Kyle Walker - Professional Footballer

 I can confirm from acute research exposure  that celebrity gossip journalism may well be the weirdest form of the English language: a brain-melting argot of multiple compound nouns, facts as adjectives, adjectives as exclamations, exclamations as facts. Commas less as punctuation and more as a lifestyle choice. A spurious tissue of quasi-truth spun out of the unattributed, unchallenged testimony of "close pals", albeit the kind of pals happy to spill your most intimate personal secrets to a tabloid journalist.

The Gossips
Pierre M Beyle (1838-1902)
Photo Credit: York Museums Trust [Public Domain] 

This, for the most part, is how the life of Kyle Walker has been recorded. Based on media footprint alone, he might well be one of the most chronicled English footballers of the past decade,and largely for issues unrelated to anything he did in a defensive transition. Search the internet for this player of 93 England caps and pretty much every medal at club level and you will be deluged with keyword-rich morsels of celebrity gossip swimming in pound signs, house prices and gigantic photos ripped from Instagram.

This is quite weird right? A whole industry of salacious Kyle Walker content that relies for its news value on the fact he's a star footballer. Nor is this purely the domain of the gossip pages. Social media has long been fertile ground for Walker-banter, usually based around the fact that he has several children (lol) with more than one partner (lol lol!)

I do not propose to judge or analyse Walker's life choices in any great detail. Partly out of an earnest belief that Walker's personal life is his own business, particularly when the welfare and sensitivities of young children are involved. Mostly, however, it's because I couldn't give the tiniest shit. But the player: this part I care about, if only because this is a career that basically shouldn't have happened. From the moment Walker broke through at the start of the last decade there was always a thrilling point of difference to him. Not just the speed, which was visceral. Not just the engine, which never ever seemed to run out. Not just the lashing long-range shots. But the pure wide-eyed sense of emergency in his step, the way he ran like if he ever stopped running the world would explode, and that would be the end of everything...

Perhaps, if you're a tabloid editor, Walker is what you want people to think all footballers are like. Certainly this might explain the grotesque intrusion into his personal life, human drama mined for snackable content, a prurient obsession that lavishly undersells his feats as an athlete and has probably contributed to his departure. As he prepares to step away from the club that turned him into a champion, it's hard not to feel he deserved better.

(Jonathan Liew, The Guardian, 2025)

Weird indeed. A sad indictment of not only the British tabloid press but for those members of the general public who delight in the most bizarre revelations, true or not, about a person's private life on social media.