Life's A Pitch

From kiss and tells to drunken debauchery, footballers exist in a world of scandal, sky-high salaries and sex. So who better to lift the lid on what really goes on off the pitch than the women who used to love them?

- Josie Copson

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 modern-day 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.