Best football fair play? Denmark player deliberately missed a penalty in 2003

Morten Wieghorst is one of very few players who can ever say that they deliberately missed a penalty.

Even the most famous example of a moment along those lines where Robbie Fowler protested against Liverpool winning a spot-kick at Arsenal in 1997, only to subsequently miss himself, wasn’t all that it seemed.

Don’t get it twisted, it was still a stunning moment of fair play from Fowler to plead with referee Gerald Ashby that it wasn’t a penalty in the first place, but it’s a common misunderstanding that he then deliberately missed his effort from 12 yards.

Fowler, ever the professional, had ultimately failed in his attempts to change the match official’s mind with honesty and subsequently returned to the job at hand: scoring goals.

According to the Guardian, the man himself explained after the game: “As a goalscorer it’s part of my job to take it and I wanted to score it. I tried to score. I never missed on purpose. It just happened, it was a bad penalty.”

The moment has since gone onto become one of the most famous instances of fair play in Premier League history and Fowler deservedly bagged Uefa’s Fair Play award that year for his efforts.

Arsenal vs Liverpool Remember when Robbie Fowler tried to tell the ref it wasn't a penalty in 1997pic.twitter.com/8FEsbTckag

However, not that this is some sort of strange competition where the fair-playest fair play is the most fair play fair play of all, we’re upping the ante even more to a penalty that was missed on purpose.

And that’s where we come back to the aforementioned Wieghorst because the same Guardian article that explains what happened with Fowler’s miss also mentioned this former Celtic hero.

Wieghorst, who played at Celtic Park for seven years, did indeed spurn the