3 days ago
You've never heard of the only Englishman to win Champions League with Inter Milan
The only British footballer in history to get a Champions League winners' medal while playing for Inter Milan would use it as a ball marker in the few years he spent as a professional golfer on the PGA circuit.
Ben Greenhalgh laughs at the memory of the confusion it would spread in matchplay. 'That was my way of getting into an opponent's head, to let them know that I might be all right at golf but I had also done a bit in football,' he says. 'It would always throw them off for a few holes.'
This is the unusual sporting career of a man who, at 17, won an Inter Milan contract in a TV talent show; became a professional golfer; and was a body double for Cristiano Ronaldo and Mesut Özil. When Greenhalgh drops into the conversation that he was a British steeplechase champion as a junior athlete, it is hard to believe that, at 33, he has packed so much in.
Greenhalgh is currently the player-manager at Margate FC in the Isthmian League south-east division – the eighth tier of the pyramid. In a successful non-league career spent mainly in his native Kent, he has played around 750 games and says he has never missed a match through injury. For seven years he has run the academy at Dartford FC, one tier above Margate in the Isthmian Premier. He has already had one major success: Martial Godo who now, at 22, is a Premier League player with Fulham.
But Greenhalgh is best known for winning the 2010 Sky One show Football's Next Star, a Britain's Got Talent for footballers. Presented by Jamie Redknapp and going head-to-head with Strictly Come Dancing in the scheduling over seven episodes it followed 10 young footballers competing to win a contract with Inter. Sadly the proposed second series – to feature Manchester City – never happened. That despite the show coinciding with Inter's 2010 Champions League triumph under Jose Mourinho.
