Abbey Clancy likes to joke that she and her husband, ex-England striker Peter Crouch, have “the footballer’s four” when it comes to children, “like Beckham and Rooney”. They have two girls, Sophia, 12, and Liberty, nine, and two boys, Johnny, five, and Jack, four. She jokes, too, of her scouse father’s horror that the children were born at the Portland hospital and so have Westminster on their birth certificates, as opposed to Liverpool, which would give them lifelong authentication of their roots. She would have more babies if “Crouchy” would allow it. But “Pete’s had the snip, so there’s only a one in 4,000 chance that we could”. Birth is a miracle she will never get over. When school mums and dads are round at their Surrey mansion, she’ll give them wine and crisps, and flash up the home videos of each child’s entry into the world on the wall-sized projection screen in the cinema room. “I’m proud of it,” she says. “All the women are crying and saying, ‘This is amazing.’ I don’t think they notice the vagina. They just look at the baby.”
Crouch doesn’t join in because, he says – in Robbie Williams’s famous words – it’s like watching your favourite pub burn down. He observes other dads wandering into the house to see where their wives have got to, then bursting out, white-faced, spluttering, “Fuckin’ hell.” He mimes a man silently screaming with his hands on his face in the throes of visual napalm. Clancy tuts and rolls her eyes to me as if to say, look at this philistine. “Well, I love it,” she says. “I’ve shown the kids it. Johnny was horrified. But it’s natural; it’s a natural thing.”
Is there a better metaphor for how comfortable Abbey Clancy feels thrusting her interior world into the open? That is the format, essentially, of their weekly podcast, The Therapy Crouch, alongside which they are releasing a new book with the subtitle In Search of a Happy Ever Never After. In the show, a listener writes to “Agony Ab” with a marital/relationship issue, and the couple try to tackle it while simultaneously disclosing lessons from their own domestic setup. The stated aim is “to help people and give reputable advice”. In reality, “our advice is total gobbledegook”, Clancy says. “We contradict ourselves constantly. One minute we say, ‘Don’t ever lie’, then the next sentence will be, ‘Just lie.’” Neither of them has had therapy. Their qualification is that they have stood the course of a footballer-Wag relationship for 17 years. Which is no mean feat. They have had their share of lurid 00s tabloid headlines, including the double entendres about playing away and so on, and so on.
The show is comic – not least because Clancy says they have learned “the art of not giving a fuck” which, Crouch adds, comes with age. He is 42 and she is 37, so Lord knows what they will be like in a decade. But it’s also edge-of-the-seat because Clancy is on a hair trigger. Little gets past her without interrogation (“What do you mean [insert trigger word]?” is a regular refrain). There are the occasional eruptions of sniper fire, peppered with liberal swearing, mostly about the division of responsibilities in the house, which as far as I can make out are 98% Clancy’s. Crouch seems mostly to be seeking the quiet life, so his wife’s love of “live things”, which in the absence of further progeny appears to be the adoption of small animals, is testing his patience to the limit.
On the day I interview them in a riverside photographic studio in Surrey, they have been rowing about a new puppy (a cavapoo called Ralph). For Christmas, Clancy has asked for a miniature donkey. It is impossible to tell if she is serious (at the end of the interview, for instance, Crouch insists she was joking about “the snip”), but there’s an air of chaos about them that seems unfakeable. We wander into a conversation about head lice and Clancy says to Crouch, “We got them, do you remember, when we went to Center Parcs? You had to cut all my extensions out because I had nits, and I was hysterical.” He nods, his expression showing the memory flooding back in real time. “That was horrendous.”
For those unacquainted with the footballer/Wag-iverse, Crouch is a former England striker who co-holds the record for most headed goals in Premier League history and who occasionally performed a comedy robot dance in moments of glory. He left school at 16 to pursue his professional career and was an anomaly on the field because of his 2.01 metres (6ft 7in) height. Among the clubs he has played for are Queens Park Rangers, Portsmouth, Southampton and Tottenham. He was at Liverpool in 2005 when he met Clancy in Mosquito bar in the city. She was a gobby 19-year-old growing up in a time when instant-mega-tabloid fame was a career choice. It didn’t matter that she was a straight A* student; she wanted to be in the Victoria’s Secret lineup, had tried to sing in a failed girlband called Genie Queen, and was about to start filming the reality TV show Britain’s Next Top Model. She gave Crouch her phone number. When she returned from the loo and found him talking to another girl, she demanded it back. Soon after, he took her for a pint in “an old-man pub” for their first date. She had £7 in her pocket and prayed it would be enough for her round.
