As anyone who follows football will know, events on the pitch only tell part of the story around any season.
We also find ourselves regularly dealing with transfer rumours, boardroom battles, managerial changes and - of course - dressing room incidents. The privacy of those locked dressing room doors means we don't hear all the stories, but sometimes they come to light.
Over the years, there have been plenty of revelations from the dressing rooms at Manchester United, Rangers, Crystal Palace and beyond. Here, Mirror Football looks back at some of those stand-out moments which have seen the light of day.
Luke Shaw and Ashley Young
Back in the 2014-15 season, Ashley Young had an unfortunate run-in with a bird. The England international, then at Man Utd, appeared to bear the brunt of a forceful... let's say 'expulsion' from a feathered friend... even if he has since denied it.
"I’m actually relieved that I’ve got the evidence," Young would later tell the UTD Podcast "I think you can tell it’s not real because I think you can tell, if a bird s*** in my mouth, you’re going to have a reaction."
That didn't stop team-mate Luke Shaw having fun with the incident, though. “Ashley Young is the joker in the dressing room," Shaw would later tell Match of the Day magazine..
"We still laugh about the time he got bird poo in his mouth against Swansea. In the changing room we hung a fake bird above his place as a joke, which he didn't like."
Louis van Gaal's trousers
Dutch boss Van Gaal was in the United dugout that season, part of a two-year stint in the Premier League. However, the tale we will relay here dates back to his time at Bayern Munich.
If you were a manager hoping to demonstrate you had cojones, how would you do it? If you answered 'I definitely wouldn't take my trousers down in front of players, that's ridiculous' then your name is not Louis van Gaal.
“I once dropped my pants in front of the entire squad," the former United boss later admitted. “I wanted to make clear: When I make a substitution, I don’t do so for my own ego, but for the sake of the team.
“I do everything for the team and I use everything I can to illustrate that. My voice, my mind, and everything else I’ve got. This shows the strength of our team sprit.”
Poo-gate
It feels self-explanatory, doesn't it. A poo. In the dressing room. During a Championship play-off semi-final (well, the exact timing off the offence is hard to confirm, with no one coming forward until some time later, but it appears to have happened on the same day at least).
Back in 2013, rivals Brighton and Crystal Palace met in the Championship play-off semis. The excrement left on the dressing room floor by an anonymous donor wasn't the source of the great rivalry between the clubs, but it probably didn't help.
"I am angry that someone within this club could endanger our good reputation and stoop so low," Poyet said in an email to staff which was printed in The Sun at the time. "Did they imagine that this would affect the Crystal Palace players? Well, possibly it did. It may just have fired them up more.
"Well someone made a very bad decision and I think it is time to stand up and take responsibility. Not just the culprit but those employees who are supposed to make our stadium safe and secure."
Aaron Wilbraham, part of Palace's squad at the time, would later detail the reaction of Eagles boss Ian Holloway. “Holloway went off his head, we arrived fired up anyway and the fact we think someone’s done this in the dressing room," he told the Undr the Cosh podcast. "Everyone was, ‘What the f***?’. The smell was hitting the back of your throat, it was horrible.”
The culprit was also identified long after the fact. As relayed by Wilbraham, it was an unnamed bus driver who was to blame.
“The changing rooms hadn’t really been done yet so there was no toilet roll and he’s s*** himself,” the forward added. “There’s no one about so he’s used these blue hard paper towels you get to dry your hands and tried to clear it up with a bit of water.
“He’s probably panicking trying to do it quick. He’s not told anyone because he’s thought he’s done a good job of cleaning it up. We’ve walked in a couple of hours later when it’s dried. For us and Holloway, we didn’t know anything about this. We were in the dark as only the bus driver knew. I think when it all came out he probably felt bad and consoled in the kit man.”
Pulis' 'naked headbutt'
There's not a lot more you can say about a naked headbutt, is there. The image is just visceral, regardless of the individuals involved in the story.
Well, in this case it was Tony Pulis involved, with the manager allegedly aiming a headbutt at James Beattie while they were both at Stoke. And yes, Pulis was allegedly naked at the time - at the very least, defender Ryan Shawcross did not deny that element, simply saying "it was a spectacle" when addressing it in a since-deleted Twitter Q&A.
"I have been a manager for 18 years and you have certain golden rules and one of the rules I stick to is that whatever happens in the dressing room stays in the dressing room," Pulis would later say. He insisted a line had been drawn under the incident and suggested Beattie had nothing to apologise for.
"The important thing is the spirit, commitment and togetherness stays in that dressing room," he added. "And you don't get that by [leaking] things out."
Lafferty's prank
Footballers and fireworks aren't necessarily a great match for one another. The same can go for stories which begin with an admission that a team-mate "knew a guy", and Gregg Wylde's story about his former Rangers team-mate Kyle Lafferty has both.
"Bonfire night was coming up and Lee McCulloch knew a guy who could get us fireworks," Wylde told the 4LadsHadADream podcast (via BelfastLive ). "So he came in one day and said, ‘Does anyone want fireworks or rockets for your family at home?’
“Some of the boys said aye and, to cut the story short, he brought fireworks in. There were these firecrackers. Have you ever seen Home Alone when he puts the firecrackers outside the back door?
“Lee McCulloch brought them in, the session finished in the morning and, I don’t know how, Kyle Lafferty got into his locker. The boys were in the shower and the place was steamed up because of the water. Kyle thought it was funny to put a couple in a water bottle and lit it.
"He lit the firecrackers, put it in a water bottle and chucked it into the showers. I couldn’t believe he had set a firework off in the changing room.
"The fire alarm goes off so we all had to get changed and leave Murray Park. We were like, ‘What the hell was that?’"
Snakes in the dressing room
Former Watford star Troy Deeney has shared more than one tale of dressing room antics, both involving animals of different kinds. How and why footballers seem to have such a ready supply of animals is possibly a discussion for another time.
“We did this pranking thing for a little while and Anthony Gerrard, Stevie’s cousin, is a lovely fella but he is a mad man," Deeney told The Star. "So he came in and threw two live snakes in the dressing room and shut the door because he thought that was funny.
“The next day someone took his car and drive it to the back of the training ground 15 miles away and left it, so he thinks his car had been stolen. As you can imagine, it then begins escalating.”
Deeney and Gerrard spent a number of years together at Walsall, where the striker made his name before making it all the way to the Premier League. He suggested there are "a lot of things you can’t get away with anymore," but the more surprising thing might be that you could still get away with them that recently. Take, for example, the second Deeney story from those days...
Smelling a rat
We could try giving this a big build-up. Instead, though, we'll leave it to Mr Deeney himself.
"Do you know the rats that they freeze to serve to snakes?" he began. A good start to any story, we can all agree.
“Michael Ricketts put one in everybody’s washbag, so there was about 15 of them. When you’re just chatting and you’ve finished training and you’re reaching into your bag to grab the shower gel, people were pulling out these big fat rats.
“I didn’t have a washbag because I was pretty poor at the time so I thought I’d got away with it. I get in my mum’s Ford Focus to go home, looked to the left of me - the rat’s got a seatbelt on.
“He’s in the passenger seat just sat there slumped. It was brilliant, but I did poo myself when I saw this rat!”
A few years after "pooing himself", as he puts it, Deeney was playing for Watford at Wembley in the Championship play-off final. The opponents that day? That's right, the Crystal Palace team still scarred by the poo-gate incident just days earlier.
