Coleen Rooney speaks out on her husband Wayne’s cheating and drinking in new documentary

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Coleen Rooney has spoken out on her husband Wayne’s drinking and cheating for the first time in a major new documentary on the footballer. 

Coleen, 35, appears alongside her husband, 36, in the documentary, ‘Rooney’, released on Amazon Prime on Friday, and is seen speaking honestly about the issues they have faced in their marriage, including Wayne’s notorious brothel visits and escort scandal.

Wayne’s wife of 14 years insists in the film that ‘I wouldn’t be standing here if I hadn’t forgiven him,’ as she reflects on their 20 year relationship from teenagers to parents of four. 

The documentary looks back on Wayne’s life from his council estate upbringing in the Liverpool district of Croxteth through to the soaring heights of his football career and throughout it all, his relationship with Coleen, who first met at the age of 12.

Speaking about their teenage romance, Wayne says in the documentary: ‘I think when I was about 11 or 12 I knew that I wanted to marry her, and I said that to her at the time. I said “when we grow up we’re going to get married and you’re going to have our kids”. She was looking at me like “yeah good one!”‘

Coleen agrees, admitting of her husband: ‘He’s a charmer, growing up that’s how he won me over. The more I said no the more he said “I will one day get that date”.’

Wayne’s charm came in the form of poems, one of which had the title ‘Wiggle Wiggle’, and which Coleen has kept to this day, telling the camera ‘they’re very romantic, you can tell he loves me.’

Wayne and Coleen began dating aged 16 and went on to marry in a lavish ceremony in Portofino in 2008. They are now parents to four sons – Kai, 12, Klay, eight, Kit, six, and Cass, three.

Later in the Amazon Prime film, Coleen is seen looking back at the events of 2004 when reports of Wayne’s brothel visits and his infamous romp with three prostitutes first emerged in the press. 

Reflecting on the difficult time, Coleen concedes: ‘The first time, we were young so there was a lot of arguing.’

Admitting she didn’t approve of the company Wayne was keeping, Coleen insists: ‘Alcohol is a lot to blame and still is, up to this day with things that has happened recently. It’s not a good thing for Wayne to be unsupervised’.

Wayne is also seen discussing the period, admitting: ‘I put myself in the wrong place and when you’re in the wrong place and there’s alcohol involved you’re gonna make bad decisions and you’re going to have to suffer and deal with the consequences’.

‘That’s what happened, it doesn’t take away any of my love for Coleen, it happened. it was a wrong decision to make, I held my hands up and we worked through it.’

Coleen says she relied on the support of her family and her own instincts to help her through, pointing out: ‘When you’re making those decisions you’ve got to focus on what you want and not other people because you have so many people saying different things to you. “Oh why is she getting back with him?”‘

‘Obviously I listen to the people that matter to me, my mum and dad always give me a positive outlook on things. There’s nothing that we can’t deal with and that’s my way in a situation – let’s sit down and see what we can do and can we make it work? And we have. We’re not the lovey-dovey type anyway, we like to have a laugh and we work well together.’

She adds that there is some element of truth to the idea that they stayed together for their four boys, explaining: ‘That was part of it but also we still love each other. Hopefully he’s learnt and he doesn’t get himself into any of those horrible situations again. But it’s happened and I’ve got to live with it, if I couldn’t cope with living with it I would have ended the relationship.’

She later adds when asked if she had forgiven her husband: ‘I wouldn’t be standing here if I hadn’t forgiven him… It’s not acceptable what he’s done and it’s happened and that’s the stage of life we were in at the time, we’ve moved on. I forgive him but it wasn’t acceptable. I haven’t got the anger that I did at the time.’

In a recent soul-baring interview with Oliver Holt, The Mail on Sunday’s Chief Sports Writer, ahead of the documentary’s release, Wayne opened up on his ‘self-binges’ with alcohol and the effects it had on his wife. 

Wayne explained that the pressures of going from a council estate upbringing to fame and fortune from the age of 16, when he made his professional debut for Everton, led to what he calls ‘explosions’.  

‘I used to hold almost everything in and keep it to myself and it would build up. I would say “F*** it” and go out and make silly mistakes with the explosion,’ he said.

‘I learned that when I felt that coming, I needed to sit down and talk to someone. That calmed things down. I spoke to Coleen quite a few times, her mum and dad and my mum and dad,’ adding: ‘I was trying to figure out how to deal with it by myself.’

Speaking about the documentary, Wayne said he wanted people to see every side of him. ‘There have been mistakes in the past, which I have always held my hands up to.’

‘It was tough for me to do it and for Coleen to do it. When tough moments have come up, we have sat down and spoke about them and figured out how we are going to get through it.’

Alluding to the scandals that previously engulfed him, including partying and other women, Wayne admitted of his wife: 

‘The first thing you see is her forgiving some of the stuff I’ve done but then we have always sat down and been open about it and figured out what is best for us as a family and we have taken that into the film.’  

The film also features interviews with footballing greats such as David Beckham, Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, and Thierry Henry, who illustrate first-hand accounts of Rooney as a teammate and an opponent. 

Meaningful testimonies from the likes of Rooney’s first Premier League manager David Moyes and Rooney’s first England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, describe the seemingly unlimited potential they saw in Rooney at such a young age. 

Rooney is released on Amazon Prime on Friday, February 11.