Andy Carroll has said his marriage to Billi Mucklow was a 'car crash' and that their relationship was 'on its last legs' before they even walked down the aisle.

The ex-Premier League footballer has opened up about his disastrous marriage to the TOWIE star for the first time in his new tell-all book, Owning It.

The striker, 37, reflected on why his relationship eventually came to an end in July 2024 after spending two years alone in France on transfer from Reading.

He claims that Billi had promised to move out there with him but that she ‘reneged on the deal’ which led to him feeling ‘depressed'.

'When I played abroad the original plan was for my family to come with me,' he wrote.

'I'd rather not go into detail but due to complicated family dynamics on my partner’s side, she stayed in Rod Stewart’s old house.

'She said she'd join me if I secured a job abroad... she reneged on the deal.’

Andy and Billi have three children together – Arlo, 11, Wolf, eight, and Marvel Mae, six – and she also raised his children Emilie Rose, 17, and Lucas, 15, from his past relationship.

'The kids had been so excited, they'd even been to France to look at houses,’ he said. 'Suddenly I had two years on my own.’

He said that, while he did ‘enjoy’ his time in France, where he played for Amiens and Bordeaux, he was ‘too depressed and drinking too much’ to ‘mask the pain from being away from the kids'.

'On top of that my marriage was disintegrating,’ he said. 'I got engaged to Billi in 2014 but only married her in 2022.’

He said that the relationship started ‘going downhill fast’ when he left West Ham in May 2019, and ‘was on its last legs before we tied the knot.’

'But we had three kids plus custody of my first two so it just felt like the right thing to do,’ he said.

'I got so low that I started doing my own therapy sessions. I came to the realisation that I was missing having control of my life, I was missing my kids, but I wasn't missing her.’

He said it was this that led him to realise that his ‘marriage was over'.

'I spent the summer in Essex and loved being around the kids but hated the rest of it,’ he said.

'We'd have kitchen parties every weekend and I'd get drunk with all these random people.

'I'd be hungover to hell in the morning not wanting to do anything.'

Billi and Andy's wedding was almost called off when he was pictured drunkenly passed out in bed with two women in Dubai on his stag do.

Billi forgave him after one of the women insisted nothing sexual happened.

Less than two years after their wedding, the couple's marriage was over – with Andy confirming they had started divorce proceedings after 'a hard few months for our family'.

In his book, the footballer, 37, went on to talk about some of the issues the couple had once he had retired from football.

'When the kids went back to school, I was dropping them off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon and doing nothing much in between,' he wrote.

'Suddenly life without football was like staring into the abyss.

'I also worried me being home a lot more might put a strain on my relationship.

'As much as a footballer might want his relationship to be equal, it's simply not possible.

'Everything has to revolve around him. Not because he's better than his partner, because he needs to be the best he can possibly be to keep getting contracts and earning good money.’

'When a footballer retires,’ he said, ‘two lives get turned upside down.’

'And if the footballer has saved enough money to keep his family in the fashion they became accustomed to, he no longer has no structural meaning,’ he said.

Andy said he then found himself ‘sitting around the house all day’ and ‘wondering what to do with the rest of his life'.

Weeks after their split, Andy and celebrity hairstylist Lou Teasdale, 42, revealed that they had struck up a romantic relationship.

At the time, Billi was said to have been blindsided and friends of hers said that she 'knew Andy had someone' but she just wasn't sure who it was.

She found out shortly before the romance was made public.

In his book, Andy admits to meeting Lou on a spontaneous getaway to Glastonbury in July 2024, the night after he made headlines for having a boozy brawl in the streets of Mayfair at a birthday party of one of Billi’s friends.

'The day after [the brawl] I went to Glastonbury,' he wrote. 'I watched the football with Louis Tomlinson and about 50 of his friends. Among them was Lou. A friend of Louis’s sister.

'Lou was so much fun that I assumed she had been drinking all day until noticing she was drinking water.

'We bounced around together until spending all night in conversation. She was so caring and easy to talk to.’

Andy said that Lou ‘introduced me to a whole new way of seeing things’ and they now believe that they ‘saved’ each other.

'Meeting her changed everything for me, making going to Glastonbury the best stupid decision I ever made,’ he said.

He said that he ‘laid it on her’ in the early days, discussing with her his children and ‘car crash of a marriage,’ adding that it was a ‘relief’ to be able to ‘share my pain with someone'.