5 footballers who never believed in training

#3 Mick Channon

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.”