Joe Willock had one of those days soccer doesn’t teach you how to handle. The Newcastle United midfielder, owner of a £200,000 Porsche 911 GT3, ran out of gas in the middle of a roundabout in Cowgate, a neighborhood in Newcastle. The scene, which quickly turned into a viral video on social media, shows the 26-year-old player pulled over on the side of the road, wearing the club’s training top and black pants, holding a green fuel can as he tried to fix a problem even VAR couldn’t explain.
From luxury to inconvenience
The car, valued at nearly £1.3 million and capable of reaching 200 mph, simply shut off in the middle of the street. The reason? No fuel. A trivial detail, but one that became a talking point in a country where soccer is followed more closely than the weather. Within minutes, fans recognized the player and started filming, turning a mechanical slip-up into viral content.
It didn’t take long for the footage to spread across accounts connected to Newcastle. And it’s funny how something so ordinary, an empty tank, can make such noise when the person involved is a Premier League athlete.
The price of visibility
Joe Willock isn’t a global superstar, but he’s well known in Newcastle. A product of Arsenal’s academy, he joined Newcastle in 2021, first on loan and then permanently, in a €29.4 million transfer.
This season, he’s featured in just three games, compared to 41 in the 2024/25 campaign. Now, he’s back in the spotlight for something far from the pitch. The episode might seem trivial, but it says a lot about how closely elite players are watched.
A simple everyday mistake, one any driver could make, turns into entertainment on a global scale. There’s a certain irony in that: while millions watch him sprint for 90 minutes at full intensity, all it took was stopping for a few seconds to make the news.