The staggering untold tales of Arsenal’s boozing culture that forced Arsene Wenger to stamp out the ‘poison’ and how he turned me into Superman, writes MARTIN KEOWN

In part two of MARTIN KEOWN’S explosive book extracts, he lifts the lid on Arsenal’s  drinking culture. 

He looked like he was wearing somebody else’s suit, it was so baggy, and a pair of glasses that looked like they didn’t belong to him. They were huge. He was quite an underwhelming figure but seemed like a nice guy, smart, with a big smile.

Arsene Wenger didn’t say a lot, but he knew just how big a cultural transformation Arsenal needed.

No more boozing, no more poison. If Arsenal were going to become great again, some drastic action was required.

When I first played for the club, what I saw around me was a load of dangerous paths, reasons to fail.

The way it worked was that when you made it to the first team, you went into the Halfway House players’ lounge. Most of the single lads went out on the circuit, to the nightclubs. And then the drinking sessions extended for some of the players to the Sunday afternoon and evening too.

They were still winning things. They were maybe addicted to the success and addicted to the booze and everything that went with it.

Before George Graham took over as manager, he and I chatted about things that were wrong with the club, certain players all taking the p***. About the team bus pulling up outside Old Trafford and us having to wait for the card game to finish before we went into the ground. About all the things I thought were unprofessional.

I told him that I didn’t think the team should be rerouting through the West End to drop Charlie Nicholas and Graham Rix off the bus after a game. He seemed shocked by what was happening.

The goalkeeper, John Lukic, once said to me that he was thinking of buying a minibus so he could pick everyone up because there were so many players who had lost their driving licences because of drink-driving.

Now the new manager, Arsene talked about how we were poisoning our bodies and how everything had to change. How we treated our bodies was key.

Wenger told me he lived the same as he expected from his players: no alcohol, no late nights.

He educated us to live a clean life and rid ourselves of that poison. That wasn’t the only change.

Wenger brought in stretching after training, which nobody had seen before. Before, yes, but never after. There were new members of staff joining, including a nutritionist.

‘Chew to Win’ became a slogan.

We were told: ‘Guys, when you have your dinner on a Sunday, you all eat too much and eat too fast and then you fall asleep. Why do you fall asleep? Because you’re using energy, the blood rushes from your head to your stomach to help you digest, but this is too much, we can’t have that. We need you to chew.

‘Chew to win so your stomach has less work to do, so it’s not using as much energy and making you feel sleepy. Then we have the advantage in the game. I need you to be one hundred per cent.’

And of course what we were chewing changed drastically too. We were moved to a slow-sugar diet, meaning no spikes in energy.

We had a lot of carbohydrates, rice, pasta, vegetables and fish – food that releases energy steadily over time. Sometimes the boss would see me eating, come over and say, ‘Oh, Martin, only one carbohydrate. Why do you have rice, pasta and mashed potato?’ And I’d say, ‘Because I like all three of them.’

And he would reply, ‘No, you have to decide which one you take because it’s not good for your stomach to have all three.’

This was quite the contrast to Bruce Rioch introducing Jelly Babies and chocolate before games, and even more so to George, who would tell us on a Friday to go home and have our own food: ‘We’re not making your food for you here.’

Instead, Wenger was saying it was the most important meal of the week and the club would gladly make it for us.

Wenger brought in parcelling our meals with yoghurt too, lining your stomach with it at the start of eating then sealing your palette with more at the end so you have a neutral taste in your mouth and don’t carry on eating.

Then our chefs asked the staff at Sopwell House, where we were training, to cook the food without salt. To be fair, it still tasted nice, if a bit bland. Then they’d send instructions to hotels when we went to away games. It was fascinating, and so well explained to us.

Next was water. He told us we mustn’t only drink water when we were thirsty because that is our bodies calling out for more water, and that’s far too late.

So everybody needed to be going to the toilet to check the colour of their wee and had to carry a water bottle with them at all times and sip it. Oh, and it couldn’t be cold water, because if it’s too cold it gives you a stomach ache.

Again, a lot of this might seem like common sense now, but it was revolutionary at the time.

One day I asked him if we could have a drink for Nigel Winterburn’s birthday.

‘Drink? What do you mean, drink?’ replied the boss. ‘It’s poison. We can’t go out drinking alcohol, we’re at a health club!’

‘Yeah, but we don’t play for two weeks and I’m not asking you if we can go out for a drink. I’m just telling you these are grown men and they’re going to go whether you like it or not.’

‘In that case, Martin, I hold you personally responsible.’

You can guess how this story ends.

Off we went to a local pub. We were a large, loud group and, although we were probably good for business, I can’t imagine the locals were overly amused to have us arrive.

