Meet the former Man United star who was snorting six grams of coke a DAY: Cult hero goalkeeper was fined for performing a Nazi salute and featured in X-rated tape with his team-mate

Quiz question: who is the only player Sir Alex Ferguson signed twice in his 27 years as manager of Manchester United? 

In case you don’t already have an inkling, it was not some trophy-laden megastar plucked and then recovered from one of the powerhouses of European football.

Rather it was a player who turned up three hours late for his first training session on rejoining the club he briefly represented as a teenager. A player who was branded ‘overweight’ and a ‘terrible professional’ by Fergie, but nonetheless went on to claim a Premier League winners’ medal in his first season back at the club.

We speak, of course, of Mark Bosnich, the first and perhaps most celebrated of Ferguson’s many attempts to replace the goalkeeping colossus that was Peter Schmeichel. 

The Scot would later claim he tried to pull out of the deal to sign the Australian stopper from Aston Villa in the summer of 1999, and is perhaps not too hard to see why. 

Within a week of his arrival, Bosnich, now 53, had been arrested outside a Birmingham lap-dancing club in the early hours of his wedding day after a fracas with a photographer. Released on bail, the Sydenysider eventually made it to the church – although not on time, given the ceremony had to be put back an hour – to marry Sarah Jarrett, the second of his two former wives, but it was a lively start to his Old Trafford career – and one that typified the eventful career of a player many regard as a cult hero.

One person not of that persuasion is Paul Scholes, the United midfield legend who played alongside Bosnich that season and has described him as the club’s ‘worst ever signing’. 

‘He came to us and he was so unprofessional, honestly it was ridiculous,’ Scholes told The Overlap last year. ‘His shooting practice, you normally have like 15 out of 20 shots. After three shots, he’s knackered. And I never realised, he couldn’t kick a football, I’d never seen anything like it.’

Bosnich is seen with Sara Jones, who is now his wife, at a catwalk show in Sydney in 2010, a year after he retired from the game following a brief spell with Sydney Olympic

Bosnich infamously performed a Nazi salute during a game at White Hart Lane in 1996. He was mortified by the ensuing uproar, claiming he had been impersonating Basil Fawlty

Bosnich first joined United in 1988 at the age of 16 – an experience he would later describe as ‘an education in football’ – but left after making just three appearances for the club when his visa expired in 1991. 

A brief stint at Sydney Croatia (since renamed Sydney United) followed, before Ron Atkinson brought him to Aston Villa on a free transfer in February 1992. 

It was at Villa Park, where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Paul McGrath, Dwight Yorke and Dean Saunders – not to mention the highly experienced goalkeeper Nigel Spink – that Bosnich forged a reputation as one of the Premier League’s finest stoppers.

Helped by his penalty-saving heroics in the League Cup semi-final against Tranmere Rovers, Villa went on to defeat United 3-1 in the final, claiming the club’s first significant trophy since the landmark European Cup victory of 1982. With Bosnich between the sticks, Villa went on to win the competition again two years later, and by the time his contract expired in the summer of 1999, Ferguson had long since decided to make him Schmeichel’s successor.

Even then, though, the United boss must have known there could be trouble ahead. 

In October 1996, Bosnich was charged with misconduct after making a Nazi-style salute to Tottenham Hotspur supporters, a club with a significant Jewish following. He claimed the gesture, made in response to taunts from the crowd over a collision with Jurgen Klinsmann the previous season, was intended as a light-hearted imitation of a famous moment from the BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers. 

Unamused, the Football Association fined him £1,000 and warned him about his future conduct, a punishment that may have stung less than the knowledge that he had caused deep-seated offence – not least to his Jewish aunt, who refused to speak to him for some time afterwards.

The incident was followed two years later by the notorious episode in which a drunken liaison involving Yorke, a quartet of women and a selection of women’s clothing was secretly recorded by Yorke. 

Bosnich is pictured with the English model Sophie Anderton, his former girlfriend, at a charity event in London in October 2002, during his ill-fated spell at Gianluca Vialli’s Chelsea

Bosnich is seen in action for the Socceroos in a 1993 match against New Zealand. He’s regarded by many as the greatest goalkeeper Australia has ever produced

‘We did a tape with four women, Dwight and myself,’ Bosnich recalled in an interview with the Australian sports show Back Page LIve. ‘We put their clothes on, they put our clothes on, and we played truth or dare on the bed. 

‘If a question was seen to be not answered correctly, you had to suffer a punishment. One of my punishments was getting hit with a belt on the backside, in a dress.’

The tape, later discarded by Yorke, was subsequently recovered by an intrepid ‘Sun reader’, leaving Bosnich to take goal kicks to a soundtrack of fans making whiplash noises for weeks afterwards.

When things failed to work out at United, Bosnich’s contract was terminated by mutual consent, and in January 2001 he moved to the late Gianluca Vialli’s Chelsea.

But after a chequered start to his Stamford Bridge career that brought more fitness issues than appearances, he failed a drugs test in September 2002, resulting in his dismissal and a nine-month ban from football. 

The termination of his £42,000 a week contract marked a personal nadir for Bosnich, who claimed his drink had been spiked with cocaine on a night out. A Premier League tribunal ruled against his claim for unfair dismissal.

Bosnich received an outpouring of goodwill when he was hospitalised this time last year, an indication of the affection fans feel for one of the Premier League’s most colourful characters

In the aftermath of his fall from grace, the embittered Bosnich turned to cocaine – which he denied ever having used before that moment – and later drew on that experience in an attempt to wean the model Sophie Anderton, his girlfriend at the time, off the drug.

‘I wasn’t taking any drugs when I was found guilty by the FA,’ Bosnich told the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘In 15 years of football, I never touched them. 

‘But everybody believed that I was into drugs, especially because of my relationship with Sophie. So one day I thought, “F*** it, I’m going to do it.” 

‘I went to a club, bought a £50 wrap of coke, and brought it home to try. Basically, I cracked. I was angry and bitter and I succumbed to what everyone said I was, a coke fiend.’

Having told Anderton that for every line of cocaine she took, he would take two – a strategy he hoped would force her off the drug – Bosnich reached a point where he was taking six grams a day.

Only when he mistook his father for a burglar, almost shooting him with an air rifle, did Bosnich, supported by his family, begin to take control of the issue.     

Bosnich would never again play at Premier League level, but his unlikely exploits earned him a special place in the affections of football fans, particularly in Australia, where he now works as a television pundit and agent. 

When he was briefly hospitalised this time last year, a smiling social media post from his hospital bed was viewed by 79,000 people and attracted a huge outpouring of support and good wishes.

In September 2022, Bosnich married his long-term partner Sara Jones, with whom he has two children, in a lavish ceremony in Sydney. Perhaps bravely, he invited Yorke to be his best man.