The players’ box of any top football club is always a hotbed of gossip, heaving with dolled-up WAGs willing their loved-ones to do well on the pitch. Without any cameras, it’s a place where footballers’ wives and girlfriends can relax.
And, as I have seen with my own eyes, truly relax they do, especially over the festive season. You’d expect champagne at this time of year, but for extra Christmas cheer, many WAGs will be delving into their designer handbags for something else, too.
As a former WAG (the acronym for wives and girlfriends of top sports stars) married to Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur defender Jason Cundy for 16 years, I was invited to countless players’ boxes where the atmosphere of camaraderie, and sometimes rivalry, was heavily influenced by the use of cocaine.
I remember one particular away game in the run-up to Christmas when it dawned on me just how commonplace cocaine use pitch-side is. One fellow WAG was constantly up and down, trotting off to the loo, paying zero attention to how her man was performing on the pitch.
Eventually, I leaned across and, whispering, asked her if she had cystitis and if she needed me to get her anything. The stunned silence from the coterie of thin, ultra-glam women around her made me realise just what an idiot I was being.
The WAG in question didn’t have a urinary tract infection. It was only later someone pulled me to one side to discreetly tell me the reason she was visiting the ladies so frequently: she was chopping up and snorting lines of cocaine.
Drugs have never been my thing, writes Lizzie Cundy, pictured, but I do understand why a WAG might resort to cocaine
Over the years I realised some WAGs are pretty shameless when it comes to their use. They have no hesitation in sneaking it into grounds; if they’re not stashing it in a compact buried in their Hermes bag, it’s smuggled in a pendant, dangling between false boobs. I even saw one hide her cocaine in a teeny wrap in the inside of her false nail.
There was one chap in the players’ box, who always behaved as though he was very much at home. He looked like a model and wore a different well-cut suit each week. Staff and players treated him like family. I thought he was a celebrity of some kind because he often wore dark glasses.
But no, he was a drug dealer. At the time, the presence of guys like this represented the side of football no one wanted the world to know about. It’s a hidden secret. Especially because most of the WAGs don’t pay for their drugs. Dealers know they’ll be paid by everyone else around them who uses, so they give the WAGs freebies.
I smile to myself scrolling through Instagram looking at the current glut of wholesome Christmas posts from WAGs.
I know well that what’s underpinning some such images is a secret cocaine habit.
Christmas is a lonely time for a WAG. The Boxing Day match is one of the season’s most anticipated games, and that means no big family Christmas dinner with all the trimmings the day before – a footballer’s priority is sleep, rest, definitely no alcohol and a few weird protein meals club nutritionists insist they eat instead. And if they’re playing away? You’re on your own.
I must stress that, while I love a glass of fizz as much as any WAG, drugs have never been my thing. But I do understand why a WAG might resort to cocaine.
For starters, in club circles it is widely available. The fact it can keep your weight down as an appetite suppressant, while keeping you jovial and high (and a bit of bore if I’m being honest), is also a huge incentive in the image-obsessed WAG world.
Lizzie in 2009 with her then husband, footballer Jason Cundy of Chelsea and Spurs
Cocaine was the original Ozempic for veteran WAGs of my generation. It’s the ideal weight-loss aide. You don’t feel hungry and you stay hyper with no risk of those ghastly side effects associated with new fat jabs. Nowadays, Ozempic is also used widely in the WAG world, but alongside cocaine. A double whammy to keep them slim and buzzing.
It’s not for me to say who uses – but that’s why WAGs who are no stranger to the drug will typically look older than their years, all jutting hip bones, high cheekbones and that slightly gaunt look.
I can also see how the use of cocaine could become habitual. It might look ultra-glamorous, but WAGs exist in a desperately insecure world. The husbands or boyfriends can go from being man of the match to having their effigy strung up by fans outside of a pub quicker than you can say David Beckham. The euphoric, confidence-boosting effects can dull the chaotic, isolated reality of life as a WAG – which often includes fighting off other women desperate to steal your husband.
WAGs use cocaine as a coping mechanism. It keeps even the moodiest of women chipper with a ‘glass-half-full’ optimism when their other halves don’t do well on the pitch. And when he has done well? It’s an obvious way to celebrate, too.
