Former Manchester United defender Wes Brown has opened up on his battle after being declared bankrupt last year.
Brown made 362 appearances for United after coming through the club’s academy, at one point earning £50,000 a week as a player, but HMRC filed a bankruptcy petition against him last February, and the petition was twice upheld by the High Court. months later.
The five-time Premier League winner, who also won the Champions League twice and was capped 23 times by England, split from his reality TV star wife Leanne in 2022 and his demise was previously blamed on the collapse of his company. bad real estate deals and overpaying on a farm.
Brown, 44, has now spoken out about where he went wrong, admitting he didn’t have the “right people” to guide him during his younger years.
“I think the most important thing is that if you make a lot of money, you need the right people, right? And I would say that’s one of the things I didn’t have,” he said on the radio Ben Heath podcast.
Wes Brown has spoken out for the first time after being declared bankrupt last year
Brown earned £50,000 a week at Man United and won the Champions League twice, but has struggled with financial problems in recent years
Brown divorced his reality TV star wife Leanne (right) in 2022 and is now facing ‘ongoing’ financial problems
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‘It was a little different. It wasn’t a lot of people you went to talk to and maybe you meet people and do this, do that. I wasn’t interested in that. You said yes and went through with it.
“It’s a long story and I won’t go into details, but it’s things that happened a long time ago with certain investments and things that a lot of people are involved in as a young child, [but] don’t really understand it.
“It’s what a lot of people do and then it came to a head last year, and that’s how it went. It happened and I’m just going to move on from it, but it’s one of those things that you hope people, especially this generation, don’t get involved in.”
Brown revealed that his current situation is still “ongoing” and was asked if anyone had ever contacted him to ask for advice on how to avoid going down the same path.
He replied, ‘No. I’ve had a lot of players say, “I’m in the same thing.”
“I’m not going to name names and that doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing will happen to them. But it’s things like if you don’t really understand it as a child, you just assume that a lot of people do it and that it’s fine. That’s not your life, you just play football.
Brown says current players have told him they’ve dealt with “the same thing” he did
“A lot of people were able to get out of it or are still trying to figure it out or whatever, but I just couldn’t do it. There’s not much I can do.’
Despite earning huge sums of money during his career, Brown was not one of the highest earners at Old Trafford.
Some of Brown’s teammates played in a side that dominated the Premier League’s first two decades under Sir Alex Ferguson, earning six times what he did.
It has been suggested he may have pushed too much in an attempt to keep up with his fellow United stars with higher salaries, but Brown denies he has spent too much on extravagant items.
When asked if he thought he had spent money frivolously as a player, Brown replied: “Not at all. Definitely not buying this equipment and that equipment, no.”
Brown appeared in a bizarre video on social media in which a tailor joked that he ‘can’t afford a suit’, and he has insisted he is determined to stay positive despite his financial problems.
Brown appeared in a bizarre video on social media in January when he was seen grinning as a tailor joked that he is “so washed up he can’t afford a suit” during a fitting in Hong Kong.
Whether or not he actually found that joke funny at his expense is unclear, and Brown admitted that it has been difficult to come to terms with his financial problems, but stressed that he is determined to stay positive and come through on the other side.
‘The most important thing for me is that I am very lucky to still be doing what I do. But yeah, it’s not fun,” he added.
“I’m not the kind of person to cry or whine about it, I’m just going to fight on and keep going.”