Former Man United star admits to sleeping with four women in 24 HOURS, filming X-rated video with a team-mate and inviting girls to the team’s Christmas party before fed-up Sir Alex Ferguson got rid

Statistics alone rarely tell the full story of an athlete’s career, but Dwight Yorke might just be the exception that proves the rule. 

For the former Manchester United and Aston Villa man, football – like life – has been largely a numbers game. 

As Yorke once remarked: ‘If you play a fantastic game, score a couple of goals and then go home and make love to a beautiful woman, what more can a man ask for?’

There were a lot of goals; there were a lot of women. 

A striker from the days before data analytics and VAR scrutiny drained football of spontaneity, when a forward’s worth was weighed in the hard currency of goals rather than xG (expected goals), Yorke’s career trajectory was easily explained by the numbers. 

Given licence to ‘go and express yourself’ by Brian Little, the former Aston Villa manager who shifted him from right wing to centre forward, Yorke went on to score 61 goals in three seasons at Villa Park before earning a £12.6million move to Manchester United in August 1998.

It was a natural progression for the Trinidad and Tobago international, a reward for his steady improvement since first arriving at Villa Park as a raw teenager nine years earlier, and the tale of his United career would again be reflected in the stats.

With his deadly strike partnership with Andy Cole the toast of Old Trafford, Yorke found the net 29 times in his first season, famously helping United to an unprecedented treble of Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League victories.

The next campaign brought 23 goals before his tally dropped to a dozen the year after, and just one in 10 appearances in the 2001-02 season – following which he was sold to Blackburn Rovers, aged 30, for a cut-price £2m.

Judged purely on goal return, it is the straightforward tale of a gifted Premier League footballer who touched notable heights with two big clubs before his career faded gradually into decline.

Yet no evaluation of Yorke’s career would be complete without a consideration of some other key statistics. 

There’s a reason Yorke, now 53, called his autobiography Born to Score – and it wasn’t all to do with his goalmouth exploits.

In his heyday, it was often said that he played with a smile on his face – and that too probably had a lot to do with numbers.

The four women he claims to have slept with in a single day during his time at Villa, for instance. 

Maybe the quartet of women with whom Yorke and his former United team-mate Mark Bosnich infamously partied after a boozy night out, an episode that was captured on video – cross-dressing, belt-whipping and all – and later plastered all over the red-tops. 

The random female shop workers to whom Yorke once distributed tickets for the United Christmas party. The countless others with whom he consorted, when he seemingly almost single-handedly kept the red-tops in business. 

‘Yorkie was just a playboy,’ former Man United trainee Daniel Nardiello told the Undr the Cosh podcast. ‘I remember the first Christmas do I ever went to, apparently, he was just in Manchester a week or two before handing out tickets to all the girls in Selfridges. 

‘So it’s all the United players and staff, and then just tens and tens of girls Yorkie’s invited. That was just his lifestyle. He used to come in and tell us stories about his conquests.’

And that’s before we even get to the more high-profile romances. 

The list of actresses and models with whom Yorke was romantically linked included one-time Hollyoaks actress Stacey Winfield, former Coronation Street star Tracy Shaw, and erstwhile Celebrity Love Island contestant Alicia Douvall – not to mention the former glamour model Katie Price, with whom he has a son, Harvey.

Yorke also has a teenage son named Brandon Tiger from a relationship with former girlfriend Naomi Smith. 

It is quite the roll call, and it would perhaps be fair to say that the manner in which Yorke expressed his masculinity back in the day has not aged well. Even then, there were those who called him out over his licentious lifestyle.  

Put it this way: when you’re even being told to rein it in even by the likes of Jack Warner – who would later resign as FIFA vice-president amid corruption allegations – it’s probably a good moment to take stock.

‘Dwight’s behaviour is a symptom of football today,’ Warner raged after Yorke and team-mate Russell Latapy failed to show up for a Trinidad and Tobago training session ahead of a crucial World Cup qualifier against Jamaica. 

‘There is a spoilt group of players who will destroy the sport like a cancer. I don’t really know the Dwight we are seeing now. He doesn’t understand that he is a role model to kids and should be acting like one.’

And so he was: a kid, that is; specifically, a kid in a sweet shop. 

‘There were some famous escapades,’ Yorke wrote in his autobiography. ‘Some made the headlines but many didn’t, like the time I ended up bedding four women in 24 hours. 

‘This particular episode began on a regular night out with my Villa drinking buddies on a trip to Birmingham’s party strip on Broad Street. We would meet up to pass away a pleasant evening in our favourite haunts, not doing anything outlandish but, yes, looking to pull girls.’