Many don’t feel they need to give up their beloved drug because they would never consider themselves addicts. If anything, cocaine is seen as sexy and cool – a far cry from the image it had among the bad boy players in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Infamously, Liverpool’s Robbie Fowler performed his ‘cocaine snort celebration’ on the penalty area white line at Anfield in 1999, getting himself a four-match ban and £32,000 fine in the process.
Chelsea goalkeeper Mark Bosnich and model Sophie Anderton’s £4,000-a-week cocaine addiction dominated the front pages during their four-year on-off relationship (he was sacked in 2002 by Chelsea and given a nine-month ban after testing positive in a random drugs test). But behind Sophie’s gilded lifestyle lay abuse and heartbreak; she later said that time ‘was the darkest and scariest of my life’.
They weren’t the only household name players who relied on the grubby white powder for an ‘extra buzz’ back then, though nowadays the footballers themselves don’t do it anymore. The testing today is rightly far too rigid for any player to risk using banned substances.
But while cocaine use might have dropped off for the players, their partners are still partaking.
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Here in the Cotswolds, every Christmas is WHITE… because all the middle-class women snort cocaine
I first entered the football scene in 1988 at the age of 19, when I met Jason. He was an apprentice with Chelsea and, as their training ground was near my Richmond home, he pursued me after we met in a local bar.
Four years later, he was in Chelsea’s first team, his star on the rise. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more money was pumped into clubs when televised rights were sold to the highest bidders.
Football became awash with cocaine as the wages got bigger and bigger, and suddenly the players had agents, managers and PR representatives – yes-people who pandered to their every whim.
Each time we moved clubs our house got bigger, with more cars on the driveway.
While I’m a strong woman, the threat of your husband being injured, demoted or stolen from you by a wannabe WAG means you live on your nerves. It didn’t surprise me that when the ITV series Footballers’ Wives first aired in 2002, cocaine snorting featured heavily in storylines. It was a realistic detail.
From the word go, as each new season began, the drug would come out of handbags.
Having had the summer off, a WAG and her husband would inevitably have let themselves go a bit on holiday at a five-star resort or aboard a yacht. His physique would be whipped back into shape by the club physio and training team, but what does his wife do?
If she’s put on weight then coke is an easy fix. She needs to look good at those first matches and it is a quick way to suppress her appetite.
Coke helps to sober you up, too – and here the details become admittedly grim.
In social circumstances, WAGs often drink, but when you weigh the same as a teenager, you quickly feel the effects.
There is nothing worse in the WAG world than a woman who can’t hold her alcohol, so they use cocaine to counter it.
One well-known footballing couple liked to drink, but he did not like to see her drunk. So she’d rely on cocaine to sober up.
Sometimes it caused bad behaviour. One girl, high as a kite, was so annoyed her husband hadn’t been picked for a game, she went outside and smashed up the manager’s very expensive car. But that’s the emotion and erratic behaviour that coke brings out.
On another memorable occasion, I’d been asked to do a fun video for a club meal. But the video had to be erased because I caught one WAG having a discreet sniff from her (acrylic) nail. She’d used the nail to scoop some powder out of her teeny tiny handbag. Trust me, that’s inventive for a WAG.
At another do I complimented a WAG on the beautiful antique locket she was wearing. I asked her what picture was inside, assuming it was a treasured image of her children, but no. A little plastic bag fell out.
Seasoned pros who take coke only get the good stuff out for friends. The powder that isn’t from a regular supplier, they’ll use with their wider circle of hangers on, the nail technician or tanning consultant who has doubtless signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement).
I think we all know that footballers have addictive personalities. It’s no surprise that so many gamble or have obsessive issues. Is it any wonder they are attracted to women with the same addictive psychological make-up?
So many WAGs think the lifestyle is a happy-ever-after. But it’s not. It’s an extremely anxious one, and you keep waiting for the fairytale to end. I point the finger of blame at the money men. They know it goes on. There is no duty of care to the women who surround these highly-paid athletes.
Take the money out of football and the drugs will go quicker than you can say Bolivian marching powder.
But then, so would the WAGs I suppose. So we can bank on many more white Christmases.