While other footballers preened and posed, Crouch was always self-effacing. Asked what he would be if not a footballer, he famously deadpanned, “a virgin”. Later, while working out what to do with his future, he sat down to write the second of his five books, How to Be a Footballer (2018). It sent up the absurd lifestyle of footballers with chapters titles such as “Cars”, “Tattoos”, “Houses” and “Haircuts”. He mocked himself for instances like the time he bought a hideous £800 Prada jumper because he was too embarrassed to put it back after finding out the price, or the £25,000 loss he made selling an Aston Martin the day after he had bought it because he realised he looked “like a bell-end”.
Thinking the book wouldn’t sell, he bought 50 copies himself (which Clancy then spent months giving away to “the DHL guy, the postman – anyone who came to the door”). He launched That Peter Crouch Podcast merely to boost publicity. The “pod”, as he calls it, was recorded in the pub with a couple of “booze boys” making gags and freewheeling on the subject of the game. “I didn’t listen to podcasts at that time. I was like, this’ll be nice. I was quite open because I thought, no one is going to listen.” Turns out he was “too open. Then I couldn’t take it back. It became the thing – my ‘honesty’; telling everyone what it was like actually. Like, people don’t just want to see the match any more, they want to see players’ lives. It went mad. Everywhere I went, it was ‘The podcast, the podcast’. I was still playing, and I’d be sitting on the bench and people would come over to talk about podcast stuff. I couldn’t believe the reach.” Crouch had 12 million listeners in 2019 alone and, to date, 60 million (spawning a spin-off documentary film about his life that aired on Amazon Prime in June).
This unexpected success as a broadcaster – which may or may not have the short shelf life of football or modelling – made him think of doing something with Clancy. “No one knows Ab the way I know her,” he says, “and I know that there’s been a bit of a misconception of her over the years, of her just tagging along … ”
“Yeah,” she interjects drily. “With my arse and big tits.”
“Well, as a footballer’s wife,” Crouch clarifies, “there’s a stereotype. She hadn’t said a lot because she’d never wanted to. But I knew how funny, how sharp, how witty she was. And I couldn’t wait to surprise people. I think it has. There’s a lot of, ‘Oh, actually, she’s a nice person. I didn’t think that.’ But I just knew it would be a success. That’s why we – not just me – we both did it.” Since January, the podcast has had just over 10m downloads.
To be clear, while he was recording in the pub, Clancy was not at home filing her nails. She was juggling children, pets, modelling work, her own knicker brand and builders and decorators in their houses in England and Portugal, as well as winning Strictly Come Dancing, puking her way through her fourth pregnancy, and corralling the many members of her family involved in keeping the Abbey and Pete show on the road. Today, her sister, Ellie, leans in every now and then to dab her nose with a big powder brush. Her brother John and cousin “Our Ross” are Therapy Crouch producers, heard as background voices on the show.
As it turned out, the regular 90 minutes set aside for podcast recording was much needed. Crouch says they realised they rarely sat down to talk for any length without kids interrupting. So, “actually, it’s been like therapy. There’s been things we’ve improved, I think, through talking.”
A section called Whine of the Week is a sort of airing of grievances, which Clancy does with a fishbowl-sized glass of red (interchangeable with Ribena). “Definitely it’s helped how we solve arguments,” she says. “By saying: sit down; you say what you want to say; I say what I want to say. We come to a resolution.” The presence of John and Ross as “referees” prevents things getting out of hand. “If we didn’t have the producers there, it’d be like, ‘Whaaaat! Who are you talking to?!’ We have to deal with things in a more mature way.”
“There’s no storming out,” Crouch agrees.
It gets heated nonetheless. Clancy happily calls him a “freak” and a “toerag”, she tells him to “fuck off” and “grow up”. Crouch says that if she were ever to become a teacher, she would be a cross between Miss Honey and Miss Trunchbull.
Clancy says that she is explosive in a row, but once the fuse has blown, she is meek and apologetic. Crouch tends to brood in his silent grudges, which drives her nuts. I raise the issue of his throwing things. Not plates, but expensive sausages and actual diamonds, as recounted in their book. The sausages were wild boar and apple, Clancy protests. She likes her meat down-to-earth. Sometimes “cheap and nasty”. Which is the inverse of how she likes her diamonds.
“We were on our honeymoon and he got me this bracelet. Gave it to me in a brown envelope. I was like, where’s the Cartier box? I know I sound like a brat, but I’m allowed to, it’s my wedding day. He’d sent his sister out, like, the night before we left, when he suddenly remembered. She went to the local town in, like, Leicestershire and went into Argos or something. So we had a fight and then he flung it out to sea.”
“But she winds me up to that point where I’m just like … ” Crouch protests, extending a long arm to mimic his throw.
“In my defence, I was pregnant and hormonal over the posh sausages,” Clancy says. “But he’s very dramatic, Pete. All dramatic gestures, like, I’m gonna throw them out the window.”
