Hey, so you know how people like to complain about rich, young people getting treated too well and coddled and such, before they earn their keep?

WELL GUESS WHAT? This doesn’t always happen. Take the case of Manchester United’s Gabriel Obertan. You see, Obertan — who is 20 years old — came over from France to the English Premier League this summer on a £3 million deal. But he had a bit of a back injury for a while, so instead of just chilling and collecting his scrill, they put his butt to work.

From the Sun:

When the French winger arrived in England, he did so as a £3million wonderkid, raking in around £20,000 a week.

Yet United coaches were at pains to make sure playing for one of the world’s biggest clubs didn’t go to his head.

While Obertan was recovering from a back injury, he was given a variety of light duties which included watering hanging baskets, pruning the rose bushes - and even washing staff cars at the Carrington training ground.

Well how about that. Oh, and if anyone from the Bulls wants to send over Taj Gibson or James Johnson to  clean my room, feel free. These clothes just aren’t going to pick up themselves.

HT: Unprofessional Foul/DS

The past few years, as the Premiership and European trophies have piled up, a running subtext surrounding the world’s most popular soccer club,* Manchester United, has been the supposed desire of Cristiano Ronaldo to leave England and play for a top club in Spain. And who can blame him? Ronaldo is young, notoriously proud of his exploits with women and England is rainy and cold all the time. For a guy like me — who carries 15 pounds too many, loves dark beer, and whose best chance with girls is hoping they find me “witty” — London would be great. For a millionaire athlete in perfect physical condition, whose mating prospects are limited only by exhaustion, Spain sounds a bit more like a party.

So it is today: Man United sold Ronaldo to Real Madrid for a world-record bid of, get this, $131 million. That’s not Ronaldo’s contract. That’s not a signing bonus. That fee is merely for the right to talk to Ronaldo about potentially playing on Real Madrid which, given the money at stake, will certainly happen.

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Ah, the iPod. It’s good at everything, really. Music? Check. Movies? Check. Filling your life with temporary, fleeting, ultimately unattainable — unattainable because it’s greedy and shallow; it’s like a shadow that never stops moving, your greed — joy? Check and check.

Add another usage: Scouting your opponents on the field. Manchester United goalie Ben Foster did exactly that this weekend in the Carling Cup, and it worked out as planned:

Foster, who had spent the moments before the penalties watching footage of Tottenham Hotspur’s players taking recent penalties on an iPod, dived to his left to palm away the luckless O’Hara’s attempt, Tottenham’s first after the teams had failed to muster a goal in 120 minutes, with David Bentley’s subsequent effort wide of the left-hand post serving to wrest the cup from the Londoners.

“I did a bit of research for the penalties,” said the 25-year-old. “We tried to find out everything we could about Spurs beforehand and, just before the shoot-out, I was looking at a video on an iPod with Eric Steele, our goalkeeping coach, and Edwin. It’s a new innovation he’s brought in since coming to the club and on it were some of Tottenham’s penalties, including one from O’Hara. I was told that, if he was taking one, to stay as big as I can.”

In some small way, that’s a genius bit of strategy. I’m not sure it will work every time. Actually, I’m not sure it worked this time. Foster might well have stopped the shot without a glance at the iPod beforehand. What I do know is this: It worked this time, which means the iPod is about to become the new scouting hotness, at least in English soccer.

The next steps here are slippery and inevitable. Can we get Brian Urlacher a PSP and a copy of Madden between plays? Can Derrick Rose be outfitted with virtual reality contacts? Will Carlos Zambrano fully morph into Wario? The sweet and choking embrace of mobile technology is upon us.

Perhaps you’ve heard about America’s newest insurance brokerage, AIG. If not, it’s a pretty simple story.

In the midst of a huge financial crisis, AIG, one of America’s largest insurance companies, forced the United States government into a difficult decision: either buy AIG or risk worsening the already buckling U.S. economy. So the U.S. government bailed out AIG for $85 billion in taxpayer money, making me — and you, and you and you — new part-owners of AIG. Pretty sweet, right?

I can already see you responding. Where’s the sports tie-in, Eamonn? Stop trying to prove how smart and well-rounded you are, poser. I have but one response: Manchester United.

See, AIG, as you can see from any Man U jersey on any red-faced hooligan anywhere, is the main sponsor of Manchester United, perhaps the world’s most famous soccer team. So when we bought AIG, we also bought the company’s 4-year, $100 million sponsorship deal from the club. America is now Manchester United’s sponsor! So what if our financial institutions are failing? We still rule where it really matters: on the chests of sweaty European men.

Anyway, how is Man U doing? Last year, as you may know, they won the Premiership and the Champions League, not a bad little two-fer. This year, though, it’s not going so well:

What the hell, Man U? Get it together. We didn’t loan subprime and tank our economy to watch you flounder around at the bottom of the table. Get it together, now, or so help us God we will find a way to destroy, and then subsequently buy, Samsung. Don’t try us.