Tales from the Secret Footballer Read online

  To Shakeel, my friend and TSF Chairman, for all his support and encouragement.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  MY HUSBAND, THE SECRET FOOTBALLER

  INTRODUCTION

  PART ONE: A GAME OF TWO HALVES

  IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY

  OK, IT'S ABOUT THE MONEY

  CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME

  THE JOKER IN THE PACK

  MY DRUGS HELL

  MESSING ABOUT

  THE PERKS OF THE TRADE

  PART TWO: WHERE NOW?

  BANG GOES PLAN A

  WHAT ABOUT RUSSIA?

  WHAT ABOUT CHINA?

  WHAT ABOUT SCOTLAND?

  WHAT ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST?

  COULD I BE A COACH?

  COULD I BE A DIRECTOR OF FOOTBALL?

  COULD I BE A MANAGER?

  COULD I BE AN AGENT?

  THERE’S ALWAYS GOLF

  PART THREE: THE ELEPHANTS IN THE ROOM

  WHERE WILL IT ALL END?

  THE PASTOR V THE PHYSICIST

  THE AWFUL ROWING TOWARD HAPPINESS

  EPILOGUE

  THE REAL MEANING OF FOOTBALL

  INDEX

  Have You Read…

  About the Author

  Copyright

  I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

  No, I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

  Well, I wake in the morning

  Fold my hands and pray for rain

  I got a head full of ideas

  That are drivin’ me insane

  It’s a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor

  I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more

  BOB DYLAN

  MY HUSBAND, THE SECRET FOOTBALLER

  Almost anything can happen in professional football: one moment a player is basking in the glory of a successful season, the next he is looking for a new club and realising that his world is a very small oyster. What makes each season fly by is that it is packed with incident.

  The only thing my husband ever said with regard to his football career was that he was going to get to the top: he was going to play in the Premier League. He didn’t care about being famous but he already recognised the by-products of being a successful footballer and he’d goad our friends when we were out together: “Your kids will have my name on the back of their shirts one day. They’ll watch me on TV and call me uncle.” He’s always known how to rub people just hard enough that they’d back away from him.

  At the club he still loves, and at which he spent much of his early career, he was hugely influential on the pitch: when he arrived they had nothing and when he left they were an established force in English football. And he isn’t modest about that: if you ask him, he’ll tell you exactly what he thinks about his own contribution to that success. He was so important to that club that they would send him out on to the pitch hobbling on occasions. There was one season in particular when I don’t think he returned from a single game without an injury of some sort – a strapped ankle or a swollen thigh or cuts and bruises all over his face and body – but he never complained. He would say to me, “The best players get kicked. When I come home with no cuts on me, start worrying.” Last season he came home with a 10in gash down his shin and passed out on our bed. At about 2 in the morning I felt the covers being pulled off me; it turned out he was making his way to the toilet and was dragging the duvet behind him because the blood had stuck his leg to it. He’s ruined so many nice bedspreads down the years that I stopped buying them long ago.

  A few years ago he spent a week in Leicester having a course of injections in his knee; they administered Rohypnol because the doctor needed him conscious for the procedure, but it was extremely painful. One day there was a knock at the door and I opened it to find him looking as if he’d been in a drunken fight. I laid him down on the sofa and his mobile phone rang. It said “Physio”, so I answered it and a voice at the end of the line told me that the hospital had lost him and were doing everything they could to find him. I explained that he was with me and the physio told me to keep an eye on him and wait for the Rohypnol to wear off – which eventually it did. An hour later he walked into the kitchen, extremely groggy, complaining that his arm hurt. I pulled up his sleeve and he had the IV hanging out of his arm.

  I remember once he had me in tears laughing while a doctor was trying to treat him: he was still in his kit as the doctor attempted to put 30 stitches into a cut above his eye. The doctor had said that he had wanted to do the procedure under general anaesthetic but then he made the mistake of saying that only rugby players had so many stitches without general anaesthetic. My husband lost consciousness at least once but when it was finished he said, “There you go, doc. My eye is stitched up and all the rugby players still wish they’d been footballers, so what are you going to tell the next one that comes in here?” You have to know how to take him because everything is a challenge, and so long as it is him who instigates it there is nothing that he can’t do.

  Neither of us would miss the damage that football has done to his body, though. It is bad enough watching him lose a match and the mood that it puts him in, but when he can’t play at all because of an injury the atmosphere in the house really isn’t pleasant.

  He has been recognised by his peers and the clubs that he has played for. He has had some success and won trophies, but when he looks back and adds up the time that he spent playing compared with where he might be now if he’d used his head instead of his feet, I know that he feels he made the wrong decision. He could be more respected, wealthier and, above all, happier. He feels that he’s wasted the last 15 years of his life. It may seem ungrateful to say so, but I don’t disagree.

