I am not sure the Walker incident should really be included in discussion given it was very different from the other incidents you have mentioned. And the Tonali and Toney incidents were directly related to football and so had consequences within football.

Most of the time when players have driving related violations there are no consequences imposed in football because the consequences outside of football are considered sufficient (in the same way that additional consequences for most workers who do not drive for a living in other industries are not imposed). This has been the case with players at City, Liverpool, Newcastle, Brentford, and pretty much every other club in English football over the years.

Again, this not to excuse Grealish’s behaviour, but it does fall in line with what I was previously saying about intervention and diversion being the more effective strategy, rather than endless or exaggerated punishment (presumably as a misguided attempt at deterrence).

In Grealish’s case, he pleaded guilty to two charges for incidents that occurred whilst he was with Aston Villa (though neither were drink driving), was fined £82,500, and was banned from driving for 9 months. He also paid for all damages related to crashing in to the parked vehicles and made direct apologies to the owners, to the court, the public, and to the club itself for his behaviour.

As far as I am aware he hasn’t repeated such behaviour, even going so far as using a car service for his now infamous post-treble bender, and by all accounts has been a lovely bloke whilst at City.

He deserves continued criticism for doing what he did in the first place, as well as continued scrutiny of his actions moving forward as a role model for young people, but accepting responsibility and changing one’s behaviour after making bad and dangerous decisions is actually what we want to teach young people. And we also want to teach them that if they respond appropriately, they can be accepted as having “done their time” in those cases, as well.

Everyone is going to have a worst mistake in their lives—you and I do—and most of the time it is not so egregious as to warrant the total destruction of our lives as payment for the mistake. I think we tend to hold footballers and other celebrities to an exceptionally high standard that we wouldn’t advocate for ourselves or our loved ones. Sometimes that is appropriate, given their status, and I certainly don’t support celebrities being held to a lower standard than non-famous people. But sometimes I think we forget celebrities are human just like us, that they all make mistakes as we have (especially the young ones) and we go a bit too far with our expectations of how they should be punished.