The English like their lions rough, not smooth. None rougher than Wayne Rooney, a brilliantly gifted footballer with millions in the bank and the mind of a duck. He sleeps with the wrong kind of lionesses, employs an agent who mixes with people who know people who kill people and cannot see a TV camera at a football ground without telling it to fuck off. This is the story of the rise and fall and rise and fall – and who knows what will happen next – of a moral idiot in our age of moral idiocy. He has the fools’ gift of saying the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. He plays brilliantly for his club, Manchester United, but when it really matters for his country his boots of gold turn to dross. But then he does something with a football that makes you roar with pride.
On the pitch, some of the time, a hero. Off it, the centrepiece, with his wife Coleen, of perhaps the most vacuous media soap opera of modern times. His enormous talent with a football and his foolishness without one have created a very twenty-first century monster. But he is not bad bad. And when you reflect on the morality of the people with money who have in their various ways entrapped his gift, none of Wayne Rooney’s follies seem beyond redemption. At times, when you consider how he has risen from the raw poverty of his background in one of the most deprived parts of Liverpool, he is something of a hero. At others, you feel he is a moron with boots of gold.
If he is a hero, he is a very lumpy one. Attracted to his money are a motley crew, of wannabe gangsters, a crooked lawyer, a succession of tarts and hangers-on. Boots of Gold is an attempt to tell his story fair and square. Four years ago Wayne, Coleen and, perhaps most of all, his dodgy agent Paul Stretford did their best to get this book killed. It sat on my laptop, waiting for a publisher, until Biteback Publishing came along. In the meantime, Stretford was fined £300,000 and banned for nine months for bringing the Football Association into disrespect.
Oh dear.
This book is also about others who may have behaved badly – including women who get paid for sleeping with men and men who get paid for chopping up other men. And, funnily enough for a book about a footballer, it’s about something bigger than a game of two halves. ‘The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man,’ wrote the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who never played for Tranmere, let alone Man United. Perhaps more than any male celebrity in the modern age, Wayne Rooney has been surrounded from the word go with the demons of temptation. To begin with, the demons were winning, big time. But not now. Other members of the England team are getting all the wrong headlines.
Not Rooney.
Above all, this is the story of a boy who, despite all the forces pulling him down, rose up to become a hero.
Cynics might say this is a book about an angry potato by an exploding tomato. The cynics would be dead right. My own personal brush with 1’37” of fame – if you don’t know what I am blethering on about, look me up on YouTube – has perhaps helped me understand and empathise in some small way with the pressures on real celebrities. It said in the papers that I said: ‘Don’t make me angry. You won’t like it if you make me angry.’ I never said that. It doesn’t matter. If you’re in the papers, they control you. You don’t control them. Is that unfair? Yes. Can you do much about it? No, not much. Is free speech more important than embarrassing stories – even if they may sometimes be horribly unfair – for celebrities and those who wield power? Yes. If you disagree, go to North Korea. Pyongyang rocks, some say.
One of the themes of Boots of Gold is that we should not judge the man unless and until we have taken a good look at the context, at the story behind the story, at his circle, at our society, at our world and the Big Money that makes it go round and round.
Why does a man with a genius for computing how a ball arcs through a parabola in space-time faster than seven billion people make a king’s ransom for himself? Well, that’s a consequence of our moral idiocy. That’s not his fault.
The life and times of Wayne Rooney make, perhaps, the dysfunctional fairy story of our time – Beauty and the Beast meets Alien v. Predator meets Cinderella-in-Football Boots, not forgetting the Curse of the Black Thong. Perhaps more than any other pantomime nonsense from the beginning of the twenty-first century, it shines a light on our moronic celebrity culture. He and his circle often appear to have been the victim of creatures that creep on the face of the earth – hedge-fund managers, whores, newspaper barons, thugs, reporters, gangsters – in no easy order of virtue.
That’s not his fault, either.
Brand Rooney may be a living symbol of a world that has lost its marbles. In our new age of austerity with the country up to its eyes in debt and millions on the dole, he is paid £4.68 million a year to kick a football and £1.5 million a year to allow his image to grace household-name products – for example, for a teeth-rotting-fat-bulging-belch-inducing-hyper-making-super-sugary carbonated water which rhymes with ‘poke’.
But Wayne Rooney is a great athlete and, not just by the standards of the grim place he hails from, not a bad man. He has come a very, very long way from Croxteth: holidays in the Caribbean with a butler thrown in, now a pad of his own in Barbados, a gin-palace off the south of France, a whole Vroom-Vroom of motor cars, enough to make Jeremy Clarkson, TV’s anti-pope of global warming, snot green with envy, a new-build mansionette in Cheshire – albeit one that brings to mind the architecture of a gas showroom – a good woman as his wife and a son he adores.
