In the second report, incidentally, on a player just two years younger than Adarabioyo and in the same soccer team, the Daily Mail wrote an ode to 18-year-old Phil Foden who bought a house almost $2.5 million for his parents.

In recent times, in the UK, English soccer player Raheem Sterling’s relationship with the media has illustrated the paradox of black athletic success.

When Manchester City, the same team from the Adarabioyo and Foden stories, approached Liverpool in 2015 to buy Sterling, Raheem was ready to leave but Liverpool did not want to sell.

Looking back, a generous defense of the UK media’s antipathy towards Sterling would be that that the media did not want one of England’s biggest talents to join Manchester City, a team owned by an Emirati billionaire who was “destroying football”.

Jordan Henderson, Sterling’s mate at Liverpool, had moved from Sunderland, a much smaller and poorer team to Liverpool in 2011 but his ambition never rubbed off the media in the wrong way.