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How wine stopped Massimo Ambrosini playing for West Ham

The former AC Milan footballer revealed he might have signed with The Hammers had it not been for manager Sam Allardyce’s preoccupation with wine.

Massimo Ambrosini, who played for Serie A team AC Milan from 1995 to 2013, almost signed for London’s West Ham United in the aftermath of being released from the Italian club. However, the former footballer recently revealed that a meeting with Sam Allardyce, West Ham’s manager at the time, put him off.

The midfielder, who played for AC Milan for 18 seasons and captained the side for four, confessed that he had his heart set on moving to West Ham but was taken aback by Allardyce’s choice of conversation when Ambrosini flew to London to sign a contract with the club.

“I had lunch with Sam Allardyce, but he thought it was a better idea to talk about wine than to talk about football, and then to get up and leave me halfway through our meeting,” Ambrosini told football magazine FourFourTwo.

“I was a bit angry about how he decided to treat me, so I signed with Fiorentina”.

Left cold

Ambrosini shared that the day after playing his final game for AC Milan he boarded a plane for London to lock in his new professional contract with West Ham. “I was happy, and totally convinced I was going there,” he said. According to FourFourTwo, all that was missing was a signature on the dotted line.

However, Ambrosini was left hanging when Allardyce, who took the helm at West Ham in June 2011 after managing Newcastle United and Blackburn Rovers, failed to address the transfer, instead waxing lyrical about wine.

“If you go and meet the manager and he doesn’t talk to you about anything, just drinks wine, refuses to talk about football, and leaves you alone with another person, without even saying he’s happy you made the journey and would be glad if you joined…” said Ambrosini.

“There was someone else from the club there, I don’t remember his name, but Allardyce got up and left us in the middle of lunch, saying he had to go to another meeting. I would have understood if he’d said ‘I’m happy you came to London, we’ll talk tomorrow, I’m glad you’re joining’ – that would have been normal. I asked his friend ‘where is he going?’. He told me to be calm, and I said ‘no’. And then I left.”

Counterfeit wine prank

The late Sir Alex Ferguson, who famously managed Manchester United for 26 years, once used Allardyce’s love of fine wine to “trick” him into thinking he had bought a counterfeit bottle – or that a colleague had drunk the contents and replaced it with squash.

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“My 25th year at United, Sam Allardyce bought me a 1986 [Chateau] Latour, the year I came to United. His kit manager gave it to me on the Saturday morning, and I said, ‘I’m going to play a trick here’, so I opened it up and put a bottle of Ribena in,” Fergusom told The Telegraph.

“So Sam comes in after the game and I say, ‘Thanks very much for the wine, Sam, it’s really very generous of you’. He said, ‘Well, you go home and enjoy that’. I said, ‘No, I want to share it with you’. So I open it up and I go, ‘What’s this, Sam?’

“He bolts out that door, honestly, like a wild man, screaming for his kit manager. And when he came back in I had the bottle opened and I was pouring the glasses. It was a fantastic moment. I had to get him.”

‘The Oenlogist’

Allardyce is not the only football manager with a passion for wine.

Franck Haise, the newly-appointed coach of French football team Rennes, picked up the nickname ‘The Oenologist’ for his dedication to wine collecting. “When I read the French review of wines, when I watch a programme on television about wine or when I am taking part in a tasting, these are the rare moments I’m not thinking about football…when I’m in the universe of wine, my mind is not cluttered with other things. It’s my escape,” he told Ouest-France newspaper.

Haise said that his love of wine started when he was as an 18-year-old midfielder playing for Rouen in the late 1980s.

“There were quite a few wine lovers in the squad,” he said. “We had a tradition that, on the eve of matches, we would share a bottle of wine, which of course I was soon the one choosing.”

Since then he has developed a deep appreciation for the wines of Burgundy, particularly those from the area of Auxerre, known for its Chablis, and has been described as a dedicated collector.