Having a ball?

One ex-Championship player, who played professionally for 22 years, reveals what it’s really like on his side of the field

It’s the night before an away game against West Ham. In a hotel room, a teammate and I are asleep when the telephone rings. It’s one of the other players. He’s arranged to meet a girl in his room but she’s brought a friend, so he asks if she can stay in our room. My teammate agrees. I pretend I’m still asleep as he answers the door and leads her into the bathroom. There’s a few giggles, some groans and half an hour later the door closes again and we go back to sleep. This is normal.

Women literally being delivered to your doorstep for sex. You don’t even have to look for ‘it’ in bars, but when you do, ‘it’ tends to find you. You’re stood at a bar and a woman casually slips her hand down the front of your trousers. You’ve not seen her before, but you don’t stop her either. Half an hour later, you can’t remember what she said, or was called, yet you’re back home with her. This is normal.

They say footballers attract a certain type of woman, but it’s every type of woman. It isn’t just the stereotypical football groupie. It’s the estate agent showing you around your new apartment. The mum whose eye you catch as you do the school run. It’s your wife’s best friend who sneaks into the room you sleep in alone because “you have to prepare for the game tomorrow”. And more common than you think, it’s the wife of the older player in the squad who has long since tired of her husband. This is all normal.

Is this just a footballer thing? Of course not. These are just men who are given more opportunity than your average male and they take it. There is simply nothing wrong with it 99.9% of the time. It’s fun and everyone gets what they want, but the stories that people remember are the extremes. Does every footballer act on their impulses? Not at all. Does every night out end with a pile of people on a bed where the only things you can make out are arms and legs? Well, I’ve not been involved in that. And I played professionally for two decades.

For every player like John Terry or Ryan Giggs who is caught in a scandal, there are many others who go home to their wife and kids every night. For every young player who

is seen out on the town on a Saturday night, there are others sat at home with a takeaway watching Match Of The Day.

You have to remember this isn’t something that happens gradually. You leave school, go into professional football, then bang, everything hits you at once. You’re given money, adulation and a false sense of worth. You become everything you’re expected to be until you work things out for yourself. Some players never get to that point, but then, what makes them different to everyone else who struggles with certain things in life?

What you do learn as you get older is that most of the women who want you just want the parts of you that come with being a footballer. They simply want to be your ‘plus one’ in a lifestyle, and for many, it’s a realisation that dawns on you too late. So blame footballers for their antics if you want to, but that’s only half of the story.

Women are delivered to your doorstep for sex