Boot room secrets: The Premier League players with the most outlandish hobbies

We know the cliches. The golf retreat, the FIFA session, the exotic holiday. Premier League footballers have been reduced, in popular imagination, to a handful of predictable pastimes.

But spend enough time digging into what these players actually do when the boots come off, and a far stranger, more human picture emerges. Some are artists. One is a world record holder. Another is essentially a one-man reforestation project.

Here are five Premier League players whose hobbies have absolutely nothing to do with the game.

Cristiano Ronaldo – Bingo obsessive

Go on, take a moment with that one. The man was reportedly given a bingo DVD as a Christmas gift and immediately fell in love with the game. There’s a beautiful mundanity to it.

One of the most ferociously driven athletes in sporting history, a man who has remodelled his entire body in service of perfection, apparently finds his zen calling out numbers. What makes it better: because the DVD was in English, it actually helped him learn the language.

So in a very real sense, Ronaldo’s mastery of English during his time at Manchester United came courtesy of a retirement home favourite. Iconic.

Nobby Solano – Salsa trumpeter

Newcastle United’s Peruvian cult hero didn’t just like the trumpet. He was consumed by it. Nobby would sleep with his trumpet, eat and train with his trumpet, and once rang his manager Bobby Robson to serenade him, anonymously, with a discordant tune.

Robson eventually worked out who was calling. He called Solano back and just laughed. The hobby went well beyond bedroom noodling. Solano formed his own salsa band, The Geordie Latinos, and became a cult figure both on Tyneside and in his native Peru.

A Premier League right midfielder fronting a brass-led salsa ensemble in a Newcastle bar remains one of football’s most delightfully improbable images.

Hector Bellerin – One-man reforestation project

The former Arsenal rightback used his platform in ways that made the rest of the game look rather shallow. At a time when most players are shifting Lamborghinis, he traded his Mercedes for a second-hand electric Tesla. Understated in the best possible way.

When he went vegan, it opened broader questions about the environment, and during the 2019-20 season, he pledged to plant 3,000 trees for every Arsenal win, in partnership with a reforestation nonprofit. He then went further.

Bellerin became the second-largest shareholder in Forest Green Rovers, the club recognised by FIFA and the UN as the world’s greenest football club. His stated principle: “Every time someone puts a microphone next to you, there’s a chance to talk about issues.”

Andrei Arshavin – Fashion designer

The diminutive Russian playmaker who terrorised PL defences in his Arsenal prime had a parallel life entirely off the pitch. Arshavin studied fashion design in Saint Petersburg and not accidentally.

He has a degree in fashion design and in his spare time there’s nothing he liked more than getting out a sketchpad and designing clothes eventually going into business with his wife to launch their own range.

For a man known for his deadpan expression and understated brilliance on the ball, the revelation that he’s been sketching hemlines in his downtime is genuinely charming. Arsenal’s creative fulcrum, in more ways than one.

Axel Tuanzebe – Hungry Hungry Hippos

The sentence writes itself. During Manchester United’s pre-season tour of the United States in 2018, Tuanzebe broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to clear a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos, finishing in 17.36 seconds, as per BBC.

He was the only member of the squad to successfully break a record that day, with teammates and coaching staff singing his name in celebration.

The defender has since gone on to have a solid PL career but the hippos record will follow him forever, and rightly so. Some legacies are built in 90 minutes. His took 17.36 seconds.