Like muck to a farmer’s boots, dirt sticks to Rooney’s gold. One cannot hope to understand the full majesty of the fairy story – Boy becomes footballing star at the age of seven, the myth of Auld Slapper, The Dodgy Agent, the Gangster and his Friend who kept his .45 Magnum underneath his Mother’s Flowerpot and the Leg in the Lay-By – without getting a little bit mucky. After he left Everton and scarpered down the East Lancs Road for a Manchester United shirt and a barrel load of cash, the Toffees had their revenge. The Everton fans chanted:
He’s fat,
He’s round,
He’ll shag your nan for £40.
Rooney!
Stop there. There is not a shred of reliable evidence that Wayne Rooney ever slept with the PVC-clad prostitute baptised by the tabloids as the Auld Slapper. She is one of a number of people in this narrative who emerge, not perhaps brilliantly, but less badly than some of the people poking their fingers and crying ‘Shame!’ So does Wayne Rooney.
As a teenager, pumped full of adrenalin and cash, he did have sex with consenting adults for money. For the record, he paid them. That was foolish but it’s not the worst thing you can do in your life, by a long chalk. Some of the others in this story – a senior police officer whose mind froze at the worst possible moment, a whole slew of newspaper bosses, a thuggery of gangsters and an agent on whose word a criminal court could not rely – come out much, much worse than the Boy Wonder himself. Some people preyed on the young and silly superstar.
That’s not his fault.
For the moment, Rooney appears to be the best striker and also the best money-generator of Manchester United, one of the richest sporting clubs in the world, and also one of the most heavily borrowed against. If the amount of money paid to Rooney seems bonkers, then one should also consider the financial genius of former Florida trailer-park entrepreneur Malcolm Glazer, whose family business bought the club in the mid-noughties by borrowing roughly half a billion quid. The interest on that loan cost the Glazers a reported £60 million a year, so in 2010 they issued a £500 million bond. This is all fancy money talk. In plain English? Well, the Burnley fans did chant about United’s finances while Rooney put one in the back of their net: ‘We’ve got more money than you have …’
You can make a lot of money out of taxing passion – and in the modern world the passion engendered by the most famous team on the planet is a very profitable passion indeed. Perhaps that’s why, since the Glazers took over, seat prices at Old Trafford have gone up, critics say, more than 40 per cent. Perhaps that’s why Manchester United’s corporate bond bid wasn’t based in Manchester at all, but 180 miles south in London’s ever-so-posh clubland, Pall Mall. The man in charge of the corporate side is that modern folk devil, a banker. To anyone who believes in the truth rather than the fairy story of the beautiful game, perhaps Manchester United should more appropriately be named Pall Mall Rovers. That probably won’t be happening any time soon.
But a whole new set of wannabe owners have ridden into the glen, garbed in green and gold – harking back to the club colours of Newton Heath, the old name of the Reds. The Manchester United Supporters Trust, MUST, have little time for what they say is the mountain of debt built up by the Glazers. They want the Glazers out. At the time of writing, MUST has 150,000 fans signed up to its website and on away days the Man United end is awash with green and gold. But wanting something is not the same as having it. Enter the Red Knights, led by United hardcore fan and Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill. Bankers? He knows buckets of them. If MUST and the Red Knights are all they are cracked up to be, this could mark a moment of revolution in British football – the time when the fans stood up to Big Money and shouted them down. If football’s number one fashionista is a guide, then when AC Milan played United, David Beckham looked very fetching in his green and gold scarf.
This space will be watched. For their part, the Glazers’ spokesman has said: ‘Manchester United is the most profitable club in the world.’ The £500 million bond issue was subscribed twice over. The Glazers have said, loud and clear, that Man United is not for sale.
As far as the man himself is concerned, Rooney’s genius on the pitch used to be cast into shadow by his genius at getting into pitch off it. The verdict of one woman he paid to have sex with when he was seventeen before he started dating Coleen – he signed a note, graciously thanking her for the shag – that he can’t write properly and didn’t seem all that bright, was, back then, hard to refute.
He’s changed. The tabloids are still after his head. Or, better, his dick. He’s still got problems in that area but he is showing a bit of improvement. Rooney is not a multimillionaire because he has something amazing inside his head.
That, too, is not his fault.
In our society, his skill is rewarded massively more than people who face the battle of the classroom every morning, who look after the old, the sick and the dying, who save people’s lives, who arrest the nasty bastards, who risk their lives fighting wars started by other people, who put out fires.