  Neither of us knew exactly what was going to happen once he started to play football for a living, but after three or four years he definitely changed. He became withdrawn. At first I thought it was because he was so focused, but years later, when I knew he wasn’t taking his football so seriously any more, he remained the same. He’d crossed over into another personality and most of the time there wasn’t any way to reach him.

  Football, like life, can sometimes be absurd; a person might think that he is getting everything he could ever want, only to find out that it means nothing. When my husband got to the Premier League he didn’t know why he was in the game any more: he desperately wanted to play football at the highest level and when he achieved that there was nowhere else to go. Simply surviving in the Premier League is enough for a lot of clubs – for the players, the managers, the fans and certainly the owners – but that was completely alien to him. I don’t think he had seen success defined in those terms before and he was angered by it. It’s easy to say now, but that was when he should have retired. He’d reached his goal; he had no plan thereafter.

  When I look back to when I first met him, I recall that he had a picture of Kurt Cobain in his bedroom: it showed the Nirvana frontman slumped against the stage after a gig, sobbing uncontrollably, as if he had nothing left to give and nowhere left to go. At the time it was just a cool picture of a hugely influential person, so I never really asked him about it.

  But a few years ago an article that had been cut out of a newspaper appeared on our fridge door. It told the story of what happened immediately after Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona won the Fifa Club World Cup, to complete a clean sweep of every competition they had entered. Halfway through the article, somebody had picked out a quote in yellow highlighter. Guardiola’s assistant, Tito Vilanova, had finally tracked the manager down; Guardiola, in tears, turned to him and said, “Where are we supposed to go from here?”

  It�
�s a question I hear a lot nowadays.

  Mrs TSF

  INTRODUCTION

  The last couple of years have been a monumental struggle. I’ve had fights with ex-clubs, ex-managers and new chairmen, while at the same time wrestling with the fact that the end of my playing career is just around the corner. I am relatively young and could play on for a few more seasons, but it is time to do something else. My next step, if I can summon the strength to take it, is important for a number of reasons. It is important financially, of course, but more than that it is important to me mentally because my biggest struggle recently has been with myself. Despite the drugs I take for the depression that has plagued me for more than a decade, it has become increasingly difficult to get through the day without thinking, “What’s the fucking point?”

  And I know that it will be difficult to move on, not because I’ll miss playing football particularly but because other people don’t want me to. I have been in business meetings talking about exciting projects and creative ideas that involve websites, inventions, manufacturing and so on, and every time it’s the same: whether I’m talking to an investor, a chief executive or a designer, within 10 minutes the conversation turns to football and that makes me feel like the sad clown, someone who is only there for the amusement of everybody else. That’s why I originally decided that if I was going to talk about football, it was going to be on my terms. If people found what I had to say interesting, then fine; if not, no problem. That was how The Secret Footballer was born.

  As TSF, I’ve loved the freedom I’ve had to reveal how the “beautiful game” really works. I’ll be doing more of that in this book. I don’t want to give you a cheesy line but some of it you really wouldn’t hear anywhere else.

  I can’t talk about football without telling you a little bit about my life, however: where I came from and how I came to be … different, as some people would put it. That’s a footballer’s euphemism for “a cock” and a manager’s polite way of telling my agent that he thinks I’m a trouble-maker who wouldn’t fit into his team. Some of the things that I have done during my time as a footballer I am not proud of, but as I’ve admitted from day one, I am not whiter than white.

  I can’t deny that this life has been a real eye-opener. I have experienced every emotion that a footballer can experience in more than 10 years of playing professionally, and heard more than a few fantastic stories too. Some of them still make me cry with laughter whenever I hear them. I’ve managed to blackmail some of the players involved into telling them again for this book, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. Fair play to them for letting me use their stories, because if there’s one thing I have learned from my years in the game, getting a footballer to play ball is by no means a given. As with my own tales, I’ve changed or fudged a few details here and there to protect the guilty.

  Not all the stories are about what happens on the pitch; they just happen to concern footballers in various situations. Some of them are funny and some of them are extremely sad, and depending on the stereotype that you have in your head you may laugh at the sad ones and cry at the funny ones. My favourite story is about a very expensive yacht hanging by its stern from the side of a marina: whenever I picture that it makes me laugh, and the players who were involved tell it so enthusiastically, too.

  This book is also about my quest for some kind of meaning as I search for my next job. I am finding it very hard to throw my energy into something simply for the money or as a way to keep busy. I want more than that. As you’ll know if you’ve read my columns, many of them reflect where I am in my life at a given moment. I hope you’ll be interested in seeing how some of my other writing came about, whether it was after a chance meeting with a quantum physicist in a coffee shop or a random dream brought about by a period of cold turkey.

  Finally, I’ll be updating you about what has happened since the summer of 2012, when my first book, I Am The Secret Footballer, was published. My life has a habit of heading off at unimaginable speeds in unpredictable directions just as I think I’m finally about to catch my breath.

