Ranked! The 50 most hated people in football
Mixed in with the cheats, chancers and chairmen that make up this list, there's a big dollop of pure, unadulterated envy. Yep, while every entry in our countdown of 50 most hated people in football have drawn major dislike for a variety of reasons, some of them are also loved in equal measure.
This isn’t a list of people we here at FFT personally hate - although some of the people here are definitely off our Christmas card list - but rather who stir up opprobrium in the game.
So what we’re saying is: don’t blame us if your favourite icon whose face you have tattooed on your thigh is here (although it would be a pretty strange person to have Mike Dean inked on their leg). We’re just trying to hold up a mirror to the football world.
That said, if we’ve put anyone here who shouldn’t be present - or if we’ve missed out someone widely reviled - do let us know (nicely) @FourFourTwo. For now, let’s bring on the hate by continuing with positions 40-31. Come back throughout the week as we finish the countdown...
50-41 • 40-31
50. Sergio Ramos
Open a dictionary at the entry for ‘pantomime villain’, and the definition might simply be a picture of Sergio Ramos, perhaps waving an imaginary yellow card at a browbeaten referee. Ramos holds the record for the joint-most sendings off of any La Liga player ever, but he’s a strange kind of hard man in that he is impossible to take seriously.
Rather than a chilling defensive gatekeeper, the Real Madrid defender’s persona is more defined by a kind of larger-than-life recklessness; a shameless supervillain. You could say that Ramos – good looking, cartoonishly ludicrous, lacking any self-awareness and amassing trophies on behalf of a super-rich juggernaut – is the defining footballer of the modern age.
Words: Alex Hess
49. Alan Pardew
His public personality straddles the line between smug and sleazy – it’s probably encapsulated by the nauseating touchline dance when Crystal Palace went ahead in the 2016 FA Cup Final, which did achieve the impressive feat of getting neutrals to back Manchester United.
There’s a thin veneer of respectability, but like a dry-lipped Bruce Banner, Pardew also has a nasty streak that occasionally bursts out - from calling Manuel Pellegrini a "f***ng old c***" to head-butting an opposing player on the touchline.
Despite a middling managerial career, he carries a sense of superiority that’s best evidenced by what West Ham fans call the ‘king story’.
Words: Amit Kawala
48. Robbie Savage
A media career which mimics who he was as a player. Robbie Savage, the combative, provocative player became ‘Sav’, the opinion-on-absolutely-everything pundit.
To give Savage his dues, he was really just an early exponent of something which many of his contemporaries have recently caught up with - i.e. he who shouts loudest and most antagonistically, wins. We’re looking at you, Chris Sutton.
He’s also been very successful and until quite recently, straddled nearly half a dozen radio and television channels, appearing in all sorts of different formats. The irritating talking head who proves the old maxim: it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
Words: Seb Stafford-Bloor
47. Tony Pulis
Until recently, it had been largely opposition fans that resented Tony Pulis's signature – and wholly unapologetic – sit-and-stifle blueprint. Although it’s increasingly now fans of the clubs he manages too. Just as sure as Wales' foremost excitement-extinguisher will always have his admirers among those who prize mid-table security, he will always face seething opprobrium from the more aesthetically minded among his spectatorship.
Pulis has been scorned by many a snookered manager in his time but none more frequently or indignantly than Arsene Wenger, who has variously labelled Pulis's team "cowards", "horrendous" and practitioners of "more rugby than football".
Also allegedly head-butted his own striker while wearing nothing but a scowl once – an image to give us all nightmares.
Words: Alex Hess
46. Pepe
Portugal’s master of the dark arts is – to English eyes at least – everything that’s wrong with football. He has all the attributes to be a legendary defender – pace, bravery, strength and intelligence – and, after a decade at Real Madrid, the trophy cabinet to match. But it’s the manner in which he’s used his talents that attracts the ire.
Like his long-time defensive partner Ramos, Pepe a is dirty, dastardly and downright infuriating player – the kind who will pull the shirt off your back when he’s defending a corner, and then collapse like a house of cards if you give him the same treatment at the other end.
Words: Amit Kawala
45. Alan Green
Poor Alan Green. He’s disliked for being everything that a football commentator is supposed to be.
Today’s equivalent is a slave to the sound bite and, more often than not, gratingly optimistic at every turn. In contrast, Green is gloriously dour; every game he covered - and continues to cover - presents an opportunity for a good ol’ moan.
To a particular type of unstable, fundamentalist fan he was prone to moments of bias, but his real crime was likely that his presence - his voice, his tone, his demeanour - made any game sound like an attritional battle in the mud. The marmite of British commentary.
