Big Dunc, winger Ward, Al-Qaeda, Escobar, Mafia & fixing: reasons for players in prison
Duncan Ferguson's lauded new autobiography brings fresh attention to footballers who've spent time in prison. Today we look at 10 extraordinary cases among many.
It was late one night in November 1995 that I found myself standing outside Scotland’s largest and most notorious prison, Barlinnie, also known locally as “The Big Hoose” and “Bar-L”.
The reason I was there was because a friend of mine, John Dower, who was an aspirant film-maker and is now a BAFTA-winning documentary director was fascinated by the work of the K Foundation, formerly known as The KLF, an art duo comprising Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty.
Infamously, The KLF had burned a million pounds in cash in August 1994, and filmed themselves doing it, and the following year, in summer 1995, they released a documentary about it, called "Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid.”
They screened the doc in late 1995 in various public places, including at the football stadiums of Celtic and Rangers, and they were planning to screen it at Barlinnie, but the Scottish Prison Service withdrew permission at the 11th hour for that to happen.
Instead, Drummond and Cauty turned up at Barlinnie on that cold November night in 1995 and projected footage from their film onto the walls of the prison, albeit for a short period of time from outside the grounds until they were escorted away. John had got wind of the stunt and wanted to document it, which is why we were also there.
What the hell has this got to do with sport, you ask?
Well, as readers of Sporting Intelligence, or as followers for many years, you probably know this tale will take some interesting twists.
Entirely coincidentally, one of the inmates at Barlinnie on that night of the KLF projection stunt was Duncan Ferguson, then a 24-year-old former Dundee United, Rangers and Scotland striker, employed at the time as a forward for Everton, and serving a three-month sentence for an on-pitch assault that had happened in April 1994 when a player at Rangers.
He actually served 44 days of his term, and that time in Barlinnie had a huge impact on his life.
The incident that put him behind bars happened during a Scottish Premier Division game between Rangers and Raith Rovers on 16 April 1994. Ferguson butted heads with Raith player John McStay, although Ferguson wasn’t even yellow-carded, let alone sent off.
The huge problem for Ferguson was that he was already on probation for two other convictions, for assaults at a taxi rank and in a pub. He freely admits now that drinking - which he gave up age 35, or 18 years ago - got him into lots of scrapes when younger, especially between the ages of 16 and 19.
The upshot after the McStay incident was a procurator fiscal in Scotland - a public prosecutor - adjudged the on-pitch head butt as a violation of Ferguson’s probation conditions
To this day, Ferguson (below) remains the only footballer from any professional division in the United Kingdom to go to prison for an incident that happened in the course of play on a football pitch.
(For those of you who like to be on top of all related matters, a non-league player, James Cotterill, playing for Barrow of the Conference in an FA Cup match in late 2006, punched an opponent in that game and broke his jaw. After footage was shown on Match of the Day he was charged with GBH and was later sent to prison for four months, serving just over a month of that before being released with an ankle tag).
Ferguson’s recollection of the events that led to his own incarceration, and indeed many parts of his fascinating life story, are getting huge traction at the moment because of the recent release of his searingly honest book, “Big Dunc: The Upfront Autobiography”.
He has been doing lots of media appearances in recent weeks, including on Gary Lineker’s ‘The Rest Is Football’ podcast in a two-part interview here and here. He was also on The Overlap recently with Gary Neville, Jill Scott, Ian Wright and Roy Keane (below).
I can also recommend this piece by my friend and fellow sports writer Alan Pattullo, who wrote a biography of Ferguson years ago and finally got to meet his hero for an interview about Big Dunc’s own book.
This feature by Tom English of the BBC is also good. As is this Q&A in The Guardian, curated by Andy Hunter, where readers asked Ferguson all sorts of questions about his life and career, and he answered at length and with candour.
Footballers in prison
Watching and listening to Ferguson’s recollections of his career, which included 16 years as a formidable talent for numerous clubs and probably too few appearances for his country, got me wondering about other footballers who have done time in prison.
There have been hundreds of them, and probably many thousands around the world. Why wouldn’t there be? In the United Kingdom at any one time, around 135 men per 100,000 people in the population are in prison. (And yes, I know you don’t get these kind of stats on most football blogs).
There are roughly 4,000 professional male footballers in England at any one time, so we might expect about five or six of them to be in prison at any given time.
In researching this piece, by the way, I was astounded to find that while about 135 of 100,000 Britons are in prison at any given time, in El Salvador it’s 1,659 per 100,000 and in Cuba it’s 794 per 100,000 and in Rwanda it’s 637 per 100,000 and in Turkmenistan it’s 576 per 100,000 and in the USA it’s 541 per 100,000.
Yep, there are about 1.8m people in prison in the USA. And no, I don’t know how many of them are footballers.
It seems that there are three major reasons, among many, that footballers end up in prison, and all those main three are depressing: sex offences, usually against women and sometimes children; driving offences mostly involving drunk driving and often leading to deaths of others; and assaults of various kinds, up to and including murder.
The rest of today’s piece will look at the cases of nine footballers aside from Duncan Ferguson who have spent time in prison or are currently in prison, mostly not for reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph.
I’ve only been inside prison once myself, so we’ll start with that story, and it’s really quite an extraordinary tale.