“I’m not! With her it’s like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang; snap. That’s what it is. I’ve thought, I’ll throw the sausages away then! What’s the point?”
Would they consider actual therapy, I ask, with a psychoanalyst, in private?
“I’d love to do it,” Clancy says.
“I think we should as well,” Crouch concedes, shifting in his seat.
“Oh, I don’t think we need couples therapy. I’d do individual. I’d like to talk. Because Pete doesn’t, other than when he’s forced to on our podcast. Pete’s not much of a feelingy-talky person.”
“I like to keep it all balled up inside,” Crouch says, shooting me a boyish smirk.
“Yeah, suppress those feelings until you die,” Clancy replies crisply.
They have been through a lot together, I suggest, steering on to safer ground. They have changed a lot from those two youngsters who met in the eye of the storm when it came to tabloid attention. They have been many versions of themselves. Not least Clancy, with motherhood. “Yeah, we’ve talked about that. Like, together, not even on the podcast. Sometimes you feel,” she sighs with meaning, “when you have kids and you’re tired and you’re working, and your body is not the same and your boobs are sagging, or you’re exhausted. You don’t feel like being a porn star tonight. Because you’re fat, you want to put your dressing gown on … ”
Crouch looks alarmed. “What are you talking about?”
“But you still love each other so much,” she continues. “It’s not like if you don’t want to have sex, that the relationship’s over. It’s like, sometimes you’re just genuinely tired. Or feel a bit shit about yourself. Or there’s … ” She shakes her head. “We’ve been through all of that. We’ve been so lucky. When we first got together, Pete was a footballer, so money was never an issue. We could go to amazing places. We had amazing houses. Then we had Sophia and that was a completely different chapter. Then we had so many kids and that was hard. But still amazing. And we’ve been so many different versions of ourselves but we’ve grown together, is what I’m trying to say. We haven’t grown apart. It would be easy to experience what we’ve experienced and grow apart. Don’t you think?”
Crouch looks relieved. I’m thinking: there’s a lot to unpack there.
“So,” Clancy continues, “I don’t understand why people get divorced in, like, their 50s. Just think: you made it that far.”
“What?” Crouch jumps in. He doesn’t think they should suggest people put up with their partners unconditionally for the rest of their life. One of their team brings over some water and a jumbo packet of giant chocolate buttons, which seems to calm things. I’m interested in their resilience, I tell them. I’ve seen in the documentary how Crouch’s father – an advertising executive – instilled in him the drive to do better. At times it was brutal. “Yeah, I would get in the car after playing badly and he would, in no uncertain terms, tell me how he felt.” When he was 13 and playing for Tottenham’s youth team, his father was so furious that he had shirked a tackle that he left the ground and drove home without him. Crouch spent some time searching for his dad, then guessed what had happened. He made his own way back home, to Ealing, west London, alone on the tube for the first time.
So, what was Clancy like as a little girl? “Oh!” she says, bringing her knuckles to the edge of her eyes. “I feel like I’m going to cry.”
“Babe.” Crouch reaches across to touch her arm. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know! I hope I’m not pregnant.” She laughs through the tears. “I am quite tough on the outside, but a bit weaker on the inside, aren’t I?”
She admits to being fearful of a great many things – of walking in the woods, of getting taxis. She often feels anxious. Crouch says she doesn’t much like being on her own. She tells me a bit about her family in Liverpool. One set of grandparents were “stereotypical”: her Nanna had “a perm and a little pinny”, gave her tea, buttered her crusty white bread with “best butter”. Her grandad rescued stray cats. There was not much money on either side, but a lot of love. “My family are very affectionate, very kissy, cuddly. All my aunties, uncles, nan. You get kissed and hugged to death.”
The tears keep coming. “What’s wrong with me?” she says, frustrated. “I’m so sorry. I had a good childhood. I was the eldest of four. So I was always kind of like the mum. Didn’t like to show much weakness.” She had guts, she says, and would answer back. Entertainment with her brother, 18 months younger, was, she says, sneaking downstairs with a Beano album in her pyjama bottoms as armour for when they got caught and smacked by their dad. Each chose a stair side – banisters or wall – to make the fastest escape. “You did get battered back then, didn’t you? I always used to, anyway. Maybe because I am a mum now, I do look back at a few things and think, hmm, that was a bit – well, you know.”
