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What’s wrong with people? I don’t mean ordinary people. I mean the superpeople. The excessively talented, the wildly successful, the world-famous, the widely adored, the wealthy beyond measure. Take Cristiano Ronaldo, Serena Williams and Taylor Swift, a triumphant trio for the ages. Each is blessed with the two things you need to reach the top: huge talent coupled with a ferocious work ethic. There’s an awful lot to love – if only they didn’t seem to love themselves quite so much.

Swift’s talent and generosity are as awesome as the wealth they’ve generated for her. Why, in a Disney+ docuseries about her huge Eras tour, we saw her distributing envelopes to emotional crew members, sharing out some of the profits. Wonderful! Who does that? On the other hand, who has themselves filmed doing that?

And now she’s married, which is wonderful, too. Millions shared her joy. But was it necessary to book for the purpose one of the world’s most celebrated venues, bringing New York City to a standstill? At the moment the deed was done, in the manner of smoke puffing out of the Vatican chimney, the billboards at Madison Square Garden flashed up the glad tidings for the world to see.

I was famous once, and I’m quite sure I let my ego race ahead of any talent I had and became insufferable. But even in my prime – if that’s the right word for it – had I happened to get married, it would not have occurred to me to book out the Crystal Leisure Centre in Stourbridge and flash the happy tidings up on big screens for the interest of bewildered drivers on the ring road beside it.

Speaking of Stourbridge, as I sit writing this in a coffee shop here, I recall that the band Pop Will Eat Itself were formed in the town. Did pop eat itself? Will it? Swift seems to have her knife and fork out. I’m waiting for the moment that the world has enough, when enough people look up at that billboard and say: “Yeah? And?”

Adoration has its limits. The adored can overplay their hands. In 2014, U2 and Apple arranged for the band’s latest album, Songs of Innocence, to be placed automatically into the iTunes libraries of about half a billion users. There were objections. It felt less like largesse than arrogance, suggesting a presumption that someone other than us decided what made it into our music libraries.

Bono, to his credit, soon nailed the problem. With the air of someone who had in the nick of time found a handhold in a cliff face to save himself from falling into the abyss of his own ego, he said: “I had this beautiful idea and we kind of got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self-promotion and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn’t be heard. There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.” Their next album should have been called Humility, or Chastened. I would have liked the sound of it.

Ardent self-love has always been part of the superstardom package, but the needle is now being pushed so deep into the red zone that, especially in sport, we’re getting distortion. There’s some argument as to whether Williams, the retired tennis megastar, asked for or was offered a wildcard place in the draw for the first round at Wimbledon. Either way, to much clapping, oohing and aahing, she took to the court. Not that she’d have heard any of these sweet sounds of adoration, as she had large headphones clamped about her head to cancel them out. I was there, and it felt a bit off.

Her opponent was a young woman called Maya Joint who didn’t appear to have read the script and went and beat the hero of the hour. For her trouble, Joint got a cursory handshake. None of us got to hear what Williams made of it all, because she declined to appear at the mandatory post-match press conference. Mandatory, that is, apparently, for everyone other than Williams. By way of an excuse, she said that her knee was sore. Hmm. Whatever, the message was clear: this was all about Williams and everyone would have to bend their own knees to her will.

Wildcards have their place, no doubt, but Wimbledon is one of the four biggest tennis tournaments in the calendar. It’s about elite sport. There’s only so many times the All England club can let celebrity or legendary status trump athletic competence before something starts to be lost.

In team sports, the veneration of the individual, by the team and the organisers as well as the individual in question, is even dafter. Ronaldo, never anything other than his own biggest fan, pointed our Ronaldo’s brilliance once again this week. “Before Cristiano,” he explained, “Portugal had never won a big trophy.” True that. But in this World Cup, way past his best, everyone other than Ronaldo could see that Portugal might have been better off without him.

Yet Fifa bent the rules to excuse him from a suspension for a red card for violent conduct that would have seen him miss Portugal’s first two World Cup matches. At which point, Roberto Martínez, Portugal’s head coach, must have quietly breathed the opposite of a sigh of relief, knowing he’d have no choice but to make the great man’s name the first he put on the team sheet. In Ronaldo’s mind, this is as it should always be until such time as Ronaldo declares that hell has frozen over. Honestly, if he were ice-cream, he’d not only lick himself; he’d buy a Mr Whippy van, rename it Mr Ronaldo and serve himself 99s all day long.

Everyone needs to know when to bow out, when their race is run. I rated myself as a good dad, ferrying children to and fro being a particular speciality. If I took Ronaldo’s attitude, I’d now be reliving past glories waiting at the gates of the school my kids left years ago. Just a shame they haven’t thought fit to commission a statue of me there. It’s the least they could have done to mark Chiles’s contribution to the community.

• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist

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