The lives of the sportspeople. What are they really like? For years social media has offered the promise of an answer to this question, but the results have been mixed. Sportspeople active on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter fall into two camps, roughly: they’re either immaculate professionals who zealously look after their bodies and radiate positive energy and good vibes into the universe, which makes for painfully boring content, or they’re Joey Barton. Snapchat, on the other hand, offers a glimpse into the lives of professional athletes that’s more messy, unfinished, honest, spontaneous and real than the often static and stagey messaging put out over these other networks.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that users’ stories disappear after 24 hours, and there’s no easy way to integrate the video component of them into other media, such as this story – the world of Snapchat is public, but feels somehow cordoned off, protected from the wilds of the internet at large (except, say, if you are the company running that world and decide to introduce a filter that allows non-black people to appear in blackface). For the past year I’ve wasted many hours watching professional sportspeople’s stories on Snapchat. There aren’t anywhere near as many athletes active on Snapchat as on other social media networks – it takes real effort and commitment to keep the content coming – and it’s mainly NBA and NFL players and European footballers who have taken up the cause. But based on my viewing, here is what I have learned.
Professional athletes are 50% more likely to die while singing in the car than ordinary people
Some people like to sing in the shower. Others like to sing in the car. Others still like to sing in the car, usually to hip hop, and film themselves. If you fall into the third group, there’s a good chance you’re a professional athlete with a Snapchat account. It’s a totally unscientific estimate, but I’d say that around 40% of Snapchat content produced by athletes is some variation on them shouting a lyric like “I Milly Rock on any block” straight to camera. If this sounds interesting to you, don’t worry: it’s not.
NFL players are 90% more likely than athletes in any other sport to live their lives as a full-time DJ Khaled tribute act
DJ Khaled, font of countless catchphrases and slogans designed to get people to turn their lives around via the trusted American method of insincere positivity, is the reigning king of Snapchat. NFL Snappers seem to feel a special affinity for the man. Antonio Brown (ab84official), the Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver and Dancing with the Stars contestant, is a particularly enthusiastic retransmitter of Khaled-isms, especially the call-and-response of the DJ’s signature, “How’s business? BOOMING!” How’s dinner? BOOMING! How’s your new routine on Dancing with the Stars? BOOMING! How’s that horribly painful-looking three-hour gym session you’re putting yourself through? BOOMING!
Antonio Brown’s non-game day footwear is mostly bedazzled
NFL players are well ahead of their peers in other elite sporting codes when it comes to the amount of swag they receive; at least an hour of their lives away from the training ground each day seems to be devoted to sorting through piles of free merchandise. Eventually it must become difficult to figure out what to do with all this stuff. Brown has hit on a genius method to filter and focus the merch inflow: he only spruiks other people’s products if they happen to be shoes with gemstones embedded in them. No one wonder the guy always looks so irritatingly happy.
Football aside, Cesc Fàbregas has the life of a mild-mannered Spanish MBA grad working in finance in the City
Most of the athletes active on Snapchat share one feature: in terms of trophies won (though not dollars accumulated), they have not had particularly successful careers. We can express this another way: most athletes famous on Snapchat are mainly famous for being on Snapchat. Spanish footballer Cesc Fàbregas (cescky4) is different, though. He failed to win anything at Arsenal, then failed to keep a place in the Barcelona starting line-up, then had a couple of good months with Chelsea and won the English Premier League title. Good job, Cesc!
Fàbregas strikes me as a fundamentally nice person, and Snapchat proves this to be a largely accurate suspicion. When Fàbregas pumps iron, he always manages to give the impression it’s the first time he’s set foot in a gym; he’s the anti-sport, which is the key to his charisma. His various attempts to appear street or cool – half-heartedly singing “Work work work work work” on the way to training, wearing a leather jacket, the occasional moody selfie in sunglasses – invariably fail to convince and eventually give way to his lived reality: nights in with his wife and kids, dorky Spanish pop music playing in the car, and tasteful seafood dinners in upscale London fish bistros with his pleasant-looking parents. He’s also partial to the dog-with-tongue-out filter, a subtle tool Snapchat has invented to allow people to confirm for the rest of the world that they will never be edgy.
Fàbregas shows more of the inside of his apartment than most other sports Snappers, and it says it all that the most bling aspect of its interior design is the button tufting on the sofas in his living room, which are dressed in muted gray fabric. Take away the glittering football career and Fàbregas could be a mild-mannered Spanish MBA grad working in finance in the City.
Athletes eat two types of food: food that is healthy, or food that looks disgusting
Fruits, salads, and simple, protein-rich plates of fish and chicken feature prominently on the menu of Sports Snapchat, as you’d expect, but occasionally, you’ll see professional athletes – people like Miami Heat center Hassan Whiteside (youngwhiteside) or Dutch footballer Royston Drenthe (rawroya) – eating stuff like this.
Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong all these years and carbs and processed meat, not leafy greens and pulses, are the key to reaching our physical peak.
Male athletes get a lot of haircuts
There is apparently no limit to the amount of grooming a highly paid elite athlete’s head can tolerate. If you’re a professional sportsman and it’s been more than a week since you snapped your hair getting trimmed, beard being sculpted, or man bun talking through its issues with a therapist, you’re clearly not doing things right.
Von Miller is a master of the rotating selfie
On the field, Denver linebacker Von Miller (millerlite40) is a buzzing, blitzing menace, one of the NFL’s most destructive specialist defenders. Off the field, he’s the closest sports Snapchat has to a house hipster. The 360-degree, shot-from-above, rotating selfie is his calling card, and he uses it to devastating effect as he pirouettes through his charming off-season existence, a schoolboy fantasy land of music festivals, morning TV appearances, private jet travel and ironic eyewear.
