I have a 13-year-old son of my own now – Jacob – and he’s currently showing a huge amount of natural ability. There isn’t, and there never will be, any pressure on him from me. If he decides he wants to be a doctor or a builder or an aeroplane pilot, that’s more than good enough for me, so long as he’s happy and secure in what he’s doing. But if Jacob does go down the path of becoming a professional footballer, the support he’ll get from his mum, from me and his three sisters will ensure that all he has to think about is his game. God knows, I made enough mistakes early on in my career to be all too aware of the pitfalls. I’m often asked what the grown-up me would say to the cheeky young lad who took Liverpool by storm in the mid-90s. I think the big message would have to be: Just Don’t Go There.
What I mean is that, for all we can justify to ourselves that we were never that bad, we just did what every other player did in those days, which was tame compared to the generation that preceded us, the reality is that you’re better off eliminating the risk altogether. And I’m not just talking about our social lives either, although late nights are part of a cycle that includes daft injuries, bad diet and, in my case, unwanted headlines. It took a while for the penny to drop that once you sign that big contract to become football’s first teenage millionaire, everything changes – including the way people behave towards you. If you think, by carrying on the way you’ve always been, you’re ‘keeping your feet on the ground’, there’s a rude awakening coming your way. People want a piece of you. Sometimes that’s just an autograph, a chat or a photo – but, all too often, they want to exploit you in some way and as sad and as wrong as it may seem, you have to break with your old habits and your old routines if you want to prevent that from happening. I’m not talking about your lifelong mates – by God, you’re going to need them more than ever – but if you plan to carry on going to your usual bars and pubs, then you have to expect some paparazzi to snap your picture with a drink in your hand. Expect someone you barely know to sell a story about you to the press. Expect some opportunist to set you up, snap your picture and splash it all over social media.
Welcome to my world.
Part of the problem, undoubtedly, was the perception the general public had of modern-day footballers as overpaid playboys, disconnected from the harsh realities of everyday life. Obviously, we would all dispute that. The majority of us came from pretty tough backgrounds and our attitude was that we would have played for nothing, for the love of the game. But it wasn’t us who invented the Premier League, it wasn’t us who negotiated those eye-watering television deals. As the millennium headed to its climax, the Premier League was awash with money and the very best players tended to be the very best paid. Although the ‘bling’ lifestyle hadn’t quite come home to roost by the late-90s, it got to a point where most of my teammates had money to burn or, in my case, to invest.
Remember, the rise of big money in football coincided with the boost to the economy that New Labour brought. Suddenly, everybody wanted to be a property developer and that’s how I became Robbie Fowler, beloved landlord to the many. The idea was to invest in rundown properties with a bit of development potential, make the repairs and improvements and either re-sell the houses or let them out to tenants. I’m not saying I was down there doing the plastering and re-wiring, but I could see the commercial sense in it to the point where there’s now a Robbie Fowler Property Academy offering investment advice and expertise to prospective developers – not bad for a Toxteth tearaway, eh?
Another Toxteth lad, my pal Ste Calvey, also carved a living from masonry – literally, in his case. Calvey was always a massively skilful craftsman and after serving a long apprenticeship, he began to specialise in stone restoration. After he left school, our Anthony joined Calvey Restoration too, so it’s fair to say we’ve all made a few quid out of bricks and stone.
David Moores, the Liverpool chairman, was not short of a bob or two, either. He had an expression for those irrational passion purchases and investments that you occasionally make, like racing cars, paintings – or, come to think of it, football clubs. They’re going to cost a lot of money. More than likely, you will not see a return on your investment but you’re going to dive in and do it anyway, because you love the world and the thing you’re buying into, and above all, because you want to!
Mooresy used to call those investments ‘Buying A Racehorse’. Well, the other thing we dabbled in, just for a bit of fun was, er … horse racing! Not as in gambling, though that obviously played a small part in a day at the races, but more as something that just fascinated us and that we grew to love – especially me and Macca. Growing up in working-class communities, you see enough of the bookmaker’s end of the business. But me and Macca discovered we had a real interest in the breeding, training and ownership side of the racing game. A few us had met the jockey Tony McCoy the year Aintree was abandoned after a bomb scare. We’d subsequently bump into Tony at sports dinners and awards ceremonies and so on, and we got on brilliantly with him. Tony was one of the people who planted the seed of our racehorse interest by opening up that world to us. He offered an open invitation to race meetings, introduced us to other jockeys and trainers and breeders and, over time, racing grew into a real passion of ours – a welcome escape from the world of football.
Although that general curiosity and interest was there, the ownership thing really all started by accident. Dom Matteo is a Southport lad and going back to the 60s and 70s, there has always been a tradition of Liverpool and Everton players living up by the seaside in Formby, Ainsdale and Birkdale, just outside of Southport. That area between the coast and Ormskirk is honestly like the Netherlands – it’s completely flat for as far as the eye can see, regularly gets flooded and is mainly just fields, farms and yet more fields.
