Ian Wright has explained how smoking marijuana nearly destroyed his football career.
The Arsenal hero, who remains the club’s second-highest ever goalscorer, admitted he took weed in his early playing days.
While at his first professional club Crystal Palace, Wright continued to take it until one specific incident changed his outlook.
At the age of 21, around seven years before signing for the Gunners at Highbury, Wright was almost caught.
“I’d been smoking weed since I was about 17,” Wright wrote in a column for The Sun. “It didn’t even dawn on me that I was doing anything wrong.
“We beat WBA 4-1 that Saturday, the whole team came into the dressing room still excited and then the drug testers arrived.
“It’s the first time I’d ever seen them and I panicked inside – I’ve been smoking cannabis, less than 24 hours earlier, and if that test comes back positive that’s it. It is literally all over for me.
“I’m sure he’s going to call my number next, number ten. He calls, “Drug test, number 11.” Phil Barber.
“I sit down – more or less collapse – and think, “Somebody’s looking out for me, now I know it!”
“From that day to this I never smoked a spliff again.”
After calling time on drugs, Wright went on to earn his move to Arsenal before becoming a true icon at the club.
He then had brief spells with West Ham, Celtic and Burnley, but the former England international striker recognised how close it all came to never happening.
Wright, 52, remains one of the all-time Premier League greats, scoring 113 goals in 213 appearances.
Wright also claimed he is part of a generation of 1990s footballers let down by financial advisers who “took our money to carry out the advice we paid them to give us but never paid the tax.”
The former England striker and BBC pundit said he has been told to go bankrupt but fears he would lose his TV career.
He added: “they’d probably say I spent it all on weed, or that I lavished it all on cars, clothes and an extravagant lifestyle.”
Despite his financial problems, Wright says he’s never been happier with second wife Nancy.
“It’s taken me until the age of 52 to properly learn what love is,” he claims.