How football went teetotal (cricket take note)

Football writers read such reports both shaking and nodding their heads. Shaking them, because top professionals behaving that way is no longer conceivable in our sport. Yet nodding them because it’s cricket now? It’s where football used to be.

How long ago? Maybe 20 and certainly 30 years. The most infamous drinking misadventure involving the England football team was when Paul Gascoigne sat in the “dentist’s chair” of a Hong Kong nightclub having booze poured down his throat prior to Euro 96.

Nowadays Three Lions players sit on inflatable unicorns having wholesome fun in swimming pools. A night designed for them to let their hair down during Euro 2024 involved Ed Sheeran visiting their spa hotel to play a mini-gig. Gareth Southgate told his squad they could have “a beer or two” but videos showed players sitting listlessly, scrolling their phones, without a bottle in sight. A convention of young vicars would be having crazier fun.

Many of the team are virtually teetotal, like Harry Kane, Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice — whose first and only taste of beer was a sip of Heineken after winning the Conference League with West Ham United. The game has simply gone 0.0 per cent towards notions you can compromise preparation and still perform.

Modern icons are not mavericks like Gazza but preparation maniacs like Cristiano Ronaldo, who eats six small meals a day, takes five 90-minute naps daily and, of course, avoids alcohol. Or Robert Lewandowski, a near-teetotaller who avoids gluten and dairy, and practises “backwards eating” (he begins his meals with dessert). Or Haaland himself, whose extraordinary regime involves infrared light therapy, sleeping with his mouth taped shut, kale smoothies and eating cow hearts. The occasional incidents of drinking that do occur — think Jack Grealish having spirits poured into his mouth during Manchester City’s title celebrations or Joelinton getting banned for drink-driving — stand out for their rarity.

Live-in chefs and personal fitness staffs are commonplace for top players, and in a 2024 survey by the PFA, alcohol came low down the list of hazards to well-being. Higher up were fear of injury, on-pitch performance, fear of being dropped and online abuse. Gambling and snus (nicotine chews) were almost as much of a concern as booze.

The main reason for living cleaner is football’s ever-rising athletic demands. Recently, Arsenal’s head of sports science, Tom Allen, published research showing from 2015-2025 the high-intensity distance covered by Premier League players has risen by 23.1 per cent and sprint distance by 36.5 per cent. There are more fixtures, games last longer and players play more “congested minutes” (football involving three games within an eight-day period).

The international players union Fifpro says top players average as little as 4.3 days between matches and some get just 22 days’ rest between seasons.

Ryland Morgans, a former head of performance with Everton, Liverpool and Wales — where he is now assistant coach — has produced almost 200 publications in applied football science and consults across European clubs. His work goes into the granular detail of how evolving tactics have increased workload for players.

One is modern coaches prioritising intensity out of possession. “The high press has significantly contributed to an increase in physical demands and arguably injuries that still plague some teams. It can be a successful tactical strategy but only if players can actually complete this type of relentless running, recover and repeat it,” he says.

There is no hiding place. Morgans notes “advancements in technology over the last 20 years and a data-thirst have significantly increased scrutiny on every aspect of performance” and expects AI will “push performance boundaries further”.

Overall, “players and staff are far more educated these days, which reflects society, when it comes to nutrition, recovery, sleep, alcohol. Add the increasing demands of fixture schedules and accumulated match demands [team bonding sessions] are scarce and when they do happen often the individual choice is not to drink alcohol”.

Manchester City players were weighed on Christmas Day after three days off because of Guardiola’s strictness on diet. Nobody was over the weight targets he set them. He typifies the modern breed of coach obsessed with what players put into their bodies. Blood is tested, saliva is tested, body fat continually measured. Eat too much or drink, and the club will find out.

Contrast this with the past. The stories of successful teams who combined world-class on-pitch performing with world-class performance in the bar are embedded in football lore, from Arsenal’s notorious “Tuesday Club” of heavy drinkers like Tony Adams and Paul Merson, to the Chelsea “Bulldogs” who featured John Terry, Frank Lampard, Eidur Gudjohnsen and others from José Mourinho’s all-conquering side. “We’d be out all the time … lads would go out and get absolutely lamped,” recalled Damien Duff.

As recently as 2007 you had Rafa Benítez’s Liverpool squad indulging in drunken mayhem at a golf resort in Portugal, where after a row about karaoke, Craig Bellamy attacked John Arne Riise with an eight-iron and Jerzy Dudek was carted off by police. Days later Liverpool beat Barcelona in the Nou Camp.

There was the Leicester City side of Martin O’Neill which styled itself, said the captain Steve Walsh, as “the best pub team ever”. They prepared for the 1997 League Cup final in Tenerife where, “I swear we never missed a night’s drinking,” Walsh said, and for the 2000 League Cup final in La Manga where they were kicked out of their hotel after dancing on tables, urinating in plant pots and Stan Collymore set off a fire extinguisher. Leicester won both finals.

Drink was simply embedded in British football culture then. The League Cup was sponsored by Worthington’s, then Carling. The FA Cup was sponsored by Budweiser. Carlsberg was emblazoned on Liverpool’s shirts, Chang on Everton’s, Coors on Chelsea’s and Newcastle Brown Ale on Newcastle United’s.

