RVP has been radicalised by Jake Humphrey’s latest endeavour – High Performance parenting

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Presenter Jake Humphrey before a match at Stamford Bridge, 2021.

Think you’re a good parent? Do right by your children? Or even if you’re not a parent yet, you reckon you’d do your best? Wrong. Terribly wrong. Jake Humphrey says you’re not grinding enough, bro – and Robin van Persie agrees.

A lot to take in there, apologies. Let’s start by making clear that Planet Football does not think you’re a bad parent, nor will you make a bad parent if that day rolls around.

We can’t speak for Humphrey, though; the self-appointed godfather of high performance, LinkedIn posting and all things being a self-made boss.

‘Godfather of high performance’. We’ve created a monster, there. Nobody show him that or else it’ll end up in the bio of all his social profiles. Unironically.

You’re probably wondering why we started this article with a rather scathing review of parenting practices. The answer is simple, but rather painful; Humphrey has broached the subject and done so with footballing royalty by his side as backup.

‘High performance’ has quickly become a disease. A buzzword for the 5am alarm, business-minded, self-absorbed ‘grindset’ bros to hide all of their insecurities and desperately beige personalities behind, and a way for them to feed their ego by tarnishing people with a brush which is scarily not too dissimilar to the one Andrew Tate uses.

Yeah, it’s that bad. It’s genuinely poisoning people’s minds. And Robin van Persie has gotten in on the act too.

Discussing parenting tactics on Humphrey’s podcast – which we absolutely adore here on Planet Football – the Dutchman helped the former BT Sport pundit open up an entirely new dimension of d*ckhead.

High-performance parenting.

Van Persie recalls a chat he had with his now 16-year-old son Shaqueel, who is on the books at Feyenoord and is being highly rated by some who watch him closely.

Teenage son Shaqueel was expressing his disappointment at not starting a youth fixture against Ajax, portioning blame on everybody but himself, as you do when you’re a teenager who’s angry at the world and just wants to play football.

His father’s groundbreaking, high-performance response? Call him a loser. Seriously. Call him a loser and make him ask himself if he thinks he’s a loser or not.

Nice, bro. Super forward-thinking, dude. Excellent parenting. Maybe you should force him to sleep on a concrete bed and start his day before sunrise every morning and make him smash his Xbox or Playstation to pieces as a rite of passage, while you’re at it.

That’s how the other high performance/sigma/grindset/winners think.

Feel free to take a moment to go and vomit after hearing all of those horrid, self-righteous phrases all in one go.

In all seriousness, though, it’s actually quite sad. Really sad.

As if Van Persie’s son doesn’t have enough pressure on him carrying that surname and trying to play football as a career, in an age where all the world can microanalyse your life on social media, he’s going home and being called a loser for being an emotional and impressionable teenager who’s angry at the world.

At 16, I’d been dropped by my team and my aspirations of somehow blagging a semi-pro career – which I was *never* good enough for – had been ripped from beneath me.

I’d spend the next three years learning what alcohol was and working at McDonald’s. God forbid what Van Persie and Humphreys would call me, because ‘loser’ would be putting it nicely.

Thankfully though, I didn’t beat myself up about it all too much, because my parents actually told me they loved me, instead of behaving like sigma bro grindset robots and speaking to me in riddles they’d found on Google.

You get the overarching point here. In a time when it’s becoming harder and harder for people to make ends meet in the United Kingdom – one of the most powerful countries in the world – and the gap between rich and poor is rising, it’s increasingly tiresome listening to society’s wealthiest bang the drum about high performance and preach from their position of privilege about working 23 hours a day, being superhuman and showing no emotion whatsoever.

Categorising everybody you cross paths with in life by winner or loser all in the name of ‘grinding’ and ‘being your own boss’ is not high performance, it’s genuine insanity.

Those who claim to be fans of Humphrey and other like-minded ‘self-made CEO’ type folk are also often the first to kick and scream about men’s mental health, often at the most inappropriate or irrelevant times.

It’s quite ironic to then see them reward borderline psychotic behaviour which involves emotionally abusing loved ones at an incredibly impressionable age.

High-performance parenting is the latest in radicalising the masses in the name of grind and growth mindset. Get it in the bin ASAP.

By Mitch Wilks

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Jake Humphrey Robin Van Persie