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A week after ‘esteemed’ newspapers like Daily Mail suggested that Frank Lampard should move to Russia as he did not have the legs for Premier League anymore, and how his general fitness isn’t the best in the league, he silenced his doubters with a hat trick at Reebok Stadium against Bolton.
For years, he has had to endure the taunts of him being fat, with rivals calling him ‘Fat Frank’ and chants like “Who ate all the pies” being sung when he played. And that, discounting the fact that he is arguably one of the best midfielders of the Premier League era.
He is not the first of the kind who performed at the top levels in spite of being ‘overweight’, to put it mildly, and certainly won’t be the last. Let us take a look back at some of the most famous pie-eaters in the history of the game.
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5. Neville Southall
Neville Southall, MBE is one of the best players to have ever played for Everton and one of the best goalkeepers of his generation. In 2004, he was voted Everton’s All Time Cult Hero.
He is Everton’s most capped player till date at 578 appearances, and also has 92 caps for the Welsh team, another record. Legend has it that he was barred from training with the team when he started out with Bury, as he stopped everything that came his way, thus demoralising the attackers and disrupting the shooting practice.
He was voted the FWA Player of the Year in 1985, and was selected as one of the 100 Football League Legends. In addition, he was also inducted into the English Football Hall of Fame as Everton’s All Time Greatest Football Player.
Arguably one of the best British Goalkeepers alongside Peter Shilton and Gordon Banks.
4. William Foulke
One look at the picture, and you would have no second thoughts on why Willam “Fatty” Foulke made the list, or why he was nicknamed that way. He was 6 ft 4 inches tall and is said to have weighed 24 stones. He was very temperamental and once snapped a crossbar clean in two, and not many were surprised.
Foulkes never let his size hinder him from performing at the top level, and was a good football and cricket player during his days. He was a great crowd puller, and often had a go at the defenders if he thought they were not defending well, and the opposition forwards always kept a distance from him, lest he should toss them into his goalpost.
He won the First Division once and the FA Cup twice with Sheffield United. He was paid a record wage of 3 pounds per game, though it is quite unclear as to if it included his food expenses.
Though he played only one season for Chelsea, most Shed End faithful will remember him with awe and respect. It is rumoured that the chant “Who ate all the pies” originated in his tribute.
3. Micky Quinn
Micky Quinn was a centre-forward who is known for his spells at Portsmouth and Newcastle. Affectionately(or otherwise) nicknamed ‘Sumo’, he was well-known for his large appetite for goals and food.
He always maintained that he “couldn’t give a damn as long as the ball hits the back of the net”. And a good finisher he was, taking Portsmouth to First Division in 1987, a league they last played in the late 1950s. While at Coventry, his boss Bobby Gould let out something that could be construed in more than one ways, “I’m not worried about his weight. He has a predatory instinct second to none, and he’s very hungry.”
Quinn himself, was not too bothered with what went around. “I remember at West Ham once we were waiting for a corner and some fan shouted the ['Who ate all the pies?'] chant and threw a pie at me, I actually managed to catch a bit of it and I just ate it in front of him!”
He claimed that he was “the fastest player in the world over one yard.” After retirement, he took to caring for horses, and his favourite quote is “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse”.
2. Jan Molby
Jan Molby did not have the best of the starts at Liverpool, and was widely questioned by fans and critics alike for his large waistline. But once he got past the slow start, he endeared himself to the Anfield faithful like few would have.
In his own words, “They used to say I was fat, Now they say I’m powerful.” He famously never left the centre circle during an entire match, and his 44 goals for the club did not involve much running, 40 of them were penalties.
He was a squad player with the “Dynamite” Danish international side which lit up the 1984 European Championship and 1986 World Cup. He was so much of a food lover that he wrote of his brief stint behind the bars, “The food was often uneatable, worse than you’d give to a dog. I suppose one good thing was that it helped me lose four stones in weight.”
1. Ferenc Puskas
Ferenc Puskas, nicknamed the “Galloping Major” is one of the finest players to have ever graced the game. Short, stocky with a potbelly that misled most to believe he could never cope up with the demands of the sport, his list of honours could put most of his fitter counterparts to shame.
In a career that spanned 23 years, he won 3 European Cups, 10 National Championships and 8 top Individual top scorer awards. He was the chief magician of the so-called Magical Magyars, the Hungarian team that terrorised defenses all over the world and became the first foreign team to win at Wembley in 1953.
An unidentified English player is believed to have said before the match, “Look at that little fat chap. We’ll murder this lot.” Indeed, the match ended 6-3 to Hungary. He scored 84 goals in 85 international matches for Hungary, 357 goals in 354 games in the Hungarian Championship and a further 157 goals in 182 appearances for Real Madrid.
His career goal tally stands at 1176 goals in 1300 matches!
The list is not a comprehensive one, as we had to leave out some of the more famous ones like Neil Ruddock, who had his shorts specially made so that he could ‘fit in’, and the likes of John Barnes and Luis Ronaldo who looked more like they belong to the Wrestling ring than the football field towards the end of their careers.
One could also not forget the legend of Thomas Brolin, who in the words of Roy Collins,had “arrived looking like the fat, cardboard replica next to which Slimmers of the Year tend to pose, and played like it”, and went on to open a restaurant with all the dishes served being “his own ideas”.