Significant in the move towards purer habits was the influx of foreign coaches (Arsène Wenger especially) and foreign players. The Premier League stopped handing out alcohol for man-of-the-match awards in 2012 and from 2019 the FA has given winning teams at FA Cup finals magnums containing non-alcoholic champagne.

A fascinating witness is Mick “Baz” Rathbone, the former head of sports medicine at Everton, who after stints with too many clubs to mention as a conditioning specialist is still working — with the PGMOL — at 67.

Rathbone has written a richl -entertaining trilogy of books called The Smell of Football about his journey through the game. It began as a player in the 1970s and 80s with clubs including Birmingham City and Blackburn Rovers. In those days, he says: “We’d come off the pitch and the first thing you’d do is take a beer and sit with your socks down, having a can while the manager debriefed us. People like Duncan McKenzie would be having a fag.”

He remember a players’ revolt over pay at Blackburn which the chairman Bill Fox quelled rather easily by having a lackey deliver 48 cans of Thwaites to the dressing room.

Things started changing in the 2000s when Rathbone was working with David Moyes, trying to raise athletic standards at Everton. “We got a nutritionist in and were concerned about James McFadden. In the meeting the nutritionist was saying ‘OK you do this, you eat that’. Faddy drove off, I drove off and stopped for some petrol.

“Faddy was ahead of me, paying for his petrol and had a giant packet of crisps, a full-fat Coke and king-sized Mars Bar. I tapped him on the back. ‘How’s the diet going?’ And he goes, ‘Really well, mate.’ ”

The first player with their own staff was the Italian Alessandro Pistone, who had a live-in fitness coach. Rathbone was put out. “I said it doesn’t make sense. We’ve got fitness coaches, I’ll look after you. But Sandro said, ‘Baz, if I do all the things right and my coach does everything right for me, and if I live right, I could get one more year from my career and that is a million pounds’.

“Now personal coaches are everywhere and an extra year of playing is worth five million, ten million pounds to the player.”

Rathbone’s son, Ollie, plays for Wrexham, never drinks during the season and even on holiday seldom touches beer. It was similar with the League Two players of Accrington Stanley with whom Rathbone worked in his last club job. “Teetotallers are everywhere now,” he says. “I played against guys like Jan Molby who probably couldn’t do more than five press-ups or pass a bleep test but was a genius on the ball.

“But as the game changes and becomes faster you can’t survive without athleticism. So what we’ve got is a generation now of players who are maybe not quite as skilful as the best from 30 years ago but who walk all over the old players because of their increased fitness.”

Rathbone does wonder if football is going too far; whether it is over-policing players’ bodies, risking making them joyless and robotic. Danny Donachie, consultant mental performance coach for Burnley, has voiced similar fears.

In a LinkedIn post Donachie wrote: “The hardest thing about being a top athlete will surprise you: boredom.” In another he observed: “The lives of modern-day footballers are curated in fine detail. Every atom of food they consume is measured and policed. Every inch they move is analysed.”

Drewe Broughton works with elite athletes and business leaders on being able to “perform with courage not control”. He was a footballer himself, a striker once expected to play for England, who succumbed to addiction problems, including with alcohol, before reinvention as a performance guru.

He has helped a number of Premier League players and coaches and also wonders where the obsession with “living perfectly” will lead. “It’s about finding the middle line,” Broughton says. “The middle line being we have to win. It’s heavy. It’s enormous. Some days I want to run away from it all.

“I can understand the cricketers. You need to find a way of dealing with pressure and still staying smiling, still staying creative, still staying full of risk, still staying full of bravery. What does booze do? Fills us with bravado, bravery and risk.

“Walking round the forest at [rehab retreat] Sporting Chance in 2011 with Tony Adams, Tony said, ‘I remember coming to watch you for Harry Redknapp when I was at Portsmouth. You got two hat-tricks in two games then stopped scoring. What happened? What did your week look like when you were getting all those goals?’ I said, ‘Drinking and shagging’.

“I said what happened was my inner voice, my moral compass — which I’m grateful of today — said. ‘This isn’t how you were raised’ and so I stopped drinking, stopped going out. I started getting to training early, leaving late, measuring my food — and went the other way to perfectionism. The wheels fell off because I was gripping on so tight, thinking about the game in three days’ time, full of stress.”

Broughton thinks camera phones, as much as performance demands, stop footballers going out drinking. “Sex is a huge problem now, sleeping pills are a problem, snus is a problem, alcohol not so much. You can hide the other addictions whereas drink, where are you going to go? A nightclub? No chance. Someone will film you.

“But it’s all the same shit. Drink, sex, gambling — it’s just energy that has to leak out somewhere. What energy were that England cricket group suppressing? The energy of truth. And the truth was the pressure was enormous. ‘We’re away from home, I’m staring at the ceiling and I’ve got to score a f***ing hundred tomorrow, and I’m shitting myself.

“So they did what they did. They didn’t find the middle line but nor did Southgate with England where everything was ‘nice.’ ”

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