Paul Merson - How Not to Be a Professional Footballer

When we walked in, I thought I’d arrived in downtown Baghdad. Water dripped from the ceiling. The board games were in pieces and all the plastic parts were scattered over the floor. It turned out they had belonged to the kids of club vice-chairman David Dein. He‘d lent them to the squad for the week, believing we’d appreciate the gesture, seeing as we were grown adults. The balcony window was wide open and I could see a bed upended by the pool outside. Then I realised the lads were sitting there in the room, all of them staring at me. Tone, Lee Dixon, Nigel Winterburn, Alan Smith and George. In the corner, Gus was twitching on a chair with his shirt off. His muscles were rippling and his jaw was clenched shut. His breathing sounded funny. Behind him, Paul Davis was massaging his shoulders, glaring at me like I was a murderer. Gus looked like a prize fighter waiting to pummel somebody.

George stood up and started the dressing-down.

‘What’s all this, Paul?’

‘Yeah, I know boss,’ I said. ‘Me and Gus had a bit of an argument and I came back here and trashed his room.’

He nodded, weighing up the situation. ‘Well, why don’t you go outside now and sort it out between yourselves?’ he said.

What? I started shaking. Gus looked like a caged Rottweiler gagging for his dinner. I’d sobered up sharpish, because I knew I didn’t want to fight Gus – he would have killed me. Gus knew it too and was cracking his knuckles, working the muscles in his upper body. Then Paul Davis piped up.

‘Yeah, why don’t you go outside and sort it out, Merse? Fight him.’

Fuck that. I backed down, apologised, grovelled, and took my punishment. Nobody spoke to me for two months afterwards, and I was chucked out of the players’ pool. That was bad news. The players’ pool was a cut of the TV money which was shared out among the team from Arsenal’s FA Cup and League Cup runs. That added up to a lot of cash in those days. I could earn more money from the players’ pool than from my wages and appearances money put together. I was gutted.

It was George’s way to keep us in check through our wallets. When I won the League in 1989, my wages were £300 a week, with a £350 bonus for a win and £200 for an appearance. In a good month I could clock up three or four grand. There were never any goal bonuses in those days, because George reckoned they would have made us greedy, but if you look at the old videos now, you can see we all jumped on one another whenever we scored. That was because we were getting more dough for a win than our weekly wage. Everyone was playing for one another, it was phenomenal, but if you looked at the subs’ bench, it was always moody. Life on the sidelines was financially tough for a player, because we were only getting the basic £300.

Still, George made a point of keeping the lads close financially. Some of the team now feel a bit fed up with him because they didn’t earn the money they might have done at another big club, and it’s true that we were very poorly paid compared to the other teams. But the thing is, all of those players went on to make a lorryload of appearances throughout their careers thanks to him. They earned quite a bit in the long run, so they shouldn’t have a bad word to say about the bloke.

It’s a million miles away from the game today, but I’ve got no qualms about top, top players making great money. They’re entertainers. Arnold Schwarzenegger makes loads of films and he can’t act, but no one says anything about him making £7 million a movie, do they? If a top player gets £100,000 a week in football, the fans say he’s earning too much, but players like that are the difference between people going to work on a Monday happy or moody.

Your Steven Gerrards, your Wayne Rooneys – these are the players that should get the serious money. My problem is with the average players getting lorryloads of cash for sitting on the bench. That’s where it’s wrong. From an early age, players should be paid on appearances, just like George had set us up at Arsenal. They should get 33.3 percent in wages, 33.3 percent in appearance money and 33.3 percent in win bonuses.

It gives the players incentives; it stops people slacking off. I’ve seen it with certain strikers enough times. They are on fire, then they sign a new contract and never kick the ball again. They don’t look interested. They move to a new club and do the same. Those things sicken me, but not all footballers are like that. When you look at players like Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes, they seem like proper professionals. They score at least eight out of 10 ratings for their performance levels every year, and they’ve won everything in the game 10 times over. They’re still churning it out. I never hear them complaining about money. Well, they’re at United, so they probably don’t have to.

My mucking around in Bermuda was par for the course really. Every year George liked to take the squad to Marbella in Spain for a short holiday. We’d go three times a season, the idea being that a few days in the sun would freshen the lads up before a big run of games. We’d meet at the airport on a Sunday morning, and by Sunday evening I’d be paro, usually with Grovesy. I loved it.

One year we went away when it was Grovesy’s birthday. Neither of us was playing because of injuries, so we went out on the piss, hitting the bars on Marbella’s water-front. By the time we’d staggered into Sinatra’s, a pub by the port, all the lads were drinking and getting stuck into dinner. I was hammered. When the condiments came over, I squirted Grovesy with a sachet of tomato ketchup. The sauce splattered his face and fancy white shirt. Grovesy squirted me back with mustard and within seconds we were both smothered in red and yellow mess.

Then the lads joined in. Because it was Grovesy’s birthday, we jumped on him and grabbed his arms and legs. Some bright spark suggested dunking him in the sea, which was just over the road. Tourists stared and pointed. God knows what they must have thought as they watched a group of blokes they’d probably recognised from Match of the Day staggering across the street, dragging a screaming team-mate towards the tide.

We lobbed him over a small wall and I waited for the splash and Grovesy’s screams.

There was no noise. We couldn’t see over the rocks. I started to brick myself. How far down was the water? Nobody had checked before throwing him in.

Finally … splash!

Then there was screaming – thank God. The lads started laughing, nervously. We peered over the edge and saw a ginger head and thrashing arms. He was about 20 miles below us, thrashing about in the waves. Grovesy was panicking, trying to swim towards the rocks. He was chucking all sorts of abuse at us, so nobody tried to help him out, and nobody offered any sympathy as he squelched all the way home.

Grovesy was used to stick. My party piece was to shit in his pillow case just to really wind him up. I used to love seeing the look on his face as he realised I’d left him a little bedtime pressie. When he caught me the first time, squatting above his bed, letting one go, he couldn’t believe his eyes.

‘Merse, what the fuck are you doing?’ he screamed.

I didn’t stop to explain.

When Grovesy left Arsenal for Southampton I was sad to see him go, but when I started sharing a room with midfielder Ray Parlour, I realised I’d found someone who was just as lively. That holiday, George had put us into a room next door to our keeper, David ‘Spunky’ Seaman, who had signed in 1990, and Lee Dixon. We called them the Straight Batters, because they never got involved with the drinking and messing around like some of us did. They were always the first to bed whenever we went out on the town. I was the complete opposite. I rarely slept on club holidays, and I’d always pay the bar staff a fair few quid to leave out a bin of beers and ice for when we got back from the pub. That way we could drink all night.