KINKY BOOTS
Secret sex lives of footballers
The time is 11.30pm and I’m squeezed into a plush velvet booth in the VIP area of an exclusive West End nightclub. Beside me sit a sea of glossy-locked, nubile young women all in near-identical bodycon dresses. In between sips of the free white wine the bar staff have sent over, I attempt to make conversation with three of them, but these women are in no mood to talk. Instead their eyes swivel like roulette wheels up and down the club, until they stop, all at once, at a banquette in the corner of the room.
Here, a cluster of young men swig champagne. At first glance, they could be any boys on a night out, but take a closer look and their features bleed into familiar faces. They are the sporting heroes of our Saturday lunchtimes, the ones whose antics are splashed across the back pages (when they’re good) and the front pages (when they’re not) of the British tabloids every other weekend. They are premiership footballers and tonight they are these young women’s prey.
Many of us have grown up understanding that footballers don’t always play by the rules of modernday monogamy – after all, rarely a month passes without a story concerning their libidinous behaviour. And if it’s not a story about that behaviour, it’s a story about the super injunction masking that behaviour. Tales of threesomes (Wayne Rooney), gerontophilia (also Wayne Rooney – look it up), sex with in-laws (Ryan Giggs’s eight-year affair with his sister-in-law Natasha Giggs), as well as more serious allegations of sex with a minor (Adam Johnson) have suggested a truly sordid underbelly.
What makes the above stories all the more shocking is that every footballer mentioned was in a relationship at the time of these allegations. And every partner (except Giggs’ wife, who left five years after his affair with his sister-in-law) stayed with them. Why do they do it? Is it pragmatism? Naïvety? A willingness to overlook a few indiscretions for a lifestyle of privilege? Or is it love? To find out, you’d have to speak to those who have gone through it.
SQUAD GOALS
“We used to call them the table sharks,” says Lizzie Cundy, smiling. She is talking about the women who would prey on her exhusband, former Chelsea player Jason Cundy, on nights out.
“Most of the girls knew the bouncers well enough for them to tip them off if there were a load of footballers in [the club]. When the champagne and sparklers started, it was like bees around a honeypot.”
Cundy is, at a guess, in her mid-forties. She has glowing, expensive-looking skin and the hard-boiled body of someone who spends hours in the gym.
“It was the same at games,” she continues.“I used to have to ask the other wives to watch my seat, because otherwise by the time I’d been to the loo and come back, there’d be another girl in my seat. We’d even have a little code, to tell each other if someone had been sniffing around. You’d have to constantly watch your back.”
Lizzie speaks with the cool detachment of someone who has had time to heal old wounds. She was with Cundy from the age of 19, and the two divorced in 2012 after his well-publicised affair with an opera singer.“Unfortunately if you marry a footballer,” she warns,“then you’ve got to have eyes in the back of your head.”
POWER PLAY
Hannah Roberts* speaks with less impartiality. We meet one rainy Tuesday afternoon in west London. I spot her immediately, a diminutive doll of a woman with a wide smile and even wider eyes. She dated a championship footballer ‘unofficially’
(OK! magazine translation: no rock, no wedding) for two years after they met in an All Bar One. At the time, he was a mid-level footballer. Hannah had barely heard of him before but he was fun and charming and there were romantic dates and lavish meals out. That was until the club he played for starting picking him more regularly for games.
“Things changed when his career really took off. He stopped talking to me, and I assumed he was with