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Inside the Wild West of football's private trainers: Bitter rows with clubs over freak injuries in behind the scenes sessions, the jaw-dropping tales of unqualified 'cowboys' giving the professionals a bad name and why 90 per cent of stars use them

Related Topics: Wild West

‘I'm really angry about that,’ Preston boss Paul Heckingbottom fumed.

The season was less than a week old but Heckingbottom’s patience was already wearing thin. This wasn’t about a dodgy refereeing call or the sale of a key player though, but an increasingly contentious issue in football that one source described as a ‘minefield’: the rise of private trainers working with footballers.