"After seeing Old Trafford's finest looking especially tired and emotional after their party at the weekend, I wondered what misdemeanours players have got up to at Christmas parties," says Alex Perkins.
Before we summon the ghosts of Christmas parties past, let's start with something nice and innocent: a food fight. Never mind Pizzagate: in the 1960s the Spurs players showed that – yes, folks – you don't have to dislike someone to toss oven-prepared savoury snacks in the direction of their noggin. "Bill [Nicholson, the Tottenham manager] had sent our trainer Cecil Poynton over to haul us out of the pub," remembered Jimmy Greaves of his first Spurs Christmas party, possibly to a background of feeble, sycophantic laughter from Ian St John. "I can still remember him coming in now only to be greeted by a cloud of nuts, fag boxes and sausages on sticks, forcing him to retreat, hands on head, back into the road. It launched a food free-for-all. The youth team players, desperate to stay on good behaviour, were like sitting ducks."
Better a sitting duck than a standing ashtray. That fate befell Manchester City youth player James Tandy in 2004 when a refreshed Joey Barton mistook his eyelids for a cinderbox and eased a cigar into both of them. Barton was fined three weeks' wages.
Still, mistakes are easily made when you've quaffed so much lager and pink champagne that you can't see beyond your own nose. In 2001, West Ham no-mark Hayden Foxe – think a ginger Bobby Moore, only not – fulfilled his dream of becoming a somebody, mistaking a bar for a urinal and deliriously spraying his 15 pints of shame all over it. The entire Hammers group were thrown out of the club, Sugar Reef, while Foxe was fined two weeks' wages and given a free transfer at the end of the season. "The whole thing got blown right out of proportion," said Foxe, an inadvertent double entendre that made literally tens of easily pleased folk wet themselves.
Another thoroughly inept West Ham centre-half, Neil Ruddock, got in trouble along with Trevor Sinclair in 1998: Razor met the rozzers when he was arrested after West Ham's fancy-dress party in – and you couldn't really script this – Romford. Ruddock was charged with affray and Sinclair with criminal damage after a woman claimed that two men ripped bits off her car. Ruddock was acquitted due to conflicting evidence; Sinclair was fined £250 and forced to pay £225 compensation.
There's more. There's always more. Last year, Manchester United's Jonny Evans was arrested following allegations of rape, but was not charged. Three Celtic players – Joos Valgaeren, Johan Mjallby and Bobby Petta – spent some time looking at four cold walls in 2002 after a clash with nightclub bouncers and a photographer during some festive team-bonding in Newcastle. Two years later, former Bolton bouncer and third Mitchell brother Stig Tofting was sacked by his Danish club AGF for alledgedly chinning four of his team-mates. Well, one of them had ripped his shirt.
Roy Carroll and Ryan Giggs went nose-to-nose at the Manchester United shindig in 2004, and not during the slow songs either, but you don't necessarily have to get violent to show what you think of a team-mate. In 1998, Newcastle came up with a novel and in no way casually racist take on Christmas party fun. The players were each to be given a present: Dietmar Hamann (he's German, tee hee hee) got a copy of Mein Kampf, while the Italian Alessandro Pistone, perceived as lacking fight, was given a sheep's heart.
Dennis Wise, meanwhile, had some fun of his own in 2001, when he reportedly gave his Leicester team-mate Robbie Savage a teddy bear that had been impaled on a lady's special electrical tool before apparently saying, "Take this, because you're the only prick in a Leicester shirt at the moment". A few well-chosen observations later, they were apparently going at it hammer and tongs. "A mountain has been made out of a molehill," said Dave Bassett, oblivious to the tittering around him. "Some of it might be a bit pornographic but that's the way it is. But in these politically correct times it seems you can't have fun."
Life, of course, was more fun when you could hold a dwarf-tossing contest in a pub. That was what Vinnie Jones organised for the Chelsea lads in the early 1990s, not knowing that, nearly two decades later, he would be the entertainment in an unofficial Limey-tossing party by the toilets in a bar in South Dakota.
Finally, there's the Anfield Comedy Club, which has had some rich moments of side-splittery. There was the time that a figure turned up to their fancy-dress party in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, with Steve McMahon on the door. "You can't come in like that. John Barnes is in there," said McMahon, in no way implying that the outfit would have been absolutely fine had Barnes not been at the club. "No," responded the KKK man, whipping off the hood, "he's in here."
Not all Liverpool footballers have been blessed with Barnes' sense of humour, however. In 1998, Jamie Carragher's idea of impromptu Christmas-party fun involved a Hunchback of Notre Dame costume, a load of strippers and some whipped cream. It certainly wasn't the last own-goal of his career, and it certainly wasn't the last own-goal to be scored at a Christmas party.
THE GREATEST PLUG OUTSIDE OF THE BEANO
Available now, the answer to your stocking-filler needs. The Knowledge in book form, a collection of our favourite questions and answers from the past eight years.
KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE
For previous Christmas specials, including the last time football was played on Christmas Day in Not Remotely Great Britain, whether being top at Christmas means being top in May, and the most goals scored on Boxing Day (66 in 10 games!), click here, here and here.
Can you help?
"Paul Ince was sacked after failing to win for 11 matches," begins Lars Ellensohn. "What's the longest winless run without a manager getting the sack?"
"Whilst watching my beloved Birmingham City struggle to overpower Watford recently, I noticed that three of our players' shirt-names began with "Q" (Queudrue, Quashie, and Quincy)," notes Andy Lingard. "Is this a record in England and how does this compare to X, Y and Z, for example?"
"The answer about Sunderland's nickname of the Black Cats makes me wonder if there are any other clubs with a similarly official nickname that resulted from some kind of formalised poll rather than simply being acquired through the normal process of common usage among fans," wonders Mark Goodge.
Send your questions and answers to knowledge@theguardian.com.
