From representing Arsenal to conquering the fashion industry as an Armani model

Fate has certainly smiled on Halls, with the now 44-year-old – who was speaking exclusively to GOAL courtesy of BritishGambler.co.uk – explaining a move into modelling that was seemingly meant to be. “The modelling one’s a weird one because I did model as a kid. I was a kid model. So I’ve done it from, I think about eight, nine, 10, 11″ he said. “And then I got signed at the Arsenal and I told my mum, ‘Listen, I don’t want to do this modelling no more’. But it went really well for me.

“I was in one of Kylie Minogue’s videos, one of her music videos. I was supposed to have a dancing scene in it, but it went to about 4am in Camden. We were shooting in Camden and I think my dance scene was coming up about 5am and I said, ‘Dad, I want to go home’. I was only a kid. Dad says, ‘Sweet, we’ll go home’. But I’m in the start of Kylie Minogue’s video.

“But then weirdly, towards the end of my career, the injuries started coming and all the rest of it, I think I was about 28, and there was something inside me that was a little bit egotistical where I was like, ‘I’ll go and be a model if this all goes wrong’. And then my sister got into me. When I had my Achilles injury, it looked like it was going to be something, she said, ‘Go into London and just go around all the agencies, walk in there’. So I walked into all the agencies, I walked into the eight big ones in London, and they all said, no, except for the last one. The last one went, ‘Oh, maybe, but what’s your deal?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a year left at football’. She said, ‘Come back in a year, we’ll talk to you maybe’.

“So then eventually, the Achilles done me and retired me. So we retired and literally had five days where it took me to the last paycheck and I was having that cry up. And then I was walking in Westfields shopping centre and the lady there came up – Sarah Vickery, she’s my agent now still, came up to me. She said, ‘Do I know you? Are you a model?’ And I was like, ‘No, but I think I popped into your agency a while back’. And she’s like, ‘Right, cool, come in tomorrow, we’ll get a test shoot done and then we’ll see what happens’.

“So I went in the next day. We’ve done a test shoot down in Shoreditch where they take a couple of pictures of you and they keep you in a nice outfit. And then a cool photographer takes pictures. And then when they come back, they have a little look and they judge you. And that was it. They said, ‘Cool, we want to sign you the next day’. That was it. So I got signed. And then all of a sudden I was a model six days later from retiring.”