Former Fulham centre-back Brede Hangeland didn’t hold back as he named 11 of the laziest Premier League stars he has played with.
Speaking to Heia fotball podcast in Norway, the recently retired footballer ripped into a number of his former team-mates __with Emmanuel Adebayor and Dimitar Berbatov getting the worst of it.
Hangeland reveals that he saw Adebayor taking coffee breaks at the gym despite being paid by three different clubs at the same time.
“I was marking Adebayor in midfield,” said Hangeland. “Suddenly he said: ’Ah, I’m hungry.’ I replied: ‘What?’ He said: ‘I can’t wait for the game to finish. I’m so hungry. Do you know a good restaurant in London?’
“At Palace, when we had strength workouts, he would sit in the gym __with a cup of coffee and a muffin. He was being paid by City, Tottenham and Palace at the same time, and he was sitting in the gym drinking coffee.”
The Norwegian claims that Berbatov was as bad as Adebayor for skipping the gym, with his former Bulgarian team-mate receiving endless massages while everyone else worked out.
“If only he ran,” said Hangeland. “Never seen a man get so many massages in my life. Whenever we were in the gym, Berbatov was getting a massage. I knew the guy who gave him the massages.
“Usually at the end of the season, the players would give all the physios a gift. But he’d massage Berbatov for hundreds of hours during the season and he would get nothing.”
The full XI: Wayne Hennessey, Chris Baird, Zdenek Grygera, Erik ‘Panzer’ Hagen, Wilfried Zaha, Jimmy Bullard, Mousa Dembele, Bryan Ruiz, Bobby Zamora, Dimitar Berbatov, Emmanuel Adebayor.