Their number s up

It s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when Foul Play realised that the business of idiosyncratic shirt numbers in football had gotten out of hand, but it may have happened roughly a year ago, around the time I glimpsed Billy Dodds running around for Rangers with the digits "47" on his back.
The magnitude of the number on Dodds back was merely indicative of the depth of the Rangers squad, rather than a personal predilection for a number that most people would associate with the Great Famine, if with anything at all.
Yet it was unignorable evidence of a growing trend. Looking through this season s Champions League squads, as I was recently in a professional capacity, it struck me that the tendency for players to express a preference for whimsical numbers is reaching fever pitch.
Plucking just one example at random, FC Porto alone have players wearing 44, 55, 59 and 99; and there is even a player somewhere in the German Bundesliga, whose name escapes me, running around in a jersey stamped with the legend 666 on the back. No jokes, please
It is hardly unknown for teams squad numbers to reach dizzy heights due to extravagant spending habits, as was the case with friend Dodds, but this is rather more than merely the old syndrome of the club s star striker jealously hoarding the number 9 shirt for himself.
The practice has yet to really take hold in the Premiership, but when it does, you ll know all about it.
Today s footballers are experts at commodity fetishism, even if not that many of them would understand what the phrase means. Having customised their luxury cars and sculpted their haircuts to within an inch of their lives, it seems only logical that they should personalise the very shirts on their backs.
Only a couple of months ago, David O Leary returned from a fact-finding mission to Milan with disturbing news to impart about Leeds then upcoming Champions League opponents.
"I saw one of their players [Francesco Coco] wearing number 77," he reported with raised eyebrows. "Surely to God they don t have seventy-seven guys in their squad?"
77 is actually a reference to the year Coco was born (another Milan player, Samir Beloufa, wears 79 on his back for a similar reason), but O Leary was hardly to know that.
Last summer, the Parma and sometime Italy goalkeeper, Gianluigi "Gigi" Buffon, declared that he was after the number 88, because he saw the digits as representing four balls, of the testicular rather than sporting variety. (He d earlier tried to grab the number 0 for himself, but let s not get into that.)
This provoked the ire of numerous Jewish groups in Italy, who informed Buffon in no uncertain terms that the number was synonymous with Adolf Hitler. It is common practice for Nazis to use 88 as shorthand for the phrase "Heil Hitler", H being the eighth letter of the alphabet.
Thus emasculated of his four testicles, and suitably chastened, "Gigi" announced that he would settle for having 77 on his back instead because it reminded him of "a pair of female legs under a short skirt".
Unkinder observers than Foul Play might comment that Buffon would stand a better chance of finally nailing down the Italian national team jersey (which, of course, will not have 88 or 77 on its back for the foreseeable future) if he could take his mind off affairs of the groin for five minutes or so.
The aristocrats of Serie A, always trailblazers in the vanguard of footballing culture, are old hands at this sort of shite. In 1997, when Ivan Zamorano lost the Internazionale no 9 shirt to Ronaldo, he instantly donned a no 18 jersey with a small "+" sign between the numbers, which well, work it out for yourselves.
It has been like musical chairs at Man United for years. When he first broke into the senior squad, around 1995, David Beckham announced in several interviews that he'd always had something of a raging stiffy for the number 10 jersey, and that he wanted it as soon as it became available.
When the 1996-97 season commenced, Becks was given his heart s desire. But a year later, Eric Cantona retired. And who received his legendary no 7 when the new numbers were being doled out that summer? I ll give you a clue, it wasn t Jordi Cruyff (who himself has always sported the no 14 synonymous with his father so much for wanting to be his own man).
Only last summer, some newspapers ran with a non-story about how there would be ructions between Fabien Barthez and Roy Keane over the ownership of United s no 16 shirt.
Keano, of course, has worn that number since arriving at United in 1993. The story was that he and the follicularly challenged Frenchman would be on something of a collision course, because Barthez had worn no 16 at France 98 and Euro 2000.
Naturally, no row ensued (though you could easily imagine it happening at somewhere like Middlesbrough or Chelsea, where they seem to be a little more laissez-faire in these matters).
Instead, Barthez took the number 1 shirt, in the process displacing the pitiable Mark Bosnich, who was assigned yes! number 13. Was Fergie trying to send him some sort of cryptic coded message, do you think?