Manchester United's Top 10 sex scandals
Revelations about Ryan Giggs' private life continue to emerge, weeks after he was Nanamed in Parliament as the football who had taken out an injunction to avoid claims of an affair with Big Brother's Imogen Thomas becoming public. It's a big tabloid story, but there have been many more involving the world's best-supported club. Here are out top 10 Manchester United sex scandals: |
Manchester United's 2007 Christmas bash was the party to end all parties, largely because Sir Alex Ferguson has not allowed players to organise one since. The headlines focused on young Jonny Evans, who was falsely accused of rape, but the incidentals were Bacchanailal: An eight-hour booze-up followed by a party at Manchester's swanky Great John Street hotel, to which 100 hand-picked girls had been invited.
"It was horrible," said one of what transpired. "A player had been pestering me and my friends for ages trying to get us up to a bedroom. I kept telling him 'no' but he just wouldn't take it.
"He was really drunk as were the rest of them. Then he just grabbed me and started to drag me away from the main area towards the toilets.
"I was in tears. The players were treating girls like pieces of meat."
The night was also memorable for Wayne Rooney suggesting to one partygoer that she and her friend should join him in the toilets for a threesome. Alas, his roving eye had fallen on Daily Mirror undercover reporter Sarah Tetteh.
When midfielder Kleberson arrived at Old Trafford from Atletico Paranaense in 2003, two things became apparent: he wasn't as good as fellow new signing Cristiano Ronaldo and his wife was even younger than the preening Portuguese, then just 18.
It emerged that the Brazilian had started dating his missus, the former Daiane Williams E Silva, when he was 21 and she was just 14, turning down a move to Leeds in 2002 because, at 15, she was not old enough to leave the country without her parents.
The couple married on Daiane's 16th birthday, which happened to be Valentine's Day, and a little over 10 months later she gave birth to their first child after the act of jumping up to celebrate her husband's goal against Blackburn sent her into labour.
No player has made a more impressive entrance to Manchester United than Dwight Yorke.
Having arrived from Aston Villa for £12.6million in August 1998, he managed to make both the back and front pages of a Sunday tabloid a month later when it printed stills from a video found in the player's rubbish, which showed he and former Villa colleague Mark Bosnich involved in an orgy with four women and a transvestite, the keeper being whipped by one leather-clad blonde while Yorke had sex with her friend. The footballers were later seen donning women's clothing.
It ushered in a golden age of Yorke shagging stories, of which his former landlady and friend Sheila Dudley memorably said: "If some girl comes to his house with her knickers in her handbag, it's up to him, isn't it?"
Best among them was the conquest Yorke had convinced that he was a local postman named Brian. She said of their trip to a nightclub: "People were coming past and saying 'hello' to him and he said it was because he delivered their letters. I believed him. He seemed a lovely bloke."
Later, he would invite then-girlfriend Katie 'Jordan' Price to Old Trafford, where Victoria Beckham would greet her in the WAGs' box with a cheery chorus of Who Let The Dogs Out?
In 2001, the pair would approach an undercover female Daily Mirror reporter in Monte Carlo, with Yorke asking, "Do you like black men? Do you fancy a threesome?" and Price pleading: "Come on. Please don't leave me on my own."
Hailed by the Old Trafford crowd with the song, "Dwight Yorke, wherever you may be, You are the king of pornography", the striker harumphed that the chant "set a bad example to kids", shortly before Sir Alex Ferguson sold him to Blackburn.
Married to the former Cathy Holding for 45 years after first encountering her in a meeting to arrange a strike at the typewriter factory where they both worked, Sir Alex Ferguson has one of the strongest marriages in football.
Which meant the press were immediately sceptical when, in October 2002, 21-year-old software technician Nadia Abrahams told South African police that Fergie had touched her knee and invited her back to his hotel after she offered him a lift when his car was involved in a 2am traffic accident near Cape Town's Waterfront district.
After all, Fergie's only previous brush with anything approaching a sex scandal had come when he was quoted as describing a former player's penis as "not just big, it's magnificent", mystifyingly annoying the recipient of the praise, Dion Dublin.
Sir Alex strongly denied any wrongdoing in South Africa and though Abrahams and boyfriend Brian Ebden managed to sell their story for £75,000, the case was dropped shortly after reports emerged claiming Abrahams had "flaunted herself at Sir Alex, dancing round and around him in circles" after spotting him in the upmarket Mannenburg's jazz club while the United manager "was behaving like a total gentleman all night".
Before September 2007, the public thought Cristiano Ronaldo's idea of fun was, in his memorable phrase, "putting a television high in a tree outside and kicking footballs at it".
Then came allegations that the Portuguese winger had organised an orgy at his Cheshire home, inviting two team-mates and five hookers.
Busy Brazilian prostitute Juliana Baltrusch claimed to have performed a sex act on Nani, dirty-danced with Ronaldo and later enjoyed a no-holds-barred spanking session with Rolph-from-the-Muppets lookalike Anderson.
A year earlier, the Brazilian midfielder had been the subject of a tabloid kiss-and-tell in which 20-year-old model Leah Houghton claimed Anderson had chatted her up with the words "f*** f*** f***", after which she had sex with him on a toilet.
No wonder he lost his hair so quickly.