Out of nowhere, Paul Merson went to the middle of the pub, did a forward roll, took out an imaginary gun and paraded it around the room. The locals looked horrified. Then he blew the top of it like in a Western and put it back in his imaginary holster.

Then the drinks arrived – and it wasn’t just one or two. Suddenly I thought, what have I done, taking responsibility for bringing this lot to the pub? Pat Rice, the coach, was waiting for us. Arsene was not impressed…

Other changes included a ban on tea and coffee, because of the dehydration.

I took it on myself to challenge him about it, but he said, ‘No, it’s a disaster, you’re poisoning your bodies.’

In the end he relented a bit and allowed tea, but not coffee. We also negotiated ketchup back in at one stage, so he did listen sometimes.

Another obsession of his was that we had to keep a tracksuit top with us all the time in case we got cold as he didn’t want us catching a chill. Back then, he didn’t allow any air conditioning in the training ground either as he said it makes people sick.

And I had all these vitamins to take – again something that’s the norm these days. Back then, other clubs looked at us suspiciously because they weren’t as advanced in that area.

So next to your locker when you sat down every morning was a little pile of vitamins. It wasn’t long before I was feeling much stronger, much quicker and had much more energy. In fact, I felt magnificent – I felt like Superman.

Wenger was showing himself to be next level. He did everything, every day. Every training session with a handshake. Every day the boss wanted us to shake everyone’s hand while looking them in the eye to create a bond. 

He always had a stopwatch around his neck, which he seemed obsessed with, and everything was done to the second and to the blow of the whistle. It was a tough schedule and he admitted eventually that he’d made a mistake because he didn’t realise how intense the games were.

In the first pre-season, he was taking the lads (I was injured) for a run at seven o’clock in the morning, then training at 11am and again in the evening.

It was too much, and we were all knackered. In time, when I went off to play for England, it felt like I could have a little break from the intensity of the training!

Arsenal training was all about technique and passing. Wenger was obsessed with the idea that you mustn’t take too many touches because you’re killing your team-mate if you don’t pass quickly enough as it means he’s got no time on the ball.

That meant keeping the ball on the floor, as putting the ball in the air meant it took longer to bring down and move on.

It was about technique, it’s about pushing through the ball. It’s about not being lazy, giving more care for the person you’re passing it to. It’s not just dumping it on them. It’s giving them a pass they can deal with.

Simplicity was a mantra. On the pitch and off it. He used to say to me, ‘One watch, one car, one wife.’ He had the most understated car in the car park.

When I went shopping, he’d say, ‘Martin, you must not buy a flowery shirt. If I’m buying, I buy a white shirt. Why? Because it’s simple. I can wear it the first day, the second day if I cannot wash it. If you wear something that stands out, everyone is saying, “Look, he never washes.” So keep things simple.’

There was advice on buying a house too. When he first arrived in north London and found the house he liked, he told me he went in, looked around, said he’d take it and would give the asking price plus twenty grand on top. But there was a catch: he wanted everything – the furniture, the cutlery, the bedding, everything. He even kept the Christmas tree!

They only took their personal possessions and their clothes. ‘I’ve got so much to do in my job I didn’t have time to go and buy furniture, bedding or beds, and this house was in top condition,’ he said.

When you worked with Wenger, he was giving you life lessons for free. He gave us so much advice about our lives outside football. He loved his players more than any other manager I’ve played for.

At the start we all felt a little bit suspicious because the guy was so nice, whereas George Graham had been the opposite. Could nice guys really win things? But he was driven by this idea of simplicity in life, and his theory was, if you have that, you take simplicity into your game and the two are linked massively.

When I look back on my career – 800 first class games – I think of defensive warriors such as Tony Adams and Sol Campbell and the genius of Dennis Bergkamp and Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry… but Arsene Wenger changed my life. I’ve never been happier than when I played for him. He was my football father figure. He unravelled the coil.

I was seconds away from doing a Cantona on scum of the earth West Ham fans

‘Keown has a monkey head’ were the words ringing out. The angry mob of West Ham fans taunting me, goading me, trying to get a reaction and put me off my game by making monkey noises every time I touched the ball.

They were even wearing T-shirts with my face on it, done up as a monkey. They had 10,000 of them printed, for God’s sake. The problem was, it was working. It was getting to me.

West Ham clearly didn’t like Arsenal. We’d had some tense games against them, including a cup quarter-final penalty shootout win, and the hatred just seemed to grow and grow – probably because they almost never got the better of us.

In fact, from September 1995 – so pre-Wenger – up until February 2006, Arsenal only lost one of those derbies. One game in eleven years.

