A Premier League star wrecked his Lamborghini and the media coverage was awful

Leicester City left back Jeff Schupp was out driving his Lamborghini in torrential rain on Monday and lost control of the car, skidding off the road. Thankfully, he was unhurt, but his car was totaled. The British papers picked up on this story on Wednesday, and they’re using it to push a narrative of footballers being arrogant and reckless.

According to The Sun, a witness pulled up at the scene and heard Schlupp talking to police. Here’s what that witness said, according to the paper (emphasis added).

“It was a bad crash but I heard him chatting and he seemed quite cool and unfazed about the whole thing. It was just the clean-up crew who were there from the Highways Agency after the police and ambulance who were called out had gone. Jeff said to them, ‘I ain’t bothered. Just get the car recovered. Oh well, I’ve got three other cars to choose from.’”

Schlupp’s aloofness about wrecking an expensive car — not the dangerous nature of the crash — is what The Sun has deemed to be the important part of Schlupp’s story.

Other outlets picked up the story and, based on the re-printing of these exact quotes in dozens of other pages, we can assume that they were unable to track down the witness themselves to verify the witness’s account. They just took The Sun’s anonymous witness account as gospel because it was what they wanted to hear, and what they thought their readers wanted to hear. This isn’t to call The Sun’s reporting into question, just everyone else’s complete lack of skepticism.

This story is a juicy one that will spark outrage in a type of soccer fan who resents that players make so much money to play a game, while coming off to fans as unaware of how privileged they are to do so. As soccer becomes more commercial, players make more money, and ticket prices increase, many fans feel increasingly detached from their favorite players. At the same time, social media allows supporters to see a bigger chunk of players’ off-field lives than ever before.

All of these things come together to create an environment perfect for a larger narrative about wealthy, ungrateful athletes who are nothing like “regular” people. Every time a story pops up about a footballer writing off an amount of money more than the median year’s salary as unimportant, media outlets are happy to disseminate it with an uncritical eye to feed the growing outrage machine.

This culture of resentment has consequences. It lets media companies make lots of money off cheap stories that require no reporting, editing, research or artwork, which leads to them making cuts in the departments that produce quality journalism. It lets billionaire sports owners win PR battles and trick fans into thinking that the people with 10-and 11-figure bank accounts are getting screwed by the people with seven- and eight-figure bank accounts. And perhaps most importantly, it keeps your blood pressure and stress levels high by giving you something to be pissed off about.

We can choose to be less gullible and less angry as a soccer supporting culture. Let’s make that choice.