FORMER Newcastle bad boy Nile Ranger has made a shock return to football.
Ranger, 33, once pocketed £10,000-a-week and says he could have been as good as Erling Haaland – but instead ended up unemployed after stints in jail.
However, in what could be the final chance in a remarkable career, the striker has been thrown a lifeline.
He has joined non-league side Kettering Town, who play in the seventh tier of English football.
Ranger has been without a club since the summer of 2022 when he left Boreham Wood.
The former England Under-19s player was tipped to be a star of the future, playing 62 times as a youngster for Newcastle.
But his career was plagued by disciplinary issues, culminating in an eight-month prison sentence in January 2017 for online banking fraud.
He was released from jail after ten weeks and returned to his then-club Southend.
But he was unable to initially play in midweek games due to a 7pm curfew.
He had previously spent 11 weeks in a young offenders institute for his part in an armed robbery while on the books of Southampton.
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Ranger has also been involved in a number of other controversies away from the field.
He caused outrage in 2011 while at Newcastle after posing with a gun.
A few months later, he was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a man in the city centre.
He was found not guilty but still spent months in exile at the Magpies.
Ranger also got charged with drunk and disorderly behaviour just days after being reinstated to training.
The player was later fined £6,000 by the FA in 2012 for making a string of homophobic comments on Twitter.
And in 2014, he was twice charged for criminal damage in what were separate incidents.
But Ranger claims he has matured since becoming a father two years ago and believes his experiences will be valuable to non-league and young players.
Meanwhile, he is keen for a movie to be made about his life and he reckons he could have been as good as Haaland.
Ranger told The Athletic: “I should be minimum Championship right now. I shouldn’t be having problems but I didn’t listen.
“If I added nutrition to my game and behaviour, I’m Haaland.
“But I didn’t want to listen. I thought I knew it all.
“Every club I’ve had, even as an adult, my mum has had to come in – because they respect her – to see if it could work as a last throw of the dice.
“She is my life coach, she’s probably disappointed deep down I didn’t really go higher – but she always says: ‘Listen, we had a blast, no matter what’.”