And that is quite something, because going to Upton Park was difficult – the atmosphere, the nastiness, their fans made it really tough, and I always went there with an ‘over-my-dead-body’ kind of attitude. But on that day in 2000 they were trying to ridicule me and I thought it was despicable.

They might have seen it as banter, but for me it wasn’t. It enraged me, making fun of my looks.

At that moment in time, I felt those fans were the scum of the earth.

Normally, I was quite good at not letting taunts from the crowd get to me, but that day I was close to crossing the line. The final whistle went. Three points in the bag. Then somebody in the crowd caught my eye.

He was pumped up, been in the gym, wearing one of those T-shirts, covered in tattoos, and was running along the stand to provoke me. I locked eyes. I was sick of being degraded and decided it was time to pick the biggest idiot I could find and show them all I wasn’t taking the abuse any longer.

Looking back now, I was seconds away from my very own Cantona moment, from jumping into the crowd and fighting. I pointed my finger at the guy, saying, ‘Come on then.’

But Dennis Bergkamp got to me, he put his arm around me, he calmed me, he saved me. He told me we’d done what we needed to do – win – and that was it.

Generally, the animosity at West Ham spurred me on. Every time I played them, I almost jumped out of the ground every time I went for a header. It just propelled me to more energy.

But if you look at the picture of me with Dennis that day, you can see in my face that I’m exhausted, that I’d been through an ordeal. I had been playing like a man possessed, doing whatever it took to get the three points. I had to win. For me the abuse was awful.

Nobody seemed to care though, nobody wrote about it – like it was an acceptable thing to do. No journalists showed any empathy for the amount of abuse I was getting. They seemed to think it was acceptable, a bit of fun.

Ian Wright drove off and crashed the Arsenal team bus

It felt like the bus was always late. And then the coach driver would wander into the hotel to have a drink and use the toilet, claiming that his tachograph was telling him he needed to take a break.

So we’d all be sitting on the bus, waiting to leave, and it was annoying. And Ian Wright was getting increasingly agitated each day.

Then the bus driver made a big mistake – he left the keys in the ignition.

Ian, who couldn’t take it any longer, marched to the front of the bus, shouting, ‘I’m going to drive this f****** bus to the training ground. I’ve had enough!’

Everyone was pleading with him not to do something stupid, but that made him even more determined.

Slowly, he put it in gear then lifted the clutch and we pulled off with the door still open, everybody on the bus in hysterics as we gathered speed down a very narrow country lane which is used for school runs.

The next moment, an oncoming car came too close and suddenly there was a huge bang as our bus clipped its wing mirror.

Ian slammed on the brakes, the bus bounced to a standstill, and he legged it to the back.

With all of us sniggering and laughing, the driver of the car, an understandably rather angry middle-aged woman, got on and said, ‘I saw you, I saw you,’ and even said Ian’s name.

She came walking down the bus to find him. ‘It was you at the wheel!’ she shouted at him. Ian feigned innocence, and at that moment our bus driver arrived. Luckily, there wasn’t too much damage done and the woman accepted an apology.

Our driver finally got into his seat, looking thoroughly p***** off. As he pulled off, someone shouted, ‘Don’t be f****** late again.’

The day Kevin Keegan won £10,000 against his own England players

People look back at Kevin Keegan’s time as England manager as a failure, but it was my most enjoyable spell playing for my country, under the man who I had idolised when I was growing up.

When it came to the serious stuff, I actually thought Kevin was a very good coach. He also made it fun.

The epitome of that were the race nights. Kevin would get a videotape of a horse or greyhound race that nobody had seen before, we’d all gather and he’d put it on the TV.

Kevin played the bookie and he would lay out tempting odds for us to bet on. He’d run through the form, we’d all lump our money on, and then the race was played on the screen.

Then Kevin would sit on the kit skip, which had wheels on it, like he was a jockey, and Arthur Cox would push him along in front of the screen as if Kevin was taking part in the race. It was hilarious.

Gareth Southgate and I would confer about how much money to put on, usually a cautious £10 or £20.

But some of the lads were putting on a grand.

The money was all placed on the skip with Keegan’s legs either side of it while Arthur shoved Kevin towards the winning post. Sometimes one of us would win, but often Kevin was the big winner, leaving the heavy gamblers feeling devastated.

You can imagine his look the time his horse nicked the race at the line to win him more than £10,000 of our money.

Extracted from ‘On The Edge: The Autobiography’ by Martin Keown, published by Michael Joseph on 31 Oct 2024 @ £22.00. Copyright © Martin Keown, 2024 – To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to 02/11/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937