For other people with a similar name, see Michael Quinn (disambiguation).

Micky Quinn
Personal information
Full name	Michael Quinn
Date of birth	May 2 1962 (1962--) (age 45)
Place of birth	Liverpool, England
Height	{}
Playing position	Striker (retired)
Youth clubs
1978-1979	Derby County
Senior clubs1
Years	Club	App (Gls)*
1979-1981 1982-1983 1983-1985 1985-1988 1989-1992 1992-1994 1994 1994 1995-1996	Wigan Athletic Stockport County Oldham Athletic Portsmouth Newcastle United Coventry City → Plymouth Argyle (loan) → Watford (loan) PAOK Salonika Total	069 0(19) 063 0(39) 080 0(34) 121 0(54) 115 0(59) 064 0(25) 003 00(0) 005 00(0) 9 (1) 490 (230)
1 Senior club appearances and goals counted for the domestic league only. * Appearances (Goals)

Michael "Micky" Quinn, (born May 2 1962 on the Cantril Farm estate in Liverpool), is a retired English footballer of Irish and Italian descent. He played as a centre-forward for the vast majority of his career. However, despite being a consistent goalscorer, he was more notorious for his large build.

Following his retirement from football, Quinn has become a professional racehorse trainer and now has stables at Newmarket in Suffolk. He also covers horse racing and football for the radio station TalkSPORT.

Quinn was the first born child of Michael and Patricia Quinn. In total they had three more children: Mark, Sean and Patricia junior. They all lived in a house on the Cantril Farm overspill estate just outside Liverpool. Michael senior worked in the local docks and later found employment as a taxi driver.

Quinn began his career as an apprentice with Derby County, but did not make any first team appearances and turned professional on joining Wigan Athletic in September 1979. Shortly afterwards he came to the attention of Social Security after being reported for claiming unemployment benefit while being employed full-time by Wigan Athletic. He explains his actions by saying that he was earning a mere £35-a-week wages at the time and his father was "hardly earning a king's ransom" from his job as a taxi driver. He had decided to continue signing on and claiming unemployment benefit to help his family, but quickly withdrew his claim.

His first child, a boy called Michael, was born four months later. He moved to Stockport County in June 1982 and then to Oldham Athletic in January 1984.

Quinn joined Portsmouth in March 1986 and finished the season as their leading goalscorer during their Second Division promotion campaign, despite spending 14 days of the season behind bars while serving a prison sentence for disqualified driving. He had been caught driving twice after receiving a ban for drink-driving. His explanation for driving while disqualified was that he had been going to buy medication for his girlfriend, who was ill.

Quinn was sold to Newcastle United for £650,000 in July 1989, just after their relegation to the Second Division. He scored four goals on his debut against Leeds United and finished as the division's top goalscorer in 1989-90 with 34 league goals. Newcastle were beaten to the automatic promotion places by Leeds and Sheffield United, and their promotion hopes were ended when they lost to Swindon Town in the playoffs.

During his first six months at Highfield Road, Quinn scored 17 Premiership goals - 10 of them in his first 6 games. His performances were not enough to bring Coventry City beyond 15th place in the final table, but they improved to 11th place the following season with Quinn still scoring regularly. Quinn featured regularly for Coventry during the 1993-94 season, still scoring goals on a regular basis, but in September 1994 Coventry signed Dion Dublin and Quinn lost his place in the team. He had unproductive loan spells with Plymouth Argyle (in November 1994) and Watford (in March 1995) before leaving on a free transfer at the end of the season.

Quinn appeared on BBC TV's Football Focus as part of their 'Cult Heroes' series in 2005, inspired by his relatively prolific two seasons as Highfield Road. Whilst at Coventry, he was nicknamed 'Sumo' and was famously quoted as being the Premiership's 'fastest player over a yard'. Quinn was also seriously considered for inclusion into the England football squad during 1993.

On leaving Coventry, Quinn had a brief spell playing in Greece with PAOK Salonika. Around this time, his youngest brother Sean (a former apprentice footballer with Liverpool and later Portsmouth) died suddenly at the age of 26. Shortly afterwards, his mother Patricia died of cancer aged 52.

Quinn applied for the manager's job at Burnley in 1996, but it went to Adrian Heath instead, and he decided to retire from football and concentrate on his career as a racehorse trainer.

In August 2001, he was suspended from racehorse training for two-and-a-half years after the RSPCA found that three horses in his care were being neglected. His ban from the sport was later reduced to one year on appeal.

In 2003 he released his autobiography Who Ate All The Pies?.

In 2005 he signed a contract with the newspaper Cambridge Evening News, where he had his own column entitled Who Ate All The Pies?. Here he comments on various aspects of football, sport and the world.

He appeared on the 2006 series of Celebrity Fit Club, weighing more than 18 stone and finished the programme as Mr Fit Club, having lost 24% of his initial body weight and now feeling refreshed. This later led Harvey Walden, the US Marine instructor, on the series comparing him to the incredible hulk.

He has most recently been seen on May 14 2006 playing for Italy in the Celebrity World Cup Soccer Six tournament in Birmingham, UK.

Quinn was the co-host of Drive Time on Talksport with Adrian Durham until recently when he was replaced by Ian Wright.

Relationships

Quinn has never been married, but has been in long-term relationships with three women. With his first girlfriend Debbie, he had a son called Michael who was born in 1980. He also has twin daughters called Melissa and Natasha, who were born in 1987 while he was in a relationship with his second girlfriend Sheila. Since 1994 he has been engaged to a model called Karen Davies. In May 2007, Micky became a father again