Professional football is, in theory, built on discipline.
Sleep tracking, nutrition plans, recovery sessions, video analysis, ice baths, and individualised training loads. Elite footballers are supposed to live every hour of the week as a finely managed athletic asset.
Then the rest of life happens. The microwaves, the kitchen sinks, the toddlers, the sunbeds, the nightclubs, the dressing rooms.
What follows is a fact-checked tour through some of the most absurd reasons professional footballers have actually missed matches, or come close.
No hamstrings. No cruciate ligaments. Just real life intervening at the worst possible moment.
Sam Henderson and the rampaging cow
In February 2018, Queen of the South confirmed their third-choice goalkeeper, 19-year-old Sam Henderson, was a doubt for that weekend's Scottish Championship match against Dunfermline. The reason was a cow.
Henderson had been at his father's farm when a rampaging cow knocked him over and injured his shoulder. Assistant manager Dougie Anderson confirmed it to the club's website, adding the helpful detail that the cow ran at him a second time but Henderson managed to dodge it.
Queen of the South had a genuine goalkeeping crisis on their hands because first-choice Alan Martin was already out injured.
There is no medical protocol for bovine-related shoulder injury in professional football. Henderson became, briefly, the only player in the squad whose injury report needed a livestock paragraph.
Kirk Broadfoot and the exploding egg
In May 2009, the Daily Record reported that Rangers and Scotland defender Kirk Broadfoot had ended up in hospital with facial scalds after one of two eggs he was poaching in the microwave exploded.
Manager Walter Smith confirmed it at the time, saying Broadfoot had "some facial burns but he should be OK."
Worth noting that Broadfoot has since disputed the version that has followed him around for over a decade. On the Open Goal podcast in 2022 he said it was a glass that exploded in the microwave, not the egg, and that he was already injured and out of the side at the time, so the incident didn't actually cost him any matches.
The original story, he claims, came from someone in the hospital who sold a more colourful version to the papers.
Either way, microwaving eggs without piercing the yolk remains officially discouraged. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents records hundreds of egg-related injuries every year. None of those people are international footballers, which is what made the story stick.
Ousmane Dembélé and the late-night console
In November 2018, Ousmane Dembélé failed to show up for a Barcelona training session and informed the club too late that he was ill.
Reports in Spain pinned the absence on the more familiar reason: he had been up too late playing video games and had overslept. Manager Ernesto Valverde dropped him from the squad for the home league match against Real Betis, which Barcelona lost 4-3.
A few weeks later, in December 2018, Barcelona club security were sent to find Dembélé at his home after he was two hours late for training. The club fined him a reported €100,000-plus.
Dembélé was 21 at the time and one of the most expensive signings in Barcelona's history. France manager Didier Deschamps publicly criticised his timekeeping.
The player has matured into a Ballon d’Or winner since then, but the image of one of world football's most expensive forwards being tracked down by Camp Nou security at his apartment is hard to shake.
Santiago Cañizares and the bottle of cologne
In May 2002, weeks before the World Cup, Spain's first-choice goalkeeper Santiago Cañizares was at the team's training base in Jerez.
In the bathroom of his hotel room, he accidentally smashed a bottle of cologne against the sink. A shard of glass landed on his foot and severed a tendon in his big toe.
He needed surgery. He missed the entire 2002 World Cup. Iker Casillas, then 21 years old and a year into his Real Madrid first-team career, stepped up as Spain's number one.
He saved a penalty in regulation and two more in the round of 16 shoot-out against the Republic of Ireland, earned the nickname "San Iker," and effectively launched the international career that would take him to a World Cup, two Euros, and the status of one of the great goalkeepers of his generation.
In simple terms, a slipped bottle in Jerez quietly redrew Spanish football for the next decade. Cañizares never played at a World Cup again.
David Batty and the three-year-old on a tricycle
David Batty was the kind of midfielder that forwards in the 1990s genuinely worried about. Combative, uncompromising, capped for England 42 times.
He once squared up to Roberto Mancini at a Sampdoria game without apparent concern for the consequences.
In 1999, during his second spell at Leeds, he was already on the road back from an ankle ligament injury when his three-year-old daughter rode straight into him on her tricycle. The collision damaged his Achilles tendon and added several weeks to his recovery.
The pattern fits a category of football injury you only really get to see at the elite level, where the rest of life still has to happen and the household keeps producing risks that no medical staff can control.
A trained midfielder of Batty's reputation, undone by the smallest possible road traffic accident, on his own carpet.
Philippe Mexes, the sunbed, and the eye
In November 2013, AC Milan defender Philippe Mexes pulled out of the warm-up before a Serie A draw with Genoa, complaining of pain in his left eye.
He was diagnosed with central serous retinopathy, an impairment of central vision usually linked to excessive UV exposure.
He missed Milan's 3-0 Champions League win at Celtic Park days later. Vice-president Adriano Galliani called the situation "bizarre."
Italian newspaper Tuttosport noted that Mexes had been looking unusually bronzed in recent appearances and reported that his condition had been brought on by spending too long under sunbeds.