Words: Seb Stafford-Bloor
44. Stan Kroenke
A man whose bank balance soars thanks to a team that meekly treads water is never going to be worshipped by that club's fans - and so it has proved with the American sports tycoon, for whom the tide of public opinion appears to have been fiercely turning over recent months.
“We don’t want his sort,” was the response of Arsenal's former chairman Peter Hill-Wood when Kroenke first showed up on the scene. That was in 2007, when Kroenke began amassing shares for £7,500. A decade on, with the American having invested precisely zero of his own money in a team that had long been drifting towards irrelevance, he was turning down offers of £32,000 per share. Good work if you can get it.
Words: Alex Hess
43. Ben Thatcher
Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. But unfortunately for a player whose elbowing controversies numbered at least three during a red-and-yellow-flecked 18-year career, thrice is very much a trend.
Thatcher gained notoriety in 2006 when his ostensible attempt to dispossess Pedro Mendes resulted in his forearm bludgeoning the face of his opponent, who was rushed to hospital having suffered a pitchside seizure. The level of brutality was so severe that Greater Manchester police were compelled to launch an investigation – just as Lancashire police had looked into a similar ‘challenge’ during a reserve game that February.
Six years earlier, in his final year at Wimbledon, Thatcher had dished out the same treatment to Sunderland’s Nicky Summerbee – a moment that persuaded the onlooking Kevin Keegan against selecting him, as planned, for his upcoming England squad. Thatcher would go on to represent Wales, despite having played for England at U21 level (four appearances, one red card).
Words: Alex Hess
42. Neil Warnock
To catalogue his fall-outs would take more than the allotted space here, but suffice to say the aptly anagrammed managerial veteran has his fair share of enemies. The sheer range of this roll call – from the widely loathed (El Hadji Diouf, Stephen Hunt) to the inoffensive (Gareth Southgate) to the downright bizarre (Sean Bean) – is testament to Warnock's status as a man who could not so much start a fight in a phonebox as inspire a Royal Rumble in one... before complaining about the outcome in the press.
His position as a protagonist in the fabled Battle of Bramall Lane (three red cards, two 22-man melees, one abandoned game) makes for an apt top spot on Colin Wanker’s greatest hits compilation.
Words: Alex Hess
41. Sergio Busquets
The iron fist inside the velvet glove. Busquets is a fabulous player, that’s not in dispute - he might even be underrated. But he lacks the sheen of many of his team-mates and the perception of him as the physicality behind Barcelona’s grace, hopelessly reductive though it is, makes him the hateable face of his club.
Few dislike Messi and only a philistine would object to Iniesta, so what are you left with? Who provided the outlet for the world’s seething jealousy? The big, awkward looking guy in the middle, of course, with his fondness for theatrics and dalliances with the dark arts.
Words: Seb Stafford-Bloor
50-41 • 40-31
40. Steve Evans
For the casual, Premier League-focused fan, Steve Evans just seems like your average, run-of-the-mill Football League manager – overweight, and somehow both red-faced and pasty simultaneously.
Yet Evans has a reputation as one of the most hated managers in lower-league football, from spells at Boston, Crawley, Rotherham, Leeds and now Mansfield.
Although touchline disasters and cosying up to Massimo Cellino at Leeds are on his rap sheet, the hatred for Evans originally stems from his conviction for tax fraud (actual evasion, not just good old avoision): during his time at Boston, player bonuses and wages were disguised as expenses to help the Lincolnshire club win promotion to the Football League.
Words: Amit Kawala
39. Vincent Tan
In our eyes, his biggest crime is wearing a football shirt over a normal shirt (and under a suit jacket). Yet Cardiff City fans have bigger gripes. When Malaysian billionaire Tan took over the Welsh club in 2010, they’d just missed out on Premier League promotion.
Although his investment helped the Bluebirds attain that prize, it came at a cost. Despite overwhelming opposition from fans, Tan pushed through a rebrand from the City’s traditional blue to a red hue favoured in Asia. The change lasted just three years, but Tan’s total disregard for a club’s tradition won him no friends in south Wales.
Words: Amit Kawala
38. Vinnie Jones
In the 1980s and 1990s, Jones was the tough-tackling, ball-grabbing face of Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang, and a self-confessed ‘Soccer Hard Man’ who was fined by the FA for appearing in a video of that name.
He was sent off a troubling 12 times during his career, and typifies the overblown machismo of ‘Danny Dyer football’ – an aesthetic that’s carried over seamlessly into his Hollywood career (he turned down a role in Snakes on a Plane, which is a good enough reason for hate in itself).
It would be interesting to drop Crazy Gang era Vinnie Jones into a flowing game of modern Premier League football and see how long he lasted before being dragged off the pitch by stewards with Theo Walcott’s blood all over his face.