Having been a customer at Liverpool massage parlour Divas in his Everton days - sending one girl a note of thanks reading: "I shagged you on December 26, loads of love, Wayne" and famously enjoying the services of 52-year-old PVC-clad mum of seven Tricia 'Auld Slapper' Tierney - the spud-faced nipper was thought to have cleaned up his act after then-fiancee Coleen McLoughlin angrily threw her engagement ring into a squirrel sanctuary.
After his move to United, Rooney's penchant for grappling grandmas was immortalised in the Everton chant: "Auld Slapper is a prossie, She plays with dirty toys, And when she shags Wayne Rooney, She thinks of Davie Moyes".
Alas, September last year brought revelations that Rooney had been paying Manchester prostitute Jennifer Thompson £1,200 a time for sex, once allowing Thompson's like-minded chum Helen Wood to join them for a threesome and a lesbian show.
Coleen forgave, as only she can, and the most shocking element of the whole farrago was thought by many to be the £200 Wayne paid a hotel employee to bring him a packet of cigarettes while sampling Juicy Jeni's dubious charms.
A swordsman of Beattyesque proportions in early 1970s Manchester, Bestie wisely opened two private clubs - Slack Alice and Oscar's - where his roistering would go unreported.
Memorable incidents that evaded the press included celebrity lawyer George Carman, who had helped clear his friend of slapping waitress Stevie Sloniecka and breaking her nose, marching up to him in Oscar's and declaring: "George Best, you blackguard. You've been f***ing my wife."
When Best was not in his Mancunian bubble, however, all bets were off.
In February 1974, he was photographed leaving London society club Tramp with reigning Miss World Marjorie Wallace, then engaged to Formula One racing driver Peter Revson.
The scandal deepened when Best returned to Manchester without her after a row, only to be arrested in Slack's at 3am and brought back to London's Wood Lane police station, where he was charged with burglary of her flat and the theft of a £2,000 mink coat, jewellery and spirits.
Wallace was stripped of her title and Best advised that he could go to prison.
But on March 22, five days before Best was due in court, Revson was killed in practice for the South African Grand Prix.
Wallace flew back to the States and the case collapsed.
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| Ryan Giggs with wife Stacey Cooke before the scandal broke |
The phrase could hardly have been more unfortunate given further claims of an eight-year affair with brother Rhodri's wife, Natasha.
Now, there's talk of a third woman and the emergence of fascinating details from the past, including his dalliance with PR girl Caroline Stanbury during his courting of Stacey and the rumoured existence of a city centre pad, known as Giggsy's Corner, where conquests could be taken.
2) Martin Edwards blows the toilet doors off
Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards had long been regarded as a lucky man.
Having failed to sell off a controlling stake in the Red Devils to ball-juggling UFO abductee Michael Knighton for £20m in 1989, the butcher's son then sat back and reaped the Premier League riches, even brushing off dalliances with prostitutes in Brazil and Switzerland, who gave him stinging reviews including "he was old and like a grandad" and "it took four hours to make love and it wasn't very good".
However, that luck ran out in scandalous fashion late in 2002 when the dad-of-two received a police caution after allegedly being caught peering under a cubicle door in the ladies' loos at Cheshire's swanky Mottram Hall hotel.
More allegations followed and former United security chief Ned Kelly later claimed to have been briefed to follow Edwards at the club's post-1996 FA Cup final party as "his visits to the ladies are becoming more frequent".
Wrote Kelly: "It had been a constant source of amusement to the players and ground staff, but it was undeniably embarrassing. He just seemed to have a compulsion to invade the space of women in their most private moments."
Edwards left the United board shortly afterwards and by 2003 had sold off his stake in United for £80m, although he remains an honorary life president of the club and was part of their sparsely-attended and rain-sodden 19th title parade around Manchester.
It's a 'What if...' double whammy which perplexes United fans and journalists even today: Would Manchester United have broken Liverpool's late 1970s and 1980s stranglehold on the title had Tommy Docherty not been sacked in July 1977?
And how many acres of newsprint would be expended on the story today had a contemporary Old Trafford boss left his wife and four children for the physio's missus on the eve of the FA Cup final?
Despite offering to resign at the club's victorious banquet after beating Liverpool at Wembley, The Doc initially survived the furore and was holidaying in the Lake District, contemplating plans to sign Peter Shilton and the mercurial Tony Currie, when the axe finally fell.
Rumours claimed Docherty had been a victim of WAG power in the shape of letters to chairman Louis Edwards from players' wives demanding his dismissal - hardly surprising as the manager had made his share of dressing room and backroom enemies during five turbulent years in which he eased out Bobby Charlton, brutally dumped George Best and Denis Law and fell out with the likes of Alex Stepney and Gerry Daly. In came safe pair of hands Dave Sexton and Docherty's thrillingly cavalier side, starring midfield schemer Lou Macari, wingers Gordon Hill and Steve Coppell and barrel-chested striker Stuart 'Pancho' Pearson, was about to be broken up. The Doc himself started ultimately unsuccessful legal proceedings against Edwards for defamation and wrongful dismissal, announcing his decision while sporting a black eye given to him by cuckolded magic-sponge man Laurie Brown, to whose ex-wife Mary Docherty has now been married for nearly 30 years. United fans mourned their loss with this creative reworking of Knees Up Mother Brown: "Who's up Mary Brown? Who's up Mary Brown? Tommy, Tommy Docherty."
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