VERY LITTLE ABOUT the relationship between footballers and women is normal. Initially, I was very rude to girls who wanted to talk to me. I wasn’t good at it and I didn’t want the hassle that it brings. Today, I’m far better at just going with the flow and having fun, but it’s still a conundrum that throws up uncomfortable scenarios.
At every club, wherever you look, there are a host of obliging women, hovering. Depending on what it is a player is in the market for there are always several women looking to meet his requirements. At my first big club, and new to town, the captain introduced himself and asked me where I was staying.
‘I’m in the hotel, mate. It’s OK, should be able to get a house sorted fairly quickly,’ I replied.
‘OK, good stuff,’ he said. ‘Listen, if you get a bit stiff after training give the masseuse a buzz. She lives not too far from there and she’ll give you a good once-over, trust me.’
‘Hannah’, as we’ll call her, turned out to be a very buxom blonde woman in her mid-twenties who knew her way around a sportsman’s body better than he knew his own. It is a mystery, to me at least, why these women feel the need to act in this way.
The players are doing the same, of course, but it’s the women who always surprise me – quite often they are well-educated, down-to-earth women. There is always one at every club; there turned out to be about five at ours.
The higher you go, of course, the more there are – but the higher the profile of the player, the more spectacular the story. Rooney can testify to that last bit. Later, these women took the form of club secretaries and, as the game grew and the money flooded in, PR girls.
The one constant from then until now are the girls who ‘work in the office’. Nobody knows exactly which office it is or what they do but, trust me, they’re there and they are always happy to help. Sometimes they are discreet about it, and other times they go ahead and invite themselves to the Christmas party – but they all share one thing in common: the need to sleep with or snare a footballer.
And just when you think that you may be about to buckle under the sheer pull of a woman who walks into the training ground to deliver the fan mail wearing high heels and a skirt short enough to show off the fact that she is wearing stockings and suspenders on a rainy Tuesday morning in January, you hear that one of the youth team players has ‘done a bit’ with her.
And that always ruins it for about a month or so.
This extract is from the book ‘The Secret Footballer: Access All Areas’ and it can be purchased here.