Words: Amit Kawala
37. Roberto Rojas
In September 1989, a promising Chile side were losing to Brazil in a crucial qualifier, and on the verge of missing out on the World Cup. Then, 65 minutes in, a flare thrown from the stands seemed to hit their goalkeeper Roberto Rojas, who went down bleeding from a head wound. The match was called off, and Brazil’s place seem threatened.
Yet it turned out that viewers had been duped. Rojas the rotter had cut his own head, with a blade hidden in his glove – a plan devised alongside captain Fernando Astengo. The flare hadn’t landed anywhere near him.
“We thought the plan had worked. With all the pressure and Chile wanting so badly to win, I really didn’t think I had done anything wrong at the time,” he said. Rojas was banned from football for life.
Words: Amit Kawala
36. John Fashanu
It’s fair to say that Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang, whose piece de resistance FA Cup win against Liverpool came after their captain had threatened to rip off Kenny Dalglish’s ear in the tunnel, did not expend much energy striving for popularity. However, Fash the Bash’s dubious profile is the product of more than just his on-pitch unpleasantries (which in itself included shattering Gary Mabbutt’s eye socket with his elbow).
His involvement alongside Bruce Grobbelaar and Hans Segers in a high-profile match-fixing scandal (all were eventually cleared) muddied his name, but it was his public ostracisation of his brother – the openly gay footballer Justin – which has left the most toxic legacy.
Words: Alex Hess
35. Graham Westley
Given the shadow cast by the Premier League, it’s remarkable that Westley – who has never coached above League One – has the reputation that he does. Or maybe it’s telling.
He’s managed 11 clubs in 20 years, including three separate spells at Stevenage, and has evidently always had the capacity to put noses out of joint. Note, for instance, how many times Westley seems to have left clubs in a backdraft of acrimony and how often personal disputes, supporter fallout, or personality clashes seem to have been responsible.
Perhaps Westley can be summed up in one quote, a magical mixture of arrogance and nonsense: “My kids don’t call me Dad,” he once said. “They call me Medal Winner.”
Words: Seb Stafford-Bloor
34. Antonio Rattin
The foul-mouthed Argentina captain during the 1966 World Cup was sent off by the German referee after 35 minutes of their quarter-final against England for “violence of the tongue”. But then, believing the referee to be biased, he refused to leave the field, sat down on the red carpet reserved for royals and (gasp) insulted the Queen.
Eventually, Rattin had to be led from the field by two police officers. It made him football’s top villain of the 1960s on these shores.
Yet in South America, this incident was viewed as an injustice against the Argentines – with fans pointing out that the referee spoke no Spanish, so couldn’t have known what Rattin was saying to him.
Words: Amit Kawala
33. Tim Sherwood
Sherwood’s managerial career started right at the top, and burned hot and bright – like an asteroid smashing into the ground. He joined Tottenham under Harry Redknapp, performed well with the U21s, and was took the senior reins in December 2013 after the departure of Andre Villas-Boas.
It was an abrupt change. From a thoughtful, tactical manager, Spurs were now being steered by a gilet-hurling, chest-thumping manager driven by “passion”. The results weren’t actually that bad, but a spell at Aston Villa ended in relegation and the anger stopped getting results, while his bullish attempts to take credit for Harry Kane come across as a bit desperate. Also, his arms must be really cold.
Words: Amit Kawala
32. Mark van Bommel
Although the Dutch midfielder’s reputation was crystalised in the 2010 World Cup Final – a one-match campaign to obtain a red card that Howard Webb manfully ignored – Van Bommel’s villainy is really a body of work.
Just as it has become fashionable to refer to rudimentary playing positions by their Italian or Spanish equivalent, it’s a surprise that nobody has coined a phrase for his role. A lover of yellow-cards, a purveyor of tactical fouls (which seemed often – amazingly – to go unpunished). Basterde, perhaps?
Van Bommel was also an awfully good player, which – in that Steffen Effenberg sort of way – somehow made it worse.
Words: Seb Stafford-Bloor
31. Francesco Becchetti
In the summer of 2014, when Francesco Becchetti's waste management consortium took over Leyton Orient, only a penalty shoot-out had denied the club a place in the Championship.
When the Italian left Brisbane Road three years later, Orient were a non-League club for the first time in 112 years, had gone through 10 managers and were on the brink of existential obliteration. After two relegations, one failed reality TV show, one winding-up order from the high court, a money laundering investigation and a six-match ban from his own stadium for kicking the Orient manager, he was finally hounded out.
But the damage – calamitous in scale – was well and truly done. "This is a position from which it can grow," he said upon departing the National League club.
Words: Alex Hess
FourFourTwo's most hated people in football: 30 to No.1 will be here this week
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