David Beckham and Gary Lineker caught the same train to Manchester for a Champions League game

Reckon either of them has got a Railcard?

You'd think football legends such as David Beckham and Gary Lineker would get chauffeurs for their journeys from London to Manchester. Or a gold-plated chariot, for that matter. But nope, Becks and Gaz hopped over to Euston Station and jumped on a train to Manchester Piccadilly.

The pair unexpectedly met when they were heading north to watch Manchester United's Champions League tie against PSG, which ended in a 2-0 victory for the Parisians.

"Bumped into a fella on the train to Manchester that reckons he used to play for PSG," Lineker said about Beckham, external, who began his career at Manchester United and announced his retirement from the game when playing for PSG in 2013.

Because so many footballers spend their huge salaries on flashy cars with platinum doors and flux capacitors in their glovebox*, it's sometimes weird for us to see such high-profile figures on regular old public transport. Granted they were in first class. But still. 

It just shows that not all footballers are racing around in million-pound cars, and that some of the game's top players - on the odd occasion - choose to travel by slightly more humble means.

*please don't @ us telling us this isn't where a flux capacitor would go. 

Yep, that’s Barcelona’s man between the sticks, Marc-Andre ter Stegen, zipping around the city on his electric scooter.

After spending the first three years of his Barcelona career in the suburb of Castelldefels, Stegen moved into the fashion district of Gracia and apparently loves nothing more than scooting about town. Light, easy to park, eco-friendly.

Something mesmerising about that clip. We could watch it for hours.

This photograph of Tottenham hotshots Eric Dier and Christian Eriksen riding the London Underground is disorientating and confusing in exactly the same way as when you bump into a schoolteacher on a night out. “What... are you... doing here?” 

In fact, there are other similar examples of this sort of thing, including…

Wilfried Zaha on the Tube - in his Crystal Palace gear!

And, even Mesut Özil on the Tube…

Love it.

N’Golo Kante's move to Chelsea earned him a contract worth around £110,000 a week. That didn’t tempt him to trade in the second-hand Mini Cooper that he bought while winning the Premier League title at Leicester. Here he is giving pal Riyad Mahrez a lift home after a 3-0 win against Stoke in January 2016.

“I’ve never been someone who loves a car and when I was young I didn’t have the ambition of a car or something like that,” said the Frenchman., external

OK, so Kante's Mini is hardly a clapped-out banger, but it's a relief to see a) someone driving something relatively normal but also b) a strong uptake for Leicester's car-share scheme.

Former Tottenham left-back Benoit Assou-Ekotto once told The Guardian, external that he saw playing football more as a job more than a passion.

“I don’t understand why, when I said I play for the money, people were shocked,” he remarked, “Oh, he’s a mercenary. Every player is like that.”

Either completely galling or refreshingly honest, depending on your view. The Cameroon full-back had a similarly non-conformist approach to transport. 

“I can get to training every day for just £20 a week. And I don't care if other players laugh at me,” he has explained, external. “You pay £150,000 [for a Bentley] and when you sell it back it is worth only £85,000. I decided to do something different.”

Well, up to a point - at the time Assou-Ekotto also owned six Ford Mustangs, so he was hardly tightening the belt.

German right-back Moritz Volz became a fan favourite during his time at Fulham for his self-deprecating sense of humour, charitable work and for the fact that he rode to training every day – as well as to some home games - on his fold-up bicycle.

Here is Moritz with his famous bike, popping up on a thread about another Fulham cult hero Junichi Inamoto.

OK, so this one wasn’t really a choice made by the player. When Tony Adams was in charge of Portsmouth, back in 2008, a little initiative he brought in to incentivise training sessions was that the player deemed to have had put the worst shift in that day would have to drive home in this banger. 

That day’s plonker was obviously David James. Yet this was just the start of things. The initiative took another turn - players had to not only drive the car but improve it. It eventually resembled the A-Team van, external.

Well, that was edifying, wasn’t it? Now then, let’s go have a look at some Premier League wage structures and get our blood pressure back up to where it should be.

This article was originally published on 15 March 2018.

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