💑 Sex scandal of the Year
The Upshot would be nothing without the odd sordid tale, so we’re grateful 2021 was a bumper year for sexting disasters.
Tim Paine fell on his sword after it emerged the Australia captain sent an “unsolicited” dick pic and ordered a Cricket Australia employee to “finish me off now!!” in 2017. Ironically the scandal did finish him off and he quit immediately.
But Paine was upstaged by Michael Owen, who demanded nudes from a glamour model with his trademark cocktail of arrogance and utter dreariness.
“Come on then, fire them through. It’s a long boring trip to London so I need something to do… leave nothing to the imagination,” snapped an impatient Owen, before commending her on her “tremendous” breasts and asking if they were “falsies” in the manner of a mechanic admiring a new carburettor.
Elsewhere, our Paris bureau kept the lights on thanks to the French football team’s dark sexual psychodrama, which shows no sign of abating.
Things reached a particular nadir with the rumour that a current French international had a party where he pooed in people’s mouths while filming himself. If you’re wondering who it was, ask an Upshot Gold member – we told them back in November.
But for all the undeniable excitement of the stories above, there was one tale which really caught our imagination. It concerned a video of Arsenal defender William Saliba, captioned “Saliba in the splash zone”.
The clip shows Saliba in his France tracksuit, on a sofa next to a guy who is completely naked and masturbating while watching something (porn) on his phone. Two other team mates are sitting on the other side of him, both fully dressed in their national team tracksuits, and acting like nothing is happening.
Probably the weirdest thing we wrote about, and because it appears to have been totally swept under the rug by everyone except this newsletter, we have to hand Saliba the gong.
This award is part of the Shotties 2021, our annual ceremony recognising the athletes whose squabbles and scandals have entertained the most this year. You can view all the awards here.
