After boxing, Warren describes football, and especially Arsenal, as his second sporting passion.
The 74-year-old is a long-term Gunners season ticket holder – originally at Highbury, where he had one of the first executive boxes on the Clock End when the stadium was revamped in the early 1990s, and now the Emirates Stadium. He started going to watch Arsenal with his dad at the age of eight.
“It was always Arsenal for me,” Warren told BBC Sport. “All my family were Arsenal mad, and they were our local team – I was brought up in Clerkenwell in Islington, and I went to school in Highbury.
“I didn’t see us win anything for a long time when I was a boy, but my first heroes were Joe Baker, a centre-forward who Arsenal bought from Torino in 1961, and a long-serving left-back called Billy McCullough, who was nicknamed ‘Flint’ after Flint McCullough from the TV show ‘Wagon Train’.
“I actually only read Billy’s obituary, external last week, because he died very recently aged 90. It’s such a shame he’s no longer with us, because all those old players were my first favourites.
“I always remember an FA Cup game against Liverpool where Joe was sent off after he knocked out Ron Yeats, their big centre-half. I think that’s what got me into boxing.
“Over the years there were many more players who stood out. People like Frank McLintock, who actually became a partner of mine when we owned a nightclub in the Barbican together in the late 1970s, plus Liam Brady and Charlie George – who was another Islington boy who I knew from when we were kids.
“That’s before you even get to the era of Dennis Bergkamp, so it’s a massive list. Now? Declan Rice, all day long. He is the catalyst of where we are.”
Chris Sutton and Frank Warren were speaking to BBC Sport’s Chris Bevan.
The AI predictions were generated using Microsoft Copilot Chat – we simply asked the tool to ‘predict this weekend’s Premier League scores’.
