When I was a young professional in Watford, my manager Gianfranco Zola told me: “You are a football player, you are paid to have no feelings.”
Those words were true, but never easy to accept, and they came back to me when I heard that the sick abuse was sung in Phil Foden by hundreds, if not thousands, from Manchester United followers during Sunday's derby in Old Trafford.
Their grotesque songs were aimed at Foden's mother – whose only 'crime' had been to raise an exceptional football player.
Those sang about the mother of the Manchester City star are meaningless idiots and they are also cowards.
How many of them would have made those comments on the face of Foden if they met him on the street? But it is safety in figures, the anonymity of the crowd.
It says a lot about the disease in our society that a large number of adult men can go to a football match and get their stairs to focus terrible hymns on the mother of a young man.
Foden was one of only three Mancunians who played in Sunday's game. His family lives in the area, so they will be influenced even more by such behavior because they cannot escape it.
We talk a lot about wanting local heroes. We talk about wanting 'right derbies'. We talk about wanting large English clubs to have contact with their roots in a globalized, Cosmopolitan Premier League.
And then Manchester produces a player who is as good as Foden – a working class, the Council of City Council, with a supreme gift that is the reigning football player of the year – and Mancunians treat him like that.
I suffered a lot of abuse of the terraces during my match days – part of it racist, part of it aimed at my family, even my children.
It is not something you really get used to. Depending on the individual, it will make you angry or sad or vengeful – but it always sticks.
Zola told me that I was 'paid not to have feelings' when my daughter was born, not long after I got out of prison.
I received a lot of stick from supporters and in the media.
I wanted to do an interview to tell my side of the story, a fundamental human instinct to straighten the record, but he told me it would only add fuel to the fire.
Maybe he was right, but I could never get my head how my choice of career meant that I was apparently an honest game for abuse.
And please don't try to tell me that because Foden earns more than 200 Grand, he just has to deal with it.
No amount of money can make that kind of song tasty.
It seems that nothing is forbidden in modern football-so that nothing is forbidden in modern society.
Social media, with the lack of filters, have this kind of abuse flourish and are normalized.
I don't know what can be done to make sense in the heads of the sad people who think it is acceptable to call the mother of a football player an 's ** g'.
Foden is paid, just like any professional football player, to have no feelings. But he will feel this anyway.
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