The Bundesliga season might have been suspended for several weeks, but that hasn’t stopped one player from facing disciplinary action.
Bayern Munich and France winger Kingsley Coman received a fine from his club recently for… driving the wrong car to work.
“I’d like to apologise to the club and Audi for not having come to training in my company car,” said Coman, who instead showed up in his McLaren.
However, it’s not the first time a footballer has been slapped with a fine for something unrelated to their actions on the pitch.
Here are five other bizarre gaffes that hit stars in the pocket.
Asamoah Gyan
Former Sunderland and Ghana striker Gyan scored goals wherever he went, but didn’t always get everything else right.
His stint at Al-Ahli in the UAE saw him continue his decent record in front of goal, but also saw him get into trouble for… unethical hair.
The do in question? A Mohawk, which fell foul of local rules. He wasn’t the only one, either, with more than 40 players reportedly asked to change their haircut or risk financial penalties.
Robbie Savage
Savage developed a reputation as a wind-up merchant during his playing days, while he picked up the occasional card for his… let’s call it ‘combative’ play.
However, nothing compares to the “improper conduct” fine he earned in 2002 for using the referee’s toilet.
“I had a bad case of diarrhoea on the day of the game, so had to go there and then, and the nearest place was the referee’s toilet,” said Savage, who was fined two weeks’ wages for the offence.
We wonder if the fine would have been halved if he’d gone for a number one.
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Darren Bent and Ashley Cole
Footballers’ Twitter accounts are very carefully managed these days, but back in the early days of the social network it was like the Wild West.
Darren Bent, keen to move from Tottenham to Sunderland (yes, to Sunderland – look, it was a different time), told chairman Daniel Levy to “stop f*cking around”.
Bent was hit with an £80,000 fine for that. Ashley Cole forked over £90,000 after using the same platform to call the FA – the FA! – a #bunchoftwats.
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John Hewitt
Back in the 1980s, when he was still at Aberdeen, Alex Ferguson didn’t quite have the power he would go on to hold at Manchester United, but that didn’t stop him asserting his authority.
John Hewitt, a striker for the Scottish club, was fined for having the temerity to overtake his manager… while driving his personal car on a public road. Look, the boss is the boss.
Mario Balotelli
“Manchester City will today demand an explanation from Mario Balotelli as to why he threw at least one dart in the direction of youth-team players at the club’s Carrington training academy” – a real sentence from a news item about the Italian striker.
When there’s an open-ended line about the number of darts you threw in the direction of your colleagues, it’s probably not a great sign.
He was reportedly fined a week’s wages, around £100,000 at the time, for the offence. He’d have needed to reach the semi-finals at the 2019 PDC Darts World Championship to make that amount back, so if it was a method of practice then it doesn’t seem particularly efficient.
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