IMAGINE someone knocks on your door and offers you £15m for your home.

Hands up all those who’d turn it down by insisting your property is only ‘worth’ £250,000, according to estate agents.

Exactly!

Now you know why BBC’s Mr Football Gary Lineker REALLY is worth £1.75m a year and why he pockets that monstrous amount of cash without the slightest pang of conscience.

They call it ‘market forces’ – a more appropriate word would be ‘insanity’.

Your imaginary buyer could be the only person in the world who knows your house is built on a gold mine – on the other hand, he or she might just be barking mad.

Either way, it makes no difference.

Your property would be worth £15m for the simple reason that someone is offering to pay that much to buy it.

It’s interesting to add that the same bricks and mortar could only be worth £100,000 in 12 months’ time, if there is a crash in this mysterious market.

Also, if nobody offers to buy your property at all, your house ain’t worth a bean.

That’s the ‘market’ we base our lives on, folks.

We’ve established then this form of financial lunacy can work for us, if we’re lucky, but that it is also completely devoid of any moral values.

This is where those of us who think in terms of social justice come a cropper.

We worry ourselves to sleep at night wondering how Lineker can be paid £1.75m for talking about a few games of football whilst a nurse might be paid, for example, £23,000.

One works one day a week offering his views on a form of entertainment, the other toils long hours to saves lives; one qualifies for the job purely because his ‘name’, the other undergoes years of training to build up his or her expertise. I could go on……….

The market doesn’t have room for conscience.

It’s nothing to do with merit or value to humanity, it’s purely based on what someone is willing to pay.

So why, for example, is Lineker paid several times more than the main political staff at the BBC?

The reason lies in the fact that football has been artificially flooded with money over the past 25 years.

Television companies, corporate sponsors and billionaire owners have created what is, in effect, an economy all of its own and certainly every bit as out of touch with reality as that £15m buyer.

Their cash has added several more noughts to the value of everything in football – most notably, of course, the players – in the knowledge that we, the general public, are stupid enough to pay for it.

Let’s face it, we haven’t disappointed them.

Attendances at Premier League matches – the home of football’s super rich in this country – are at a record level.

More folk than ever watch the games on commercial TV or live streams.

More money is generated through sales of items like replica shirts.

Yet the standards of the product itself – 90 minutes of football – has only improved in line with our increased knowledge of issues such as sports science, nutrition etc.

Relating it again to your house, it’s still the same bricks and mortar, merely tarted up a bit and given an artificial value.

So even football pundits such as Lineker and his Match of the Day partner in crime Alan Shearer can stay on the gravy train years after they finished kicking a ball around.

Their pay is not calculated on their moral worth to society – negligible in both cases – but on how much an insane person from a rival TV company would be willing to pay them.

Lineker is also reported to be paid £1m for hosting BT Sport’s Champions League coverage, so you can see his BBC pay packet is indeed ‘market’ value.

By this time, you’re probably shrugging your shoulders thinking ‘that’s just the way it is, might be stupid but there’s nothing we can do about it’.

And under the current financial system you’re dead right.

Lineker’s pay and the crazy world of football is merely a glimpse of the way money is manipulated in this country.

It is created out of thin air by private corporations by the name of banks – then given often random value by financial dealers in the ‘insane’ casino they call ‘the city’.

If we’re lucky, enough of this imaginary stuff they call money will be drip fed to enable the vast majority to eek out a living. Others aren’t so lucky and die in their poverty.

Cheer up, the new football season starts soon – another chance for the poor to donate to the owners of the asylum.