Former Liverpool and England striker Peter Crouch has told some fascinating stories about money in football on his podcast and other platforms.Listeners of 'That Peter Crouch Podcast' might remember his tale about spending £800 on a jumper from Harrods that he didn’t even like.“I got to the till and I was thinking, 80 quid, maybe. It was £800,” he said, per Shortlist. â€œI bought it anyway and hated it from that moment. I decided to wear it to the pub and spilled Guinness all down it. Ruined.”

Footballers earn incredible amounts

Crouch reportedly earned £80,000-a-week when he was at Tottenham and a career spent mostly in the Premier League will have seen him earn enough to last several lifetimes.

Much is made about how much elite footballers earn, but it’s only really put into perspective when the players shed some light into how their lives change after that first big pay cheque.

Last year, former Manchester City defender Micah Richards revealed he spent $150,000 on a night out in Los Angeles after his pay rose from £5,000-a-week to £50,000-a-week.

Crouch had a similar feeling of having more money than he knew what to do with.

Crouch's story about Pompey kitman

Even when he was making a name for himself as a young striker at Portsmouth at the start of the century, Crouch was leading a lifestyle that differs from the norm.

In an episode of his podcast from 2018, the ex-forward told a story involving Pompey’s kitman Kev McCormack that summed up how different some professional footballers have it.

“We had one at Portsmouth who was a character, Kev. He was an ex-boxer from Wales and he was brilliant,” Crouch, who joined Portsmouth for the first time in 2001, said.

“At Portsmouth we weren’t well off at that stage and we had to wash our own kit, that was in the early days.

“I was a single lad on my own and hadn’t worked a washing machine in my life! So I used to give him the kit and give him sixty quid.”

Pompey kitman had a clever plan

Crouch’s fellow podcast host Chris Stark couldn’t believe what he’d heard. “Sixty quid?!” he replied.

“To wash it, a week, I think,” Crouch said.

Imagine paying someone £60 a week, or £240 every month, to stick some clothes in the washing machine and turn it on.

It’s a completely different world.

Yet Crouch wasn’t aware that Kev the kitman had come up with a sneaky idea to make some money without actually doing the washing.

The 41-year-old added: “What he used to do, I hadn’t realised, he’d charge a few of the lads and then just give it to the ladies in the laundry room!

“So he was actually, like you say, a mobster!”

Pretty clever, that. Kev himself must have made a few thousand pounds and he barely had to lift a finger.