The most interesting pieces of soccerball trivia you know (that are 100% false)

37. Hardline Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is an ardent follower of St. Mirren FC: the result of a torrid teenage affair with former Saints midfield hardman, Billy Abercrombie.

38. In terms of goals per minutes on the pitch, the most prolific striker of all time is Ricky Shakes.

39. The Royal Engineers enjoyed an unbeaten run of 257 matches between 1907 and 1916, which only came to an end after the side's 5 England midfielders were wiped out on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme.

40. Your favourite footballer is Ebbe Sand.

41. Viera vs Keane was a work.

42. Sammy Lee holds two European Cup winners medals and represented England on 14 occasions.

43. There is no scientific evidence that Scottish Third Division club Stenhousemuir actually exist

44. The first American to play in the English First Division was Samuel Butthurt IV who was goalkeeper for Oldham Athletic between 1920 and 1932.

45. West Adelaide FC was a football team.

46. "lol britpop zing culture" was invented by Walter Winterbottom, who once passed the time between England games by writing sarcastic missives about The Hollies to the Daily Telegraph. None were ever published.

47. Kenny Miller holds dual Scottish and Argentinian nationality, but opted to play International football for Scotland as he had never heard of Argentina.

48. When Roy Keane goes to donate blood, he declines the syringe, and instead requests a hand gun and a bucket.

49. There are no steroids in football. Just players Roy Keane has breathed on.

50. On an average football pitch there are 1,242 objects Roy Keane could use to kill you, including the pitch itself.

51. Before becoming a professional soccerball player, Alexei Lalas was already an accomplished American footballer. His 46/-----%$34 pipecock return for the Tallashassee Goddammits in the 1991 Ultraplayoff was briefly an all-time record, but was famously shattered just weeks later by Jody "Zif" Stokenbokker Jr.

52. Matthew Etherington has been out of contract at West Ham for the last 18 months, but manager Alan Curbishley doesn't have the heart to tell him.

52. Martin Jol played bass for Focus from 1971-74, including on their Top 20 hits, "Hocus Pocus" and "Sylvia" but left before the recording of the "Mother Focus" album citing disilusionment with band's lurch towards jazz rock. He and Thijs van Leer have not spoken since.

53. Gordon Banks was the first man to say "fuck" on British television in 1966 during an interview on Southern Television's regional news programme, 'Day by Day'.

54. Stewart Downing? Fuck off.

55. Gil-Scott Heron's dad's tenure at Celtic was only the tip of the 'late 60s/early 70s black musical revolutionaries with Scottish footballing connections' iceberg. Albert Ayler's aunt spent two years as a madam in Dundee FC's onsite brothel, while no less than four of The Last Poets' mates from school appeared in a St Mirren-Kilmarnock match in 1971

56. The footballs used in the 1962 World Cup were designed by Salvador Dali. Goalkeepers complained that they were too light and moved unpredictably in the air. Also that they had teeth.

57. Niall Quinn likes to steal from the sweet jar in the corner shop while the shopkeeper is busy counting out panini stickers

59. Yahtzee was originally developed as a pre-pools panel method of determining the score of postponed games. It was abandoned when the first result it came up with saw Aston Villa beat Fulham 259-38.

60. Never go on a camping holiday with Stan Collymore.

61. The first tie to be decided on penalty kicks was the 1968 Fairs Cup quarter final between Leeds United and The Art Ensemble of Chicago

62. Winners of the Raich Carter Trophy automatically qualify for the latter stages of the UEFA cup

63. Instead of listening to The Shins, the original script of Garden State called for Zach Braff to gave in amazement at a poster of Rui Costa, a scene that was later changed due to strained relationships between the US and Portugal.

64. Roy Keane is building an Irish international "skin suit" from the bodies of his signings, for him to wear at Sunderland matches.

65. Jack Charlton is a close personal friend of Elton John's.

66. Fabio Capello has no political leanings to the Far-Right whatsoever. oh no siree.

67. Mild-mannered Yeovil loanee Zoltan Stieber finds physical compliments so awkward to deal with that he wears soiled tracksuit bottoms everywhere and frequently daubs anti-semitic slogans and pictures of mutilated cats on his forehead and chest in Tipp-Ex.

68. King of the long throw-in Dave Challinor once did a throw-in so big that it cleared the other side of the pitch and knocked a ballboy unconscious. Unfortunately, this was during his international debut for England against Sweden in 1994. Challinor was so traumatised by the incident that he was immediately substituted and transferred to Bury, thus effectively ending the career of England's most promising centre-back since the war.

69. Graham Taylor was only offered the England job in order to hush up his discovery that all Aston Villa players were contractually forbidden to pass to Tony Daley more than two times per match.

70. The legendary sloping pitch at Easter Road was actually caused by the one-time St Mirren front pairing of Mark Yardley and Barry Lavety jumping for a high ball at the same time and landing simultaneously, thereby causing a sizeable movement of the tectonic plates underneath Edinburgh.

71. The story recently in the news involving a young goth couple thrown off a bus due to one walking the other around on a lead was a heavily disguised version of a similar story, quashed by Arsenal's legal team, involving Theo Walcott and Jens Lehmann. It is not known which player performed which role

72. Concerned colleagues and fans of Paul Merson recently staged an unofficial testimonial match in his honour, raising £132,000 to help the troubled star fight his financial difficulties. Overcome with gratitude, Merson immediately bet the entire sum on Brock Lesnar defeating Frank Mir at UFC 81.

