A PREMIER league star was raking it in on £40,000 a week during his playing days but now can’t even afford a phone.
In the mid 2000s Lucas Neill was a footballing hero as captain of West Ham and played in the 2006 World Cup.
He was living the high life too, with a Ferrari in his garage and holidays in the Maldives.
Nowadays, Neill, 45, lives a very different life having gone bankrupt and was recently facing three years behind bars as he stood trial for failing to declare money he never knew he had.
He had been accused of concealing more than £2million from creditors.
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As he battled his financial problems the lights would often go out because he didn’t have the money to top up his pay-as-you-go meter.
Last Monday though, a jury at Preston Crown Court took just 26 minutes to acquit him of the charges.
Neill told The Times: “I’ve won my freedom, but I feel like I’ve lost in life.”
During his financial hardship, his wife Lindsey Morris, a beauty therapist and personal trainer, became the breadwinner, as he only had his £900-a-month footballer’s pension.
He blames himself completely for his financial ruin.
Neill, who is a dad-of-two, said: “I feel like I didn’t protect my family… And that hurts. I let my family down.”
The Professional Footballers’ Association has warned that between 10 to 20 per cent of professional players go bankrupt when they retire.
Nell had been advised to pump vast sums of money into a scheme which gave the promise of investing in British films in return for a huge tax break.
The scheme appeared to be legitimate and were pushed heavily by accountants and financial advisers and the government had championed the investment tax relief.
But the taxman eventually came sniffing around and forced those who invested in them to repay the money they claimed, which in many cases totalled up to tens of thousands of pounds.
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Neill said: “People say they want to advise you. Help you. People just constantly want to take a tiny slice out of you. Telling you they’re going to add value to what they’re doing. That’s just a lesson for all footballers.”
He added: “Do you need these professional financial advisers? I was very successful in the world of football, but I clearly wasn’t ready for this other world — the world of business. And I’ve learnt the hard way.”
HMRC told him he owed £400,000 and he had to sell seven or eight properties, losing money on each one, to pay it back.
He then defaulted on a NatWest loan he had taken out to pay for a barn near Newcastle, which was held in an offshore fund.
Neill was left owing the bank £737,000 - and was declared bankrupt in 2016.
He said: "People couldn’t believe it, but I had nothing left. That was my rock bottom.
"After 20 years of a football career and all this hard work, I’ve got nothing to show for it."
During a meeting with the insolvency service he was meant to list all his assets, but forgot to mention the 144 acres of land he had bought around the barn.
The insolvency service investigated Neill for seven years, so he was unable to own his own home, or even take out a mobile phone contract.
When he went bankrupt, the repossessed 144 acres was sold for £3m by a lender and after the loan was settled, the remaining £2.1m was put into Neill’s offshore trust.
Neill claims he never knew about this but the insolvency service accused him of hiding the money from his bankruptcy proceedings.
Now he has been found not guilty he is starting to rebuild his life and he also wants to find out what happened to the offshore funds.
His defence lawyer, Joseph Kotrie Monson, of Mary Monson Solicitors, said: “Why would somebody ever put their family through all the pressure of bankruptcy, if they knew they had enough money in a bank account to pay off the debt and still have a million left over?”
He’s now coaching women and girls at a football club and working as a project manager for a local digital firm.
