The story of the Arsenal fan who tricked his wife into naming their baby Lanesra has gone viral. But other footie-mad parents have gone even further. Just ask little YNWA …

Never marry a football fan. That is the message from Australia, where – according to a letter in a magazine that has gone viral online – a mother discovered two years too late that the “unique and romantic” name Lanesra that her husband picked for their daughter, was his football team Arsenal spelled backwards.

Some might say the little girl got off lightly – at least Lanesra sounds like a name. In Norway, a Liverpool FC-loving couple made headlines in 2015 for giving their daughter the exotic name YNWA (pronounced Yee-nwa if that helps) – the acronym for club song You’ll Never Walk Alone. While it might sound slightly dubious to burden your child with their parents’ obsession, the reason was a sweet one: the couple feared their baby would not survive her difficult birth, so wanted the name to symbolise “that her mum and dad will always be here for her”.

But the beautiful game doesn’t always inspire a beautiful name. In 1966, a Liverpool supporter called his newborn after every player in the 1965 FA Cup-winning team – including the manager and two assistants. Pity the poor teachers who had to take the register for Paula St John Lawrence Lawler Byrne Strong Yeats Stevenson Callaghan Hunt Milne Smith Thompson Shankly Bennett Paisley O’Sullivan. Even worse, her mother only discovered her daughter’s unusual name when she came out of hospital – and said she was “disgusted” at her husband’s choice. Mainly because, although her husband was football mad, she had never watched a match in her life.

Father names baby son Bermondsey Millwall Den without telling his wife Read more

Last October, Millwall fan Mike Bloomfield took a similar gamble, sneaking off to register his son’s birth without telling his wife what he had planned. Despite living metres away from Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, the Croydon-based builder defiantly called his child Bermondsey Millwall Den Bloomfield to encompass the name of his beloved team’s ground (the Den) as well as its location. “We wanted a name that stuck out,” he says. “I was born and bred in Bermondsey and Millwall has always been my football team. Den was my wife’s father’s name too.”

His wife, he says, with some understatement, was a little surprised. “It was a dangerous thing to do, but she loves the name now.”

But, he says, unlike the father of baby Lanesra, he would never have waited two years to tell her the truth: “That’s the coward’s way out!”