Extreme people doing things at an extreme level are, believe it or not, often a little extreme. And let’s face it, elite modern football is a deeply unnatural environment, a multi-billion‑pound industry peopled entirely by men dressed in shorts, a glazed and airless place of minor concerns endlessly magnified, and an industry that would simply cease to function if everybody blinked a couple of times, took a breath and decided to be completely sensible about everything. Elite, big-money teams in particular are fascinatingly strange, a conspiracy of cosmopolitan self-interest that still remains somehow coherent, these disparate bands of sporting brothers ferried via chinchilla fur-lined helicopter gunship from hotel to airport to luxury compound, barked and yelped and brayed at twice weekly but still able to leap and fight and run through pain for one another, presenting in the process an oddly stirring example of the indomitable human spirit, even while filtered through the triple-glazed tinted glass of billionaire idiot ball. At the end of which: Yaya wants a cake. Give him a bloody cake.