Pettiest reasons a footballer has refused to play RANKED: Ronaldo, Tevez, Ben Arfa… | OneFootball

When football’s most elite players feel disrespected, logic often goes out the window. As these former Real Madrid, Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City superstars demonstrate.

Not every player boycott is rooted in principle. Some are fuelled by grudges so ridiculous they expose just how fragile egos can be.

Here are six of the pettiest reasons a footballer has refused to play.

6. Fernando Redondo

“I was picked for Argentina’s World Cup squad in 1990 but I knew I wasn’t going to be in the starting line-up, I would just be another squad member, so I preferred to stay home.”

It’s believed that the former Real Madrid enforcer wanted to focus on his law studies at the time. Unique? Certainly. Petty? Not so much. Actually quite noble, in fact.

The real pettiness came later.

“He told me what he thought I could give the team…but when we got to the subject of hair, I told him I wasn’t going to cut it because it forms part of my personality,” Redondo said of Argentinian legend Daniel Passarella and the sticking point that left him out of the 1998 World Cup squad.

“And I, more than a footballer, I am a person.”

Diego Maradona sided with Redondo, and we’re inclined to sit on that side of the fence. Passarella was undoubtedly the pettier of the two.

Still, you wonder if Redondo looks back and regrets choosing his luscious locks over representing his country. His only World Cup experience was their cursed USA ’94 campaign.

5. Hatem Ben Arfa

The mercurial Frenchman, as we’re obliged to call him, reportedly went on strike at Marseille to force a move to Newcastle United back in 2010. But there are countless examples of such transfer shenanigans.

No, here we’re going back to Ben Arfa’s inauspicious loan stint at Hull City.

He made just nine appearances on loan to the Tigers in the 2014-15 season, and he left you with the distinct impression he simply couldn’t be arsed with life on Humberside. Or that he didn’t fancy playing under Steve Bruce. Bit of both, probably.

After being subbed off after 35 minutes due to a hilariously lackadaisical display in a 3-0 defeat to Manchester United, Ben Arfa promptly jetted home to France and was never seen in Hull again.

To be fair to Bruce, he was surprisingly magnanimous about how the saga unfolded.

“There have been no bad words between us, but you just have to face it that sometimes transfers don’t work out and that’s what’s happened this time,” he told reporters.

“He’s played his last game for Hull and he has been told that’s the case. I wish him the best of luck in the future and I genuinely hope he gets the career many believe his talent deserves.”

Bruce got his wish, with Ben Arfa enjoying a late career renaissance back in Ligue 1, flourishing at Nice and earning a move to perennial champions PSG.

4. William Gallas

We’re breaking our self-imposed transfer rule to include Gallas, who went to bizarrely extreme lengths to get away from Chelsea.

Yes, refusing to play to force a transfer is the oldest trick in the book. But threatening to score an own goal? That’s something else entirely.

Chelsea’s official club statement on the matter still leaves our jaws on the floor 20 years later:

“Before the first game of the season against Manchester City, when only four defenders were available and John Terry was doubtful with an injury, he refused to play.

“He went on to threaten that if he was forced to play, or if he was disciplined and financially punished for his breach of the rules, that he could score an own goal or get himself sent off, or make deliberate mistakes.”

3. Carlos Tevez

Joe Hart recalled the circumstances of what led to Tevez’s exile from the Man City squad during the club’s title-winning 2011-12 campaign:

“Carlos did make himself available to come on the pitch, but he was asked to warm up, having already warmed up for 20 or 25 minutes, and then he was asked to warm up again to come on – and I’m pretty sure he said: ‘I am warm.'”

“I did not feel right to play, so I did not,” is what Tevez is said to have told Sky Sports’ Geoff Shreeves that night, though his agent claimed he’d been let down by a poor translation.

Whatever the nuts and bolts of the origin, the striker spent much of the following five months practising his golf swing back home in Argentina.

All very silly when you look back, isn’t it?

2. Cristiano Ronaldo

We’re tempted to put this one straight in at No.1, but frankly Ronaldo’s actions have gone above and beyond “petty”. It’s enough to send you into an existential tailspin about the state of the sport itself.

The world’s highest-paid footballer has opted out of games amid gripes that the Saudi Public Investment Fund hasn’t furnished him with enough expensive team-mates.

He’s sitting there thinking that while the likes of Joao Felix, Sadio Mane, Kingsley Coman, Marcelo Brozovic and Inigo Martinez make do in his absence.

You’d think that banking almost half a million quid a day (a day!) would be enough for Ronaldo to grin and bear such immense sporting hardship, but apparently not. Cry us a river.

1. Yaya Toure

Alright, technically speaking, Toure didn’t actually go on strike after the infamous birthday cake saga of 2014. He didn’t miss any games.

But we’re including this because it is the single most childish palaver in football history.

Toure turned 31 two days after the final game of the 2013-14 campaign, in which Man City pipped Liverpool to the title, largely thanks to the midfielder producing one of the greatest individual campaigns in Premier League history.

Twenty goals and nine assists are an outstanding return for a player in his position.

Things might have been so different had cake-gate happened during the crunch time of the run-in. Steven Gerrard might have a Premier League winners’ medal had the Ivorian been born in March or April.

“Everything Dimitri said is true. He speaks for me. I will explain after the World Cup,” tweeted Toure after his agent’s astonishing rant.

“He got a cake but when it was Roberto Carlos’s birthday, the president of Anzhi gave him a Bugatti,” Seluk had said.

“I don’t expect City to present Yaya with a Bugatti, we only asked that they shook his hand and said ‘we congratulate you’. It is the minimum they must do when it is his birthday and the squad is all together.”