5 footballers who never believed in training

For many, the life of a footballer appears a charmed one. All that money for just kicking a ball around for 90 minutes once or twice a week. But the reality is that in the modern game, in an era in which athleticism and stamina are becoming increasingly fundamental, the majority of their work is done away from the cameras on training pitches and in gyms.

That wasn’t always the case. At times in the past, there were players who were able to get by on talent alone, and for whom a dislike of training wasn’t detrimental to their chances of making a career in the game.

Here are five footballers who never believed in training:

#5 Jose Moreno

Jose Manuel Moreno was one of the key members of the River Plate team known as La Maquina who delighted audiences across Argentina in the early 1940s.

For some, Moreno remains one of the best players of all time. He married technical excellence, daring and a wonderful strike with outstanding physical qualities. But he never believed that training, in the traditional sense, was necessary to perform well on match day.

“The tango,” he once said. “Is the best training you can do. You set the rhythm, step it up when you want, make all the movements and work your waist and legs.”

And so Moreno trained his way, with a drink in hand. When that right was taken away from him, his ability seemed to disappear, as Eduardo Galeano noted in his book Football in Sun and Shadow.

“Those in charge at River ordered him to give up his rowdy ways, unbecoming of a professional athlete. He did his best. For an entire week, he slept at night and drank nothing but milk. Then he played the worst game of his life.”

#4 Socrates

Socrates of Brazil kicks the ball during the World Cup match against Argentina

Socrates was a highly influential figure on and off the pitch. With a bachelors degree in medicine and a keen interest in political affairs, he was certainly not the typical footballer. For him, football was a hobby. A delightful, engaging hobby, but a hobby nonetheless. He enjoyed playing in matches but loathed the idea of dedicating himself to training.

As Andrew Downie wrote in his biography Doctor Socrates: Footballer, Philosopher, Legend: “...[Socrates] loved to study and hated to train. He thought running laps of the pitch or doing star jumps was a waste of time and he couldn’t be bothered with it. All he cared about was having the ball at his feet.”

Socrates was also a heavy drinker and easily got through two packs of cigarettes a day. He was, in many ways, the quintessential 1970s public figure: talented and unchained.

#3 Mick Channon

Mick Channon was part of the Southampton team who won the FA Cup as a second division side in 1976 and then returned to the club in the early 1980s to form part of a side that also featured Alan Ball and Kevin Keegan and is widely considered the best the club ever had.

He made nearly 50 appearances for England during the 1970s but it was his disdain for training that perhaps stopped him from enjoying a career as successful as Ball or Keegan. Whereas those two were happy to work hard in training and stay behind afterwards to work on specific things, Channon despised it.

“I didn’t want to train. I just wanted to play,” he told the Telegraph earlier this year. “Training was the most boring thing I ever ----ing did in my life.”

As Mark Sanderson quipped in an article in When Saturday Comes: “This coming from a man who now earns his living in horse racing.”

#2 Gary Lineker

Glenn Hoddle and Gary Lineker England circa 1986

Gary Lineker was a prolific striker at club level and with the England national team, where he was a missed penalty away from equalling Sir Bobby Charlton’s then-record of 49 goals, but he achieved all that he did despite a well-known dislike of training.

As Harry Redknapp recalled in his book A Man Walks On To a Pitch: Stories from a Life in Football: “It is amusing to see Gary looking so fit now because during his peak years as a player his aversion to practice sessions was famous throughout football. He was a terrible trainer. He just liked to come in on Saturday and play.”

Lineker always said that he didn’t like to train because he preferred to save any good fortune in front of goal for the matches themselves. But Redknapp believes it was actually because his striking technique wasn’t particularly well-refined. In that interpretation, it was the embarrassment of performing shooting drills in front of his teammates that accounted for Lineker’s hatred of training.

#1 Romario

Romario was a wonderfully gifted player and there are still some in Brazil who consider him the most talented player to have emerged from the country since Pele.

But Romario never possessed the same singular drive to be the best that lifted Pele to such heights. He was technically impressive and finished superbly, but he liked to party and his ardent aversion to training meant that he wasn’t always in his best shape come match day.

When he announced his retirement in 2008, he made his dislike of training patently clear: “I’m happy,” he said. “Because I won’t have to train again, or travel or sit in team hotels.”

Romario would always try and negotiate deals with his coaches to avoid attending training, particularly when it was set to clash with the Rio de Janeiro carnival.

As the late Johan Cruyff once recalled: “One time, Romario asked me if he could miss two days of training to return to Brazil for the carnival. I replied: ‘If you score two goals tomorrow, I’ll give you two extra days rest compared to the other players.’ The next day, Romario scored his second goal 20 minutes into the game and immediately gestured to me asking to leave. He told me: ‘Coach, my plane leaves in an hour.’”