On the night in question, Yorke recalled, he left ‘with a girl whose name I cannot remember, but with whom I ended up enjoying a night at my house’. 

The woman left hurriedly for work the next morning – ‘no awkward “I’ll call you” moments’, Yorke enthused – and the striker attended training before deciding to call ‘a girlfriend named Sue’.

‘She knew what was on my agenda when I called her that afternoon to catch up,’ wrote Yorke.

A tryst with ‘another well-established date’ followed that evening, after which he received a call from ‘a girl I knew from Tamworth’. Did he fancy dinner?

‘Well I hadn’t eaten, so why not?’ reasoned Yorke. ‘A little wine, some conversation, some food and I could feel my energy levels returning.

‘Lynne made it clear that she wanted to come and spend the night at my place and who was I to reject her offer?’

While that day was an outlier, it was, said Yorke, ‘indicative of the life I had come to take as normal’. The question, from a football perspective, was whether his taste for the high life derailed a career that would bring a meagre return of just 27 goals in seven years following his Old Trafford departure.

‘I wouldn’t say it ruined my career,’ Yorke, who went on to play for Blackburn Rovers, Birmingham City, Sydney FC and Sunderland before his retirement in 2009, later told the Guardian. ‘People have seen me party and having a good time with beautiful women, I’m not disputing that, but I don’t think anybody out there has a better work ethic than me. 

‘I’m full-on with everything I do: if I party, I party; if I train, I train hard.’

Others tell a different story.

Rod Thornley, a former Manchester United masseur, believes Yorke lost his way after his spectacular debut season at the club.

‘The level of success proper got to him,’ said Thornley. ‘He went from Villa to us, to winning everything, and he would come in with yellow eyes so many days.

‘He just loved a party. A great, great lad, honestly a great lad, but f***ing hell, he absolutely went off the rails after winning everything.

‘You could see it physically, he wasn’t as good on the pitch – you could see it physically just in his eyes, the amount of days he came in with yellow eyes was ridiculous.

‘Sir Alex [Ferguson] knew everything. He knew what was going on with every single player at all times, he was so on the ball.’

It is hard to imagine two more disparate characters than Ferguson, who was married to his wife Cathy for more than half a century, and the freewheeling Yorke.

The former Man United manager was famed for his hardline approach to discipline, yet it was not unknown for him to relax the rules for certain special players.

Yorke did not quite fall into the same category as Eric Cantona in that regard, but Ferguson valued the striker’s services enough to fire a warning shot across the bows the summer before he sold him to Blackburn.

‘If Yorke finds the form of two years ago you wouldn’t ever want to sell him,’ said Ferguson. ‘He is one of the best in the business.’

Yorke never did recapture that form, but if his flamboyant lifestyle exacted a cost on the pitch, the greater sadness surely lies in his estrangement from Harvey, his 22-year-old son, away from the bright lights. 

Yorke, whose book included a dedication to Harvey – ‘So he may know the truth’ – has always maintained that Price undermined his efforts to establish a relationship with his son, who suffers from a variety of health problems including autism, blindness and a rare genetic condition known as Prader-Willi syndrome, which can lead to overeating and dangerous weight gain.

‘My advisers and legal team tried so many times to make it work, yet this woman constantly tarnished my name out there, [saying] I’m a bad person, that I’m not caring,’ Yorke said in 2009. ‘So I wanted to let Harvey know that I’m always here for him.’   

Price has countered that Yorke, who reportedly refused to believe Harvey was his son until a paternity test proved otherwise, has never shown interest in being a father, claiming Yorke ‘has seen Harvey about nine times in his life’.

In other respects, however, the striker has nurtured roots with the past. 

He remains a sports ambassador for his country, a role he has held since 2006. Despite a brief flirtation with bankruptcy in 2018, he maintains a lavish lifestyle, living it up in Dubai and enjoying glamorous golf breaks with the likes of Pep Guardiola, Jack Nicklaus and Michael Jordan. 

He briefly managed Australian side Macarthur FC and is a brand ambassador for United. And last November, Yorke was appointed head coach of Trinidad and Tobago, describing himself as ‘proud and privileged’. Not everyone shared his enthusiasm, however. 

‘Wealth, and sporting prowess, ought not to be the determining factor in deciding who we elevate as our “soccer legend,”’ opined one reader of British African-Caribbean newspaper The Voice, beneath an article on Yorke’s appointment. 

It was a small reminder that big numbers, whether on or off the pitch, do not always add up to universal acclaim.