Why don't professional athletes hire drivers when they go out partying when there is so much at stake? Originally answered on Aug. 8.
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Answer by Greg Gordon, European soccer scout, consultant and journalist
The answer seems so obvious and yet there's a load of stuff at play here.
The first thing is that if messy end results can be predicted in advance, then athletes probably do take precautions and hire a driver or have a civilian "Jiminy Cricket" in tow. But if you are someone with a headstrong personality who attracts trouble, or if you find yourself too susceptible to peer pressure, then you'd really never know when you'd need that driver. Every day, in that context, is the prelude to tomorrow's gory front-page story.
Secondly, sports achievement is all about defying the odds to succeed. The downside is that to maintain your dream, you probably don't do a lot of risk analysis, even if you are a fantastic risk-based problem solver within your sport.
If you're looking at the odds against you, you'd never pick up the guitar in pursuit of pop stardom, you'd never write a novel, never form a startup company on the basis of a new idea and you'd never follow your dreams of sporting stardom. This is due to the massive downside involved in every top-level endeavor. You can't expect the extreme outliers in a statistical sample to ever behave rationally, because all their empirical evidence is telling them they are the exception to the rule.
The third aspect is a culture of entitlement. Bad stuff happens, but we only see what ends up in the newspapers.
I think it would be safe to assume that entitled, charismatic people with economic assets can wriggle out of all sorts of scrapes. They can strike a deal to write a weekly column in the newspaper in exchange for keeping a bad story supressed, for example. Their people could pay off people when things have gone "too far." In most cases, charisma, status, connections and money win the day if they have to.
What gets into the news is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg — the stuff that couldn't be crisis managed out of existence. If one does bad or stupid stuff and gets away with it regularly, then chances are he or she will do so again until the slip-up becomes too big.
Lastly, there's the sad human element, which I'd like to demonstrate with a couple of examples.
I live in Glasgow and I once saw then-Rangers and England midfielder Paul Gascoigne in a city center street. Now, Gascoigne is a troubled soul with the ability to make an instant connection with people, and that is a volatile combination.
I once saw him in that street surrounded by young newspaper sellers. Gazza bought a paper from one of them and was then caught in a cycle of buying a paper from all the boys there. A great day for all those young fans, but for Gascoigne it was a scenario that is destined to repeat itself day after day and take its toll.
If what is being asked of you is potentially destructive in situations where drink, attractive women and madness collide, then the bill can be more than £10 worth of newspapers.
The second story involves a soccer manager with a similar spirit whose conversation I overheard as he walked along the street. He had nipped out to buy something in the local shops and had been waylaid en route for an inordinate amount of time. He was explaining to his wife the process of events where one person after another had collared him with a pressing request.
His line: "Good guy, autograph, w—, good guy, autograph, w—." Pretty much sums up the trajectory of events and all the potential random factors that might coalesce to create some very bad experiences, as well as good ones too, of course.
Extrapolating from this, you can see that whether you are a craven egotist or a chronic people pleaser, things can quickly turn a sedate night out into a car crash, sometimes literally. People being people, things take on a momentum all their own.