Birthday snub leaves Yaya with blues

If a footballer who earns a somewhere north of a quarter of a million pounds a week can get into a complete strop over his employer’s failure to wish him a happy 31st birthday, imagine the damage such an insult could do to a mere mortal.

Yaya Toure was so upset by Manchester City’s snubbing of his special day that he was weighing up his footballing future – admittedly a slight overreaction, but it shows how important birthdays can be to some people.

For the first half of your life, it’s an excuse to get out with the lads and give it a good lash – but for the second half, it’s a day you’d prefer to forget on the basis that it’s another page torn from an ever dwindling book.

When you’re ten, you cannot sleep with the excitement of wondering if the postman will bring birthday cards – a euphemism, of course, for money – to mark your special day.

Then there’s turning 18 and perhaps 21 – the only difference between the two is that all your little old aunties turn up at your coming of age and you have to entertain them for an hour before you can get stuck into it with your mates.

But after that, as you grow older – and in this scenario, 31 qualifies as old – you tend to settle for a cup of tea and a smile; perhaps a hand-drawn card on a folded A4 sheet, with a picture that depicts you as a stick insect super hero.

You certainly won’t quit your job over it – although some companies, unlike Manchester City, won’t take that chance.

I once worked for a newspaper that automatically sent every employee a birthday card on their special day – and while it was nice that accounts remembered, this often proved more hassle than it was worth.

Because despite what Yaya might feel, there are many who’d prefer their birthday passed by quietly and without public attention – but when a card is left on your desk before you come in, your cover is well and truly blown.

And the knock-on from this is also bad news – your colleagues have a good excuse for buying you nothing because they only just found out when they saw the card….but they’d be delighted to join you for a drink later, once you’re the one paying for it.

So the card that you know was signed in advance ended up costing you money on a day when you might have had a reasonable expectation of being the recipient of goodwill and Guinness.

Yaya, of course, could buy the bar and still have change from his week’s wages – but that doesn’t seem to be the point.

It was a matter of principle that annoyed him – his Arab bosses didn’t care enough to wish their superstar midfielder all the best for his big day, which fell during City’s post-season tour of Abu Dhabi.

Just what he was talking about soon because something of a mystery in itself after a video surfaced of Toure being presented with a birthday cake by the club, which also tweeted a birthday message at the time.

But it would appear that the multi-millionaire wasn’t angling for a mere card and a cake at his work station – he’d seen other clubs do so much more than that.

“He got a cake but when it was (Brazilian full-back) Roberto Carlos’ birthday, the president of Anzhi (Makhachkala) gave him a Bugatti,” said Toure’s representative Dimitry Seluk.

“It’s not a question of money or contract, believe me. He has everything he needs. For Yaya what is the most important thing is human relationships,” explained Dimitry. “We’ve not asked any money, we don’t ask any presents. We’re only talking about attention.”

And clearly he’d personally ensured plenty of that in what must be the most petulant reaction to a missed birthday of all time.

Indeed so upset was Toure that he was thinking of quitting the club altogether, sparking something of a mini-riot among the world’s richest clubs – and presumably the dispatching of several staff to buy up all the birthday cards they could find.

Certainly no one in his entourage will ever forget his big day again, because clearly this is a man who might appear to have everything – except a Happy Birthday.

And maybe that’s where the gifted midfielder got his name – someone asked him if he’d like a big birthday party when he was a young fellow.

And jumping up and down with excitement, he clapped and shouted: “Yaya, yaya – gimme, gimme, gimme some cake.”