Secret Footballer - The Secret Footballer: What Goes on Tour

What Goes on Tour is meant to stay on tour. But it isnt going to any more

In November 1992, when the Premier League had only been open for business a few months, Manchester United bought Eric Cantona from Leeds for 1 million and paid him a colossal 10,000 a week wage. We called it a mega deal. The party had begun.

In the summer of 2016, Paul Pogba, whom Manchester United had sold for 1.5 million four years earlier, re-signed for the club for a world record 87 million. His wage? 220,000 a week. After tax, that is.

My entire career took place between the Cantona mega deal and the Pogba return.

You probably want to know where the money went.

After all, whats a little secret between friends?

The Secret Footballer is back with his most sensational expos to date of the real lives of Premier League stars

I Am The Secret Footballer

Tales from The Secret Footballer

The Secret Footballers Guide to the Modern Game

The Secret Footballer: Access All Areas

The Secret Footballer: How to Win

WHEN A FOOTBALLER retires, people always say hell never have to work again, the lucky bastard.

Yes, thats because our afternoons at the London School of Economics told us all there is to know about the necessity of prudence in financial matters. We get the best advice, we make the best investments; when we get given shedloads of money, we are mature enough and shrewd enough to protect ourselves from sharks and from ourselves.

Actually, heres a thing that will make you weep. In my first job, I earned slightly less than 11,000 a year and I lived very much hand to mouth. Now, after a lifetime in football, I have a mortgage of 11,000 a month. There are months in the year when I cant pay it. So I have a mortgage that my agent got me into during the good times, and a bank who just loved me to death during the good times, but now that bank cant give me a new mortgage because I am an ex-footballer and dont have a recognizable permanent pensionable job for them to enter into their 19.99 calculators.

I dont want sympathy, but there is a real family living under that heavily mortgaged roof. Real little people. The pressures for me today are the same as for everybody else. It sometimes feels as if football never happened. I sometimes feel like Steve Martin in The Jerk when he realizes that after accidentally getting very rich, he has now accidentally gone very broke. He sweeps all the stuff off his desk. I dont need any of this, he says. I dont need this stuff. I dont need anything. Except this. This ashtray. Thats the only thing I need. Is this. Just this ashtray. And this paddle game. The ashtray and the paddle game, this is all I need. And this remote control and these matches and this lamp And he shuffles off in his dressing gown with his trousers bunched around his ankles.

I have a snooker table that I bought. I love it. It is the one thing that takes my mind away from the struggles of life. And I do have struggles. But Im fucked if Im selling my snooker table. Thats all I need. That snooker table

I signed my first professional football contract for 550 a week, but as Id had a job outside football I was still wired in to thinking of earnings in per annum terms. 550 a week is 28,600 a year. I thought Id hit the jackpot. So did my friends. They envied me for not being broke in the fourth week of every month. I was still thinking that way too and I was pretty pleased with my lot. Until I realized that as a footballer I needed things that I couldnt afford. I was still broke by the fourth week of every month.

The truth is, I would have signed for 200 a week to be a footballer. The game is poor at negotiating. Money cures everything. Rub some money on that gunshot wound, youll feel better, son. Need more? Its in a bucket in the corner.

I always think of the Beatles in this regard. After Brian Epstein died, the boys needed a new manager. Three of the band members recommended Allen Klein, the American business guru who was already manager of the Rolling Stones. Paul McCartney was the one to hold out. The boys visited McCartney to put the screws on him. They told him that Klein would do it, but he wanted 20 per cent and the contract had to be signed immediately. (It didnt.)

McCartney said: Tell him he can have fifteen per cent. They said: Youre stalling. He replied: No, Im working for us; were a big act. I can recall the exact words: Were a big act the Beatles. Hell take fifteen per cent. But for some strange reason (I think they were intoxicated with the American) the others said: No, hes got to have twenty per cent, and hes got to report to his board. Youve got to sign, now or never.

Sadly they overruled McCartney and signed Klein, and, like the Rolling Stones, wound up in years of litigation (the Stones $1.25 million advance from Decca back in 1965 was deposited into a company Klein had set up and the fine print of the contract didnt require him to release it for twenty years. Even in football that would be a sharp stroke.) But Ive always remembered that McCartney quote. Id have it over the door of any school of economics. Id nail it over the door of the FA too, if I could find a proper fucking door instead of the revolving one they have for all the staff who come in and leave again soon after.

I thought of McCartney when watching Roy Hodgson at the 2016 Euros. Why make him the highest-paid manager? Offer him half! The man is over sixty, the job is the culmination of his lifes work. You really think hell turn it down? Just like I wouldnt have turned down 200 a week for the chance to play football.

You think the amount of money footballers make is indecent? Listen, different laws apply. Gravity doesnt work on football money. It just goes up and up, with no relation to market forces. And so the guys who do the work or play the game get the lions share of what people are happy to pay for.

At my first professional club, when I had moved into what I regarded as the big leagues, I thought that certain things were expected of me. Not just expected of me by the club, but by my friends and by the general public, who talked about little else but my life and lifestyle.

Mrs TSF was now the wife of a professional footballer. Forget all that stuff about having a degree and a life of substance in the real world. She was going to have to make a step up too. She has discussed this a little in her intro at the beginning of the book. No need to look back if you skipped it. I dont come out smelling of roses.

You know when couples say that they stay together for the kids? Years ago the basketball player Dennis Rodman wrote a book called Bad As I Wanna Be. A year later his wife brought out a book called Worse Than He Says He Is. Well, Mrs TSF could bring the game of football to its very knees if she decided to write a book. So lets just agree that her foreword is to literature what Gaud was to architecture and Einstein was to science.

Weve had a lot of interesting times together since I signed for my first professional club. And whereas most players wives spend a fair amount of their time looking sideways out of the window as the juggernaut hurtles down the outside lane of the Premier League highway, Mrs TSF always looked dead ahead.

At first we were both rabbits in the headlights, Mrs TSF and I. Christ knows what wed have been like if Id been signed by Manchester United instead of a League One struggler. As I say, I had blind faith that somebody would spot me doing something interesting with a football one day, but until it happens its just a warm feeling inside that tempers the reality of working in a warehouse with a sadistic arsehole that calls himself your boss and who hates you more than his own life.