The Cult: Andrey Arshavin

"My time in London was an alright part of my career. There were some good moments and there were some not particularly nice ones." While this might seem like a fairly anodyne statement, it nonetheless shines a light into the inscrutable depths of Andrey Arshavin's mind. For many footballers, four years spent playing for Arsenal – making 144 appearances and scoring 31 goals in the process – would represent a career highlight, a whole host of treasured memories and a source of great personal and professional pride. For Arshavin, it was fine, but nothing to get too excited about. He liked living in London, sure, but the football was a bit inconvenient in the end so he decided to pack it in and scoot off home.

Even at his very best, there was a sense in which Arshavin was not on quite the same wavelength as his fellow footballers. He was on another plane of thought – not a higher plane, necessarily, but somewhere otherworldly and far away. While his teammates were lounging around the VIP tables in Mahiki or jetting off on weekend breaks in Dubai, Arshavin was hunched over his laptop participating in bizarre Q&A sessions on his now tragically discontinued website. He was probably paying an intermediary to do the hunching, mind, but the point still stands that he was investing his time in answering questions about the collapse of the USSR, his fear of dentists, his disdain for women's football and his fondness for bears.

Arshavin clearly had cerebral and intellectual pretensions, which were not perhaps entirely unfounded. He played draughts at a regional level as a child and also tried his hand at chess, which in an interview with The Telegraph in 2009 he credited with teaching him "to think logically." We can assume his critical thinking abilities were temporarily suspended when he reportedly said that women should be banned from driving, this in addition to several other casually chauvinistic comments made down the years. "In my opinion a woman and a man are two absolutely different creatures" was another of his pseudish musings on gender, a position endorsed by hawkers of conventional wisdom but unlikely to earn anyone a biology degree.

Thankfully, the diminutive Russian didn't need such a qualification, because by the time he arrived in England he already had a fashion degree from the St Petersburg State University of Technology and Design. He is also a published author in Russia having released a book titled 555 Questions and Answers on Women, Money, Politics and Football, which given what we already know about his wacky, off-the-wall opinions may best be left on the highest possible shelf. It might also be worth taking his advice on the beautiful game with a pinch of salt, with his career hardly a model example to the next generation of overseas imports. Indeed, some clues to his mentality on the pitch may be found in his motivations for secondary education, as told to The Daily Mail the same year he joined Arsenal: "My friends and I decided to try for the technology and design institute, because there were lots of girls among the students and you didn't have to study too hard."

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