Simon Jordan refused players condom request while owner of Crystal Palace

Simon Jordan led a colourful life while owner of Crystal Palace and he has revealed that his duties also included turning down a player's request to receive condoms on expenses.

The English businessman spent a decade as chairman of Palace, leading the club as they earned promotion to the Premier League. During that time, Jordan dealt with a mountain of strange requests from players.

But one of those requests has particularly caught the eye in the wake of Ilaix Moriba's reported demand that RB Leipzig's physios bring him grapes while he underwent a massage. Jordan slammed Moriba for the request before revealing he had to deal with something even more unusual.

"If you’re going to do it, then you deserve to be ridiculed, if people are actually going to sit there and do it. It’s not a contractual obligation," Jordan told talkSPORT when asked about Moriba.

“I can remember players – I’m not going to give you details of the particular player because it’s too damaging – but I remember receiving an expenses report from a player who was away from home on loan with us.

"Hadn’t seen his wife for a long time, professing loneliness, but put condoms on his expense sheet. I couldn’t quite work out what I was doing there!" Asked if he approved the request for condoms, Jordan said: “No, I didn’t. I rubbed it out!”

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Footballers are also notorious for trying to maximise their earnings. And Jordan revealed that some attempted to use the player ratings in newspapers to convince him to hand them a pay rise.

“I also had players coming into my office with a copy of The Sun saying that the seven or eights out of 10 that they’d got from a reporter praising who was praising them entitled them to a pay rise," he said.

“Grapes, I probably would insert grapes into a certain place of a player, for that particular request, but it might not be grapes, it might be a water melon!”

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