Not having to write words out is good for Pat McAfee’s comedy
Indianapolis punter Pat McAfee (fourthdownboss) fancies himself a stand-up comedian in his off-field hours. On Twitter, spelling is his comedic Achilles heel; on Snapchat, liberated from the chafing protocols of writing and punctuation, he produces some genuinely funny work, none of which I can reproduce here, because it’s disappeared off my phone.
In the Snapchat battle of the failed Dutch football prodigies, Royston Drenthe is a clear winner over Ryan Babel
Who has failed to live up to his early-career potential more: former Madrid starlet Royston Drenthe or Ajax and Liverpool wastrel Ryan Babel (ryanbabel.com)? It’s a tough call; both are now well into the final chapters of their respective careers, journeymen traversing the football hinterlands of the Middle East. But in the Snapchat wars, Drenthe has Babel beat fair and square. Babel’s material mostly consists of him filming his own face from the waist up (a rookie error, really; we all know selfies are strictly to be taken from the top looking down) and sitting around tables with random dudes, giggling like nerdy schoolboys goofing off in the library. Drenthe, on the other hand, treats his Snapchat output with a seriousness he never brought to his football career: we see him doing weights, playing keep-up on the beach, offering tips on hydration, and shouting through his grill of fantastically golden front teeth “I Milly Rock on any block.” Drenthe weighs 72.7 kilograms, in case you were wondering. I know this because he weighed himself yesterday and snapped the scales.
Professional athletes’ entourages usually include one fat guy whose main job is to be laughed at
As befits people with a lot of money and time on their hands, professional sportsmen accumulate hangers-on to keep themselves entertained. Most of these associates are people who look and sound a bit like the sports star himself, but often a sleepy-looking fat guy is thrown into the mix, purely for comic relief. This is an approach to human friendships I think we’d all do well to emulate.
Kevin Séraphin has poor taste in bedding
Away from the court, the New York Knicks forward Kevin Séraphin’s (kslife13) life seems to involve moving between lots of different houses, most of which are empty and dark, and playing FIFA with groups of young men, who usually appear out of nowhere, glumly paw at their consoles for an hour or two, then recede back into the darkness once the game is over. Does Séraphin own these dwellings? Is he a hostage being moved between safe houses in enemy territory? Assuming the former is correct, Séraphin has a strong interior design case to answer, because the bedding in these houses is mostly appalling, the kind of pink-and-lime-green-stripe abominations you’d expect a freshman college student to come back with after their first trip to Ikea. Shocking.
There is no social situation in which Emmanuel Frimpong will fail to find a way to integrate the word ‘dench’
Professional sportspeople are among the most enthusiastic adopters of new social media-bred coinings; they’re woke, they’re lit, they’re fire, they’re BOOMING. But few can actually claim to have invented one of these terms themselves. Emmanuel Frimpong (isyourboyfrimmy), the former Arsenal midfielder most famous for being a former Arsenal midfielder, is one such person. Frimpong was sacked earlier this month by Russian Super League club Ufa, where he had been on contract since 2014, but even if his once-promising-looking career fails to reignite, it seems pretty certain that the word “dench” will continue to be the guiding theme of the Frimpong experience. What does “dench” mean? Frimpong’s professional career, more than anything to do with playing football, should be understood as an attempt to answer this question. And Snapchat has given us deeper insight into this investigation than any other medium.
Over the years, we’ve seen Frimpong triumphantly denching on a sun-drenched balcony somewhere in the Middle East (“Dench! Dench!”), denching through playing days on the road, denching the night away alone at home; he’s denched in gyms, he’s denched in hotel lobbies, he’s denched in restaurants, he’s denched in the dark. He’s dench-harassed random passersby from a car in remotest Russia in the middle of winter (“Hello! I just arrive from Africa! I never see snow! Dench! Dench!”), but don’t let the intentional comedy of that scene, from early 2015, fool you into thinking “dench” is somehow one-dimensional. Just yesterday, at the kitchen table in his mother’s house, Frimpong showed us how to successfully dench over a home-cooked meal. This was a quieter, more contemplative dench than we’ve become used to. As Frimpong dug his spoon into a delicious-looking fish and pork stew, there was a hushed and incantatory reverence to the words: “Dench, dench, dench.” Snapchat has allowed us to see that Frimpong’s concept of “dench” is more than just a one-dench wonder. Dench is large; dench contains multitudes. In fact if Frimpong were reading this story out loud right now, there’s a good chance he’d look over the words and simply say, “Dench.” What does “dench” mean? I still don’t really know.
The sporting lifestyle is about as compelling as Marx’s vision of life under communism
Sexy cars, flashy nights out on the town, drugs, money: you’ll never see any of this on an athlete’s Snapchat. Karl Marx once said that in communist society, people would be free to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening.” If you were to summarize the life of a professional athlete according to Snapchat, you’d come up with something that sounds equally boring: “Fruit in the morning, gym in the afternoon, Fifa at night, car singing all the time.” Only occasionally does the necessity to actually appear in competitive sporting fixtures intrude on this routine. Okay, that’s not totally true across the board: Antonio Brown and Von Miller both have pretty glamorous lives, even if the level of glamor is measured purely by the intensity with which their shoes sparkle. But they’re the exception, on Snapchat at least. The lives of the sportspeople, what are they like? Painfully unremarkable, for the most part. Or, as Michael Essien (iam_ess) eloquently put it yesterday: bored.com.
- This article was amended on Thursday 21 April to clarify that Von Miller plays for Denver, not Carolina.
