Arsenal: 8 Incredible Urban Legends You Didn't Know About

7. Paul 'The Photographer' Merson

As a general rule of thumb, footballers - and other athletes - are usually better than normal human beings: they are faster, fitter, stronger, more skilful and all too often are really, really, really ridiculously good looking. And then there was Paul Merson. He probably wasn't the fastest athlete, nor the fittest - far from it - there were stronger players than him and if we compare his silky feet to Cristiano Ronaldo, he'd probably come up short there too. But the creative midfielder did apparently have one skill that separated him from us mere mortal men: he was a photographer. Not the DSLR, Nikon 50mm fixed lens, butterfly obsessed, long raincoat wearing kind though: Merson apparently used to take photo's in his head instead - or as it's commonly known, he had a photographic memory. The rumour was that he would get the ball into his feet, look up for a split second and *click*, he would capture a fullscreen view of everyone on the pitch, allowing him to make decisions that other conventionally-brained players couldn't without even looking, since he could still see them in his head (as long as nobody moved an inch presumably). So Is It True? Probably not. A number of people claim to have eidetic (photographic) memory, but science has never found a single verifiable case of photographic memory, and eidetic imagery is virtually nonexistent in adults. Plus, if you've seen him stumble through foreign players' names on Soccer Saturday, there's no way you could ever believe it.