to do an interview to tell my side of the story, a basic human instinct to set the record straight, but he told me that it would only add fuel to the fire. 

Maybe he was right but I could never quite get my head around how my choice of career meant that I was apparently fair game for abuse.

No amount of money can make those sorts of chants palatable

Troy Deeney

And please don’t try to tell me that because Foden earns more than 200 grand, he should just deal with it. 

No amount of money can make those sorts of chants palatable. 

It seems that nothing is off-limits in modern football – because nothing is off-limits in modern society. 

Social media, with its lack of filters, allows this sort of abuse to flourish and become normalised. 

I don’t know what can be done to knock sense into the heads of the sad people who think it is acceptable to call a footballer’s mother a ‘s**g’. 

Foden, like every professional footballer, is paid not to have feelings. But he will be feeling this all the same. 

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