Her dad was very funny, she says, but “very much ‘boys do the boys things, girls do the girls things’. So he would take my brother to football, and the girls stayed at home to clean and go shopping or go to the hairdresser’s.” Her parents separated when she was 12, “for the same reasons people normally split”, and she took her mum’s side and didn’t speak to her dad for five years. The split upsets her now, more so than it did then, she thinks. It was a stressful time, especially as her mum worked different jobs and she had to look after her two much younger siblings, John and Ellie – feeding them, dressing them, getting them to school. She had taken four separate buses before she was able to sit down and open an exercise book in her own classroom. “But they were gorgeous little kids,” she says. “I always liked babies and baby things. I was never allowed any pets or anything like that. So that’s why I want them all now.”
Crouch suggests that this resilience stood her in good stead for having kids of her own. It also stood her in good stead for Britain’s Next Top Model (which she later presented) as a teenager. Like a lot of revisited television footage from the 00s, watching it today can make your blood boil. A flavour: judges comment on contestants’ “thunder thighs”, on their skin, their pubic hair; one of them is nicknamed “Jaws” and told not to smile. Clancy is singled out as “lads’ mag” fodder, “sex on a stick” and told, “You’re not a stripper; this is high fashion” and, “We don’t want so much of the tits and arse.” Behind her back, they muse, “Maybe she should take her top off and earn a lot of money.” Later, contestants are told they must kiss a male model in a swimming pool. One 18-year-old gasps, “He said he wouldn’t stick his tongue in my mouth and he did. It was horrible.”
“Hmm,” Clancy says. By way of mitigation, she says those shows were a form of escape route at the time, “a way out of being a girl from Liverpool. Those opportunities didn’t exist otherwise. So, for me, it was an incredible experience.”
Abbey & Janice, the show she did with ex-supermodel Janice Dickinson the following year, less so. It purported to help Clancy break into the American modelling market. Among the “tasks” were swimming with sharks, draping herself over men in a bid to get work and walking down Hollywood Boulevard in a bikini.
Crouch, who was by then her boyfriend, shudders and says the whole thing made him uncomfortable. Behind the scenes it was worse still. “It was just nuts,” Clancy says. The whole thing was “mad. But this was allowed on TV then. It didn’t seem unusual to me. It’s only when we look at it now that we realise.”
Their children live in a different world, Crouch says. They attend private schools, travel business class and have riding lessons. Clancy says, “There’s no easy way to say it without sounding like braggy or whatever, but it’s their norm. Their dad’s a footballer. I do my job. They’ve got a privileged life, but it’s not their fault. We can’t hold it against them or shout at them for it, but we try to make them aware that everything we’ve got, it’s not from generational money. We’ve worked hard, both of us, to provide this. And we feel proud, don’t we? Everything we’ve got, we’ve earned ourselves.”
The information doesn’t quite land as they expect. “The little ones go, ‘Do you know my dad? He’s the judge on The Masked Singer,’” Clancy says. “Nothing about the fact that he’s got 42 England caps.”
“I heard Sophia telling someone, ‘My mum won Strictly,’” Crouch adds. “I was like, ‘I played for England, you know!’”
Neither is particularly interested in what Clancy calls “the Waggy thing”. “We’re totally different people,” Crouch says about the Beckhams and Rooneys. Though Clancy knew Coleen Rooney all the way back to their teenage days clubbing, she didn’t follow the “Wagatha Christie” trial. “I don’t watch any news, because it’s all too sad,” she says. The name Rebekah Vardy would not have come up if their “consultant” didn’t bark from a corner of the room, “They don’t want to talk about Rebekah Vardy! They don’t want to talk about her!”
Afterwards, I listen to them bickering about the new puppy on the podcast. Crouch does not want another animal. He has stood firm on this point for years. He says Clancy has gone into nesting overdrive in preparation for the animal’s arrival – just as she did with their kids – and wants to know when this constant nesting is going to stop. “But the thing is,” Clancy hits back, “do you want to be married to a slob? Like, it’s just so fucking annoying. Like, just be grateful. Like, genuinely I mean this, I actually mean this. I’m sorry, I’m clean. Oh, I must try harder to be dirtier.”
Crouch starts sniggering. “Yeah, that’d work.”
Clancy gives up this round with an eyeroll. But minutes later she reveals they have been arguing while recording their audiobook in the Penguin offices because Crouch stood too near the microphone and Clancy said he sounded like Darth Vader and was putting her off. “We ended up having a full row … ‘What do you want me to do, just not breathe? Do you want me to just not breathe in here and die?’”
She says she has been in floods of tears on the exercise bike in the gym because Crouch sent her a text over the puppy standoff that read: “I love you but you are ruining my life.”
“I was being serious,” Crouch says. “But at least I said I love you.”
In the end, I tot up the number of times they tell me they are happy and in love versus how often they sound as if they want to murder each other. It comes out about equal.
• The Therapy Couch: In Search of a Happy Ever Never After by Abbey Clancy and Peter Crouch is published by Ebury at £22. To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
