I broadly agree, but I don’t think there’s any reason you can’t have sympathy for someone with money who trusts a regulated financial advisor and gets ripped off.
By that token, a rich widow who gets conned out of her life savings by a gang that have targeted her doesn’t deserve any sympathy. Nor the Holocaust charities that invested in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
I get that people are responsible for their own decisions, and all of these footballers have to bear some of the responsibility, but we all place our trusts in professionals in a way that leaves us exposed. Doctors, lawyers, accountants. There have been plenty of rogue doctors over the years, who people have completely trusted, and nothing is more sacred than health.
That is the distinction here I feel.
To say someone shouldn’t have transferred money into a solicitor’s client account after he ran away with it would be egregiously unfair, and whilst this wasn’t exactly in the same page, the principle is the same. They trusted these people to make safe investments for them and that trust was massively breached.
There are people far, far worse off than these footballers btw, but to have no sympathy at all when we are talking about unsophisticated people who trusted regulated professionals to look after their money responsibly is a bit harsh imo.