Most footballers' eye injuries happen on the pitch. Mexes managed to give himself one in a tanning salon. Worth being clear that this was not a burn injury, contrary to how it sometimes gets retold.
It was a genuine retinal condition serious enough to keep a Champions League starter on the sidelines.
Rio Ferdinand and Pro Evolution Soccer
In January 2001, Leeds defender Rio Ferdinand missed a Premier League fixture against Newcastle United after straining a tendon behind his knee.
The cause was sitting on his sofa with his foot up on a coffee table for several hours, playing Pro Evolution Soccer.
Manager David O'Leary delivered the famous explanation to the press: "It wasn't even on the training ground, he was watching television and had his foot up on the coffee table. He had it there in a certain position for a number of hours and strained a tendon behind his knee." Leeds lost 3-1 to Newcastle.
Ferdinand has spoken about it with humour over the years, which is the correct response. Repetitive strain injuries from gaming are a real medical category.
The detail that elevates this one is the choice of game: a future England captain damaging himself trying to win at virtual football.
Edmundo, Fiorentina, and the Carnival clause
The "skipped training to go to Carnival" anecdote is often pinned on Romário, and there is a kernel of truth there.
Johan Cruyff has told the story of Romário, then at Barcelona, asking for permission to fly home for Carnival, and Cruyff agreeing on the condition that he scored twice against Valencia. Romário scored his second after 20 minutes, gestured to the bench, and was on a plane within the hour. Cruyff allowed it.
The more extreme version belongs to Edmundo. In the 1998-99 Serie A season, Fiorentina's Brazilian striker invoked the now-legendary "carnival clause" in his contract and flew back to Rio mid-season to attend Carnival.
Fiorentina were top of Serie A under Giovanni Trapattoni at the time, with Gabriel Batistuta also injured. They ended up missing out on the title.
Edmundo went anyway. The evidence being: there are players for whom certain things will always come before football, regardless of the league table or the calendar. Carnival, to a particular kind of Brazilian striker, is one of those things.
Fernando Redondo and the haircut
Fernando Redondo was one of the most elegant defensive midfielders of his generation.
He had won two La Liga titles and two Champions Leagues with Real Madrid, including the 2000 final at the Stade de France where he was named UEFA Club Footballer of the Year.
He missed the 1998 World Cup because he refused to cut his hair.
Argentina manager Daniel Passarella, nicknamed "Kaiser" for his disciplinarian streak, banned long hair and earrings from his squad. Redondo had long, wavy hair. He declined to change it. Passarella left him out.
Argentina went to the 1998 World Cup in France without him and were eliminated in the quarter-finals by the Netherlands, courtesy of Dennis Bergkamp's iconic late winner in Marseille.
In Redondo's own words: "I was in great form. But he had particular ideas about discipline and wanted me to have my hair cut. I didn't see what that had to do with playing football, so I said no again." Claudio Caniggia was dropped for the same reason. Redondo never played at another World Cup.
David Beckham and the boot above the eye
On 15 February 2003, Manchester United lost 2-0 at home to Arsenal in the FA Cup fifth round. United played poorly.
Sir Alex Ferguson was furious in the dressing room, and Beckham, who had made an error leading to one of the goals, took the brunt of it.
According to multiple accounts, Ferguson kicked a boot lying on the dressing-room floor in Beckham's direction. It struck him above the left eye and required stitches.
Diego Forlán later said Roy Keane and Ruud van Nistelrooy had to step in to separate the two men. Carlos Queiroz, then Ferguson's assistant, has since insisted the boot ricocheted off a table first.
Beckham wore the cut visibly the next day with an Alice band drawing attention to it, and the photographs went around the world. He didn't actually miss matches because of the injury. What he missed was a future at Manchester United.
Ferguson wrote in his autobiography that this was the moment he told the board Beckham had to go. By that summer, Beckham had signed for Real Madrid for £30 million. United used part of the money to bring in a young Cristiano Ronaldo.
A boot in a Manchester dressing room, kicked in anger, opened the door for Galácticos-era Beckham and effectively bankrolled the start of Ronaldo's Old Trafford career. The trajectory of multiple careers, redirected by one badly aimed shoe.
What it all has in common
Cows. Eggs. Toddlers. Sunbeds. PlayStations. Carnival. Haircuts. A pair of size nine boots in a dressing-room corner.
Football clubs spend extraordinary sums on facilities, medical staff, performance science, and recovery technology that genuinely is light years ahead of what was possible a generation ago.
They measure heart rate variability. They track sleep stages. They have nutritionists and psychologists, and chefs.
And then a goalkeeper microwaves an egg, a defender oversleeps after gaming all night, a midfielder stretches the wrong tendon on the wrong sofa.
Our prediction: it will keep happening, in slightly different forms, for as long as professional footballers continue to be human beings with kitchens, video games, agricultural relatives, and irrational personal grooming preferences.
The gap between training sessions is the part the sports scientists cannot reach. That is where the strangest stories live.