Anyway, it turns out those never-ending flat fields and, by contrast, those good long stretches of sand are an ideal environment for horse breeding. It’s pretty well documented that Ginger McCain used to train Red Rum on Ainsdale Beach (less well-known trainspotter fact: Red Rum got his name from the last three letters of his mum and dad’s names – Quorum and Mared!). So, it turned out the flatlands around Ormskirk were a breeder’s dream and Dom knew a trainer from the area called Mick Meagher. Mick agreed to look out for an entry-level buy into the horse trade and a few of us – Dom, Razor Ruddock, me, Macca, Jamie Redknapp, John Scales, Rob Jones and Phil Babb – formed a gung-ho, swashbuckling buyer’s club, ready to transform the racing landscape with our audacious, instinctive, Wolf of Wall Street-style investments. Well, we put a grand each in, anyway, which was just about enough to buy a pit pony.
Our pit pony turned out to have something about him though, winning his first race at decent odds. That was a lot of fun, just the simple fact of having some skin in a race – though nowhere near as much of a laugh as our naming session. I swear we could have gone on for days, coming up with daft names like Cunning Stunt and Easy Balls (he was a gelding – think Lord Varys in Game of Thrones!). I take exceptional pride in the fact that it was me who came up with the ingenious and unforgettable name we stuck with … Some Horse! It’s ridiculous how much amusement that gave us, the idea of a random punter in the bookmakers going, ‘Who’s winning?’ or ‘Who won the 3:15 at Haydock?’ and the bookie saying, ‘Some Horse!’ That was just our sense of humour, but I’m convinced it all added to the great team spirit we had among that squad.
The consortium bought another horse – surprisingly enough, named Another Horse, in the hope that they’d compete in the same race and the commentator would have to go ‘and Some Horse eases past Another Horse on the final straight’ – but that was as far as the enterprise went for most of our LFC Buyer’s Club. I think the likes of John Scales – or James Bond, as we called the handsome Yorkshire brute – just wanted to go to their showbiz parties and gallery openings and impress some debutante by saying: ‘Yah, I have a minor interest in bloodstock, own a couple of nags, actually. You should come to my stud sometime …’
There was an unforeseen side effect for me, though. When Some Horse won in its first outing, I went into the winners’ enclosure as an owner. It was the first time I’d seen our nag close-up and in fact, the first time I’d ever been that close to any kind of gee-gee. I found out pretty quickly that I had an acute allergy – several, as it turned out! My eyes puffed up and I came out in these attractive red blotches, and I think I broke the world record for consecutive sneezes. Channel 4 had the racing in those days and they were waiting for a cheeky interview, but I just went legging it to the First Aid tent.
Ah-ah-ah-achoo!
In spite of my allergies, me and Macca had caught the bug, big time, and went into a proper partnership, which, after a great deal of spit balling and head banging, we decided to call The Macca & Growler Company. Beats me how we came up with these winners, time and time again! Through Tony McCoy, we met a top bloodstock agent, Graham Bradley, and with his input, took the whole thing up a level or two. Whereas, up until then, we’d been concentrating our modest interest in flat racing, Graham and co introduced us to a whole new turf game – the National Hunt hurdle circuit. A bit like the way certain football clubs and scouts will look for quality and value in untapped territories – Arsène Wenger, for example, bringing in so many players from France and the African nations – Graham Bradley was one of the first buyers to move into the German market. He found us a whole string of top horses, like Auetaler, Bernardon, Samon and our best-known nag, Seebald, all trained by Martin Pipe.
With me and Macca so busy with our football, the horses became a lovely pastime for our dads. Dave McManaman and my old fella, Bobby, had become firm friends since I broke into the Liverpool team and the nags were something they grew to absolutely love. They would travel to all the race meetings and phone us from the racecourse with all this jargon they’d picked up – we didn’t have a clue what they’d be on about. Dave had actually worked in one of those unlicensed backstreet bookies that every major city used to have, mainly because it was illegal for women to lay bets! Can you imagine that, women having to go and see so-and-so in such-and-such a pub or grocer’s or whatever, just to lay a little bet? Anyway, Dave McManaman was a shrewd tipster and The Macca & Growler Partnership started to flourish. With horses of this calibre and Martin as trainer, we had quite a few winners, which, in turn, raised our profile. You get the picture? High-profile, earning megabucks, prancing around, swigging champagne at Cheltenham and Aintree, giving it the big one? I didn’t – and I never would (for the record, I can’t stand champagne!) – but it’s easy to see how a certain type of person could start to get the wrong impression, maybe even bear a grudge.
I still don’t know for sure whether the incident at the Holiday Inn was a set-up. What I do know is that, if I hadn’t been there at 2am, it couldn’t have happened at all. It was after our home game against Aston Villa, towards the end of April 1999. I was banned for four games for the line-snorting incident and a further two games for taunting Graeme Le Saux. There was a fine of £32,000 to go with the £60,000 Liverpool had already fined me – if the club had been hoping by getting in first and going in hard on me, they’d soften the FA’s stance, then it backfired – badly. My ban was due to start after the Villa game, which was effectively, therefore, my last game of the season. With pre-season training three months away, I felt fairly safe in having a drink in town after the match and putting an up-and-down season behind me.