73. Frank Mir is now expected to challenge Steve Howard at UFC83: Full Throttle.

74. Ever since moving to England to play for Chelsea, Petr Čech has become a massive fan of the Australian soap drama "Neighbours" and is hoping to score a cameo role as a randy Czech backpacker looking to score with some Aussie girls on Ramsay Street.

75. Wayne Rooney has shagged your mum

76. Yakubu was born in 1982.

77. All of the above are 100% false

78. The most viewed Youtube clip in Hungary is of Tamás Priskin lip-synching along to "Anthem For The Year 2000" by Silverchair.

79. Arsene Wenger's real name is Paul Wenger, but, being highly superstitious, he changes his forename in honour of which ever football club he is involved in:

At Strasbourg he was known as Lee Wenger
At Monaco, Hooky Wenger
At Grampus Eight, "Gramps" Wenger

The one exception to the rule was the three years he spent managing AS Nancy.

80. Middlesbrough player Lee Cattermole is a cross between a cat and a mole.

81. Massimo Maccarone was most renowned for his ability to pass ta ball

82. Michael Stewart once got a little crazy but he never yeehaw.

83. Wanderers FC player Charles Alcock, later chairman of the FA, accompanied his zoologist father on a trip to Queensland, Australia and brought back a stuffed wombat which was given pride of place in the club's dressing room. His twin brother Roderick dressed up in a costume resembling the wombat and paraded up and down the field at half time, earning himself a place in the histiry books as the first ever club mascot.

84. Jules Rimet was Lister's room-mate in Red Dwarf

85. Oldham Athletic's original nickname was "The Smiths" but was dropped after the 1983-84 season after Joe Royle was hit in the face by a wayward bunch of gladoli thrown by a group of black clad teenagers.

86. Struggling against loneliness and the language barrier when he moved to Celtic, Stiliyan Petrov passed the time by firebombing burger vans. A tearful Petrov vowed to halt the practice when an overthrown Molotov cocktail cleared his intended target and destroyed Glasgow's only Subway restaurant.

201. BBC foreign correspondent Orla Guerin is a former member of the Derby Lunatic Fringe

202. https://www.instagram.com/p/BCJQ1mVtsLC/

203 Aleksandr Kokorin is the second-highest paid Russian player in the Premier League after Igor Denisov, his former team-mate from Dynamo Moscow. Kokorin is now so rich and famous that his bulldog, Rony, has his own Instagram page.

204 Ansi Agolli has played for Qarabag since 2010 and has become a fans’ idol there while winning in three league titles, and two domestic cups. His status as well-loved player in Azerbaijan was boosted after Albania’s qualification for Euro 2016. Agolli will be part of Azerbaijani football’s history books, through being the league’s first player to take part in the competition.

205 Razvan Rat is an avid wine collector, a hobby he began while playing for Shakhtar Donetsk in Ukraine – where he met his wife, too. He grew up in a small Romanian town, Piatra-Olt, where he watched the country’s legendary 1994 World Cup campaign at his neighbours’ house because his family did not have a television.

Despite being affectionately nicknamed "Thor" by Aston Villa fans, Birkir Bjarnason's name is actually the Icelandic for "Bucky Barnes". The Captain America sidekick is by a significant margin the most popular Marvel character in Iceland, with 8% of Icelandic men being named after him.

Bjarnason himself credits his 2012 transfer to Standard Liege to feeling more motivated as a result of Marvel's early 2010s revival of the character.

Javi Martinez is a World Cup champion and multiple Bundesliga title winner, but the Bayern Munich man also claims to have come up with the concept for ‘The Hunger Games’.

Suzanne Collins is the published author of a series of books which have been turned into Hollywood blockbusters.

The first instalment of her trilogy was released in 2008, with subsequent offerings hitting the shelves in 2009 and 2010.

‘The Hunger Games’ focuses on a futuristic world in which the inhabitants of impoverished ‘districts’ fight for survival in a compulsory televised battle royale.

By the time the books became movies in 2012, over 26 million copies had been sold.

Bayern star Martinez claims he missed out on a piece of that profit having come up with a similar idea in his youth.

The 30-year-old Spain international told German magazine Socrates : “Writing is a great pleasure for me, even as a teenager I started to write a book.

“And believe it or not, the plot was pretty much the same as 'The Hunger Games'.”

When Collins’ version of events hit the big screen, Martinez admits he found it difficult to watch.

He added: “That was strange, I was sitting in the cinema and thought: ‘It does not exist, that's my idea, which I had years ago, the creators must have stolen my computer’.”

Marvel Cinematic Universe mainstay Sebastian Stan was given a custodial sentence in 2009 for the aggravated stalking and subsequent attempted kidnap of then-Birmingham City midfielder Sebastian Larsson. The Acocks Green native, born Jordan Scuggins, later adopted his stage name as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the incident, quipping to Tim Lovejoy that it "might help me remember about the restraining order."

Disgruntled former romantic conquests of Rohan Ricketts at one point organised into a support group named "The Riders of Rohan". The collective's efforts to raise awareness of the former Wolves midfielder's apparent shortcomings in the bedroom ultimately floundered amid confusing legal action from the Tolkien estate and New Line Cinema.

I had read that separately tbh

1. Claudia Caniggia doesn't sweat.

― That mong guy that's shit, Tuesday, 5 February 2008 11:12 (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

more sinister now ofc

This thread is very funny. For some reason I am particularly enjoying “Jerome Boateng is a wiccan”

210. Declan Rice exudes a unique pheromone which makes him sexually irresistible to English commentators and pundits