  In 2012 I signed a deal that I was not expecting. The club involved had suddenly lost a player in circumstances I can’t go into and wanted me to fill the void until he got himself out of his spot of bother. I didn’t want to sign, if the truth be told, but as well as being very persuasive, the owners are also very good friends of mine. One thing led to another and the enjoyment that I got from the following season was unlike anything I had experienced for years. For the briefest of moments I remembered why I loved football.

  Before I signed I called a friend at a big boot manufacturer who sent me the latest pair of his company’s horrifically coloured plastic monstrosities. He’s always been good to me, even though these days nobody gives a shit what boots I wear, in particular the mums who used to ask me every five minutes because their sons wanted the same. But once I had them the familiarity was overwhelming – the smell, the touch, the ritual of slipping them on and pulling the laces tight and the pressure around the foot as the leather fell in on itself. It just felt right. “Just when I thought I was out,” I said to myself, “they pull me back in.”

  PART ONE

  A GAME OF TWO HALVES

  What I’ll miss about my life as a footballer

  – and what I’ll be glad to see the back of

  IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY

  In the last few years I have played against two former clubs. In one match I left the field to the fans singing my name; in the other I barely made it out of the stadium. It was another example of football’s ability to throw up uncomfortable scenarios for everyone involved: no matter what team you support or which team you play for, sooner or later you will have to face people with whom you have history. The shit that I have had to deal with recently has been relentless.

  As I look back on my career, I occasionally reflect that it might have been a good idea to keep my mouth shut when slating various people, clubs or fans, but that wouldn’t have been me and there is nothing worse than a kiss-arse in football. I’d certainly be wealthier if I was like that but I can almost guarantee that I’d have had a breakdown by now. No, I only know how to be myself.

  I knew there would be uncomfortable games to play because I have pissed people off over the years. Sometimes it was deliberately, sometimes unintentionally – but the result is always the same. Lots of players say things that annoy other people without thinking about how they will deal with it in real life rather than from the safety of their Twitter accounts. Eventually you find yourself playing away from home with everything stacked against you and the fans baying for your blood, and it isn’t pleasant.

  A while ago, and not for the first time in my career, my position at the club I was playing for became untenable. There were two reasons. Firstly, I was in the grip of depression to the point that I simply could not function, either off or on the pitch. Eventually I made the decision to inform my manager that he would have to drop me; unfortunately, he decided to give me one last chance. I had to appreciate what he was trying to do but he got it completely wrong, and therein lies the fundamental difference between managers who are successful and managers who are not. A successful manager will always do what he thinks is right for the team, not the individual. Don’t get me wrong: he’ll make sure that the player is OK – but if he can’t perform, he won’t play.

  Secondly, the club was in financial trouble and owed its players a lot of money. They owed me so much that I thought I was going to lose my house. Shit happens; I don’t want sympathy and I’ve never asked for it because I have faith in my ability to make sure that things work out for the best. This saga dragged on for more than a year, with false promises of payments that were followed by yet more contract negotiation and the signing of even more paperwork. Somewhere an entire forest must have given its life in A4 just for me to sign countless pieces of paper that seemingly meant bugger-all.

  Meanwhile, the fans were being repeatedly told that if the players
who were owed money insisted on being paid, the club would have to go into liquidation. So they were on at us, standing outside the training ground and shouting profanities as we drove through the gates and walked to the changing rooms. People can be very brave from a distance. One day something just flipped inside me and I walked over to have it out with a couple of them. After we’d all shaken hands, they told me that the survival of their football club was more important than any one person. I should be a “hero”, as they put it, and save the club by forgetting about the money I was owed.

  “What matters more to you, mate?” I asked one of them. “Your family or this football club?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “My family,” he said.

  “Same here,” I said. “I need that money to make sure that my family have a home to live in, so I’m afraid I can’t simply waive that money, because I wouldn’t be able to support them, would I? How am I going to pay my mortgage? It wouldn’t be very responsible of me to go home and tell my wife and children that I’ve forfeited a huge amount of money and we’ve lost our house but it’s all right because some football club that we’ve got no real affinity for is going to get away with not paying its debts.”

  There was silence all round and the men looked very unsure of themselves. I didn’t want to embarrass them; I just wanted to put a side of the story across that I knew they were not being told. The conversation went on and it became clear that he and his friend were typical of a lot of fans. They don’t really understand the politics of the situations that they get so impassioned about, and they care little for the players in the middle of them because as far as they are concerned, every footballer is a millionaire, isn’t he? I didn’t tell them about all the considerations that I had to make: the fact that this money was needed because I had a huge tax bill to pay; the fact that the bank was threatening to repossess my house. To all intents and purposes, I was just a greedy footballer.