Coming back to my message from Present Day Me to Young Robbie (or Jacob), we footballers might feel entitled to wind down like ordinary people do – but are we ordinary people? In pursuing our dream, do we have to accept that ‘ordinary’ has gone for as long as we’re in the limelight? Apart from my long-standing, close circle of friends I had always kept myself to myself. I never actively courted publicity, always, always tried to stay private – but can you ever stay private when your day job places you slap bang in the public eye? There’s always going to be an element that decides they don’t like you, even though they’ve never even met you. So, are you, in a way, asking for trouble, exposing yourself to the haters just by being out in the first place?
The fact that, to this day, I only drink bottled beer when I’m out, my thumb permanently clamped over the neck so no chancer can slip anything into my drink, tells its own story. Even in a coffee shop, I always have the plastic lid and drink through the little slot. Is that too high a price to pay for the celebrity – some might say infamy – that comes hand-in-hand with being good at a popular sport? For the almost inevitable flak that comes with the territory, especially in today’s world of smartphones, Instagram, Snapchat and immediate (often fake) news, is it worth it? On a different day, I might give a different answer, but I think I’d steer Jacob in the direction of a discreet meal in a restaurant that he knows and trusts rather than a city-centre bar.
Saying that, we’d always wind up at the Holiday Inn in Paradise Street because it was discreet – or at least it was supposed to be. This was the hotel that LFC had used since Bob Paisley’s time as manager. It was a tried-and-trusted (and lucky!) routine. On match days, he’d bring the team down – especially before a night game – to give them a team talk and let them get their heads down for a bit of a kip before heading up to Anfield on the team bus. Whether I was out with old pals like Gordon and Ste Calvey, or on a night out with my teammates, we’d generally head back to the Holiday Inn for a nightcap while we waited for a taxi. There was a little private lounge where we knew we wouldn’t get hassled and that’s where I found myself after that game against Villa, feeling pretty sorry for myself.
We’d lost the match to an Ian Taylor goal, I was out for the season and I was suddenly, in my mid-20s, no longer a kid with the world at his feet, but an experienced pro who was expected to deliver. There’s no doubt about it, I was at a low ebb, starting to think for the first time that I wasn’t tasting the kind of success I’d always imagined I would do – the cups, the medals, the international caps. To my mind, one League Cup medal wasn’t sufficient reward enough for a lad who’d been expected to go all the way to the top.
My cab was due, so I went through to the toilets for a wee. The bogs are in the main hotel, meaning that guests staying there or people using the public bar will stumble into those same facilities, too. As I was washing my hands, two lads came in. Looking back, I think they’d seen me go in there and had followed me in – only they know for sure. What is on record (it came out in the court case and was never disputed by the fella’s legal team) is that one of them offered me a line of coke. I’ll admit I wasn’t in the best of moods; I’ll admit that, if it happened again, I’d be a little more diplomatic. But, at that time, on that night, I brushed him away, told him to fuck off and made my way out of the toilets, back towards the private lounge.
I’m told by eye witnesses who gave evidence that one of the lads appeared behind me and whacked me in the back of my head. I reeled from the sucker punch and his mate then joined in. The two of them started filling me in before guests and security broke it up and gripped my attackers. When it went to court in the summer of 2000, the lad admitted everything, apologised and didn’t dispute my account of what had happened. The judge agreed – he was sent down for 18 months. But, the way it was reported, it was yet another of those ‘no smoke without fire’ stories that seemed to dog me. I’m sure it played a part in the way that Gérard Houllier came to look upon me and I have to say, I gave him reasonable cause to think that way – not in so far as I did anything so bad, but I put myself in that situation in the first place. Like I say, the moral of the story is: Just Don’t Go There.
It was horrible, being fit yet being out of action. As I sat there after our final game of the season, watching the Lap of Disgrace, I began to feel emotions up until then alien to me. I was despondent, dejected – not just in the way that footballers feel down about losing a game, this was more of a personal low. When I had been in this situation previously, looking on in despair at a situation I was powerless to affect, it was through injury – an occupational hazard. I would try to take it on the chin and use my disappointment as motivation to get back into the thick of it ahead of schedule. This time, I was out on a limb and it was mainly of my own making. I could moan and gripe about things being taken the wrong way, but I was starting to realise that, all too often, there was a common denominator in all these incidents: me.
For the first time in my adult life I experienced genuine self-doubt and as a result, plummeted into a kind of despair I had never known before. As a kid and now, as a professional, playing football was all I had wanted and all I’d ever known. I was always one of these naturally happy, optimistic characters who instinctively expect things to work out for the best. Now here I was, just turned 24 years of age and for the first time, beginning to doubt myself. At least this time it was within my gift to sharpen up and do something to bring about change. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I knew I had already blotted my copybook with Houllier – he had me down as a disruptive influence, someone who didn’t respect his own talent, let alone his teammates and peers. To me, nothing could be further from the truth and I determined to knuckle down and prove myself once and for all to the new regime.