Why Footballers Should Be Banned From Buying Cars

Let’s face it; premiership footballers have it pretty damn good. Even though I possess the hand-eye coordination of a drunken infant (my footwork skills are roughly on par with those of an amputee) and the fact I’d be more likely to start ovulating than actually score a goal, let alone even get near the ball, I always thought that a career as a professional footballer was the way to go. If not for the sport, but for the money.

When you’re earning hundreds upon thousands of pounds every week, I’m not sure you really give a damn about what average folk think about you. Consequently, footballers have the habit of modifying* the most synonymous symbols of their wealth, their cars, to within an inch of their lives to suit their own eclectic tastes.

There are three breeds of footballer; the ones who buy brilliant cars, and then ruin them; the ones who buy awful cars, simply because nobody else has one, and then ruin them; and finally the select few who buy great cars, and leave them be. Before crashing them.

Jermaine Pennant exemplifies the “buy good, make bad” principle perfectly. He treated his gorgeous, refined, sexy, svelte Aston Martin DBS to a “chrome-job”, whereby the car’s entire exterior was wrapped in a reflective chrome vinyl. Great. Whether Pennant is so vain that as he steps from his faux-pillared mansion, he needs to watch himself approach the car, check his hair and practice his monologue for that week’s press conference before driving away, I don’t know. Nor do I know how he manages to see anything when it’s even remotely sunny.

When is a Range Rover just not big, brash or bling enough? When you’re a footballer, that’s when. Thierry Henry once had a Lincoln Navigator, which at about 30 centimeters longer than a Rangie, must be visible from the outer reaches of space.

Cristiano Ronaldo’s not one for ruining his cars with million-inch rims, chrome wraps and 68-speaker stereos. Right now he’s got a tasty Lamborghini Aventador on the drive, where once sat a Rolls Royce Phantom and Aston Martin DB9. What Ronaldo does do though, is ruin them in a completely different way. When he wrecked a bog-standard Ferrari 599 in a tunnel near Manchester Airport in 2009, car-fans worldwide let out a unified groan in seeing such a fine piece of Italian craftsmanship embedded in the armco. Ouch.

The moral of the story? Ban footballers from driving. Though I fear Bentley’s sales would plummet irretrievably.

*read “ruining”