That’s wrong but not his fault.
A lot of mush has been written about Rooney and Coleen, some of it even, allegedly, by themselves, and hopefully this book won’t add to it. Wayne and Coleen’s lifestyle choices may sometimes appear like a crude satire on the banality of materialism. The bling – the rocks and frocks and motor cars (some that all but triple the speed limit in Britain) – they spend their money on seems proof, if proof were needed, of Alexander Pope’s sally: ‘One can tell the contempt God holds for riches by the people whom he chooses to give them to.’
Boots of Gold casts a critical eye on all and everyone whose stories have entered Wayne’s World, from a top police officer who told a terrible lie to the Director of Public Prosecutions to a psychotic gangster who chopped body parts up and dumped them across the Home Counties in matching luggage, to Britain’s most crooked lawyer, to a whole gallery of soccer players.
As I have mentioned already, Rooney’s agent Paul Stretford comes in for a measure of criticism in this book. He did charm the socks off Wayne’s mum and dad when he met them in 2002, while Wayne was still contracted to another agent. In that year Wayne Rooney signed a footballing contract with Proactive – the agency Stretford set up – while still contracted to the other agent. That is against the rules of the Football Association.
To make matters worse the Rooneys ended up getting independent legal advice to look over the paperwork from Kevin Dooley. Once upon a time, Dooley had been the lawyer of choice for Liverpool FC’s stars. He was a character, a fixture at Anfield and a legend in his own lunchtime. But by the turn of the twenty-first century, Kevin Dooley was a very bent lawyer in a hurry, under investigation by the authorities for his part in a well-publicised scandal involving other people’s money disappearing into the hands of a conman known as ‘Long John Silver’.
Dooley & Co. had been raided in 2000, then shut down for good by the authorities in 2002. Although Dooley’s firm had been closed down, he still had a solicitor’s ticket and he moved to another firm, albeit working under a cloud. In July 2002 he was tried by the Solicitors’ Disciplinary Tribunal for his role in the Long John Silver scam and while awaiting the verdict, in August, Dooley advised the Rooneys. In September, the bent lawyer was struck off for good. And who introduced the Rooneys to Dooley, one of the most crooked lawyers in Britain? That, according to Stretford on oath, was either him or a colleague at Proactive. Stretford has made it clear he had no idea that Dooley was in deep trouble when the lawyer was introduced to the Rooneys.
Later, Stretford, suspected of muscling in on Rooney, became prey to threats of violence. He sat down at a meeting with people who wanted to take Rooney away from him or get a slice of the Roo action. Also present was a very nasty London gangster indeed. A while later, a large ex-boxer Scouser, accompanied by two Australian cage fighters, burst into a meeting and frightened the life out of Stretford. Whatever you may think about the agent, he didn’t deserve that. You cannot read a description of the boxer-cum-cage-fighters-incident without feeling sorry for the agent. A blackmail trial followed with Stretford as the Crown’s star witness. But the trial collapsed after Stretford gave evidence on the stand which did not stack up. The prosecution told the court they could no longer rely on his word. He continues to deny he had misled the court, blaming the prosecution for bungling his evidence. The Football Association investigated and found that Stretford had given ‘false and/or misleading evidence’ to the police and ‘false and/or misleading testimony’ in eight instances at the trial, including his denial that he had ‘muscled in’ on the previous agent. Stretford appealed and lost and ultimately accepted a £300,000 fine and a nine-month ban. Late on in 2008, after the FA’s Disciplinary Committee had poured a bucket of the brown stuff over Stretford, he and Proactive – now part of Formation Group PLC – parted company.
The posh blokes with wigs on their bonces – they call themselves lawyers – argued about the slicing of the Rooney cake. Wayne Rooney still trusts Stretford and the whole family sticks by him. In the flesh, Stretford appears like a northern clone of Arthur Daley, the entrepreneur in ITV’s Minder – a wheeler-dealer played by George Cole.
To sum up Stretford in four words: easy patter, dodgy charm.
He has an eye out for the main chance, he looks after his own interests, but in the shark-infested world of British football Paul Stretford, just like Arthur Daley, is, on the sliding scale of sharkishness, not so much a Great Killer White, more a dogfish.
The world of Wayne Rooney can be mucky and messy and the money is silly. But let’s note that in Christmas 2009 Wayne and Coleen dumped their fancy holiday plans and stayed at home to visit Coleen’s adopted invalid sister, seriously ill in hospital. Two months later his mum, Jeanette, and dad, Wayne Senior, went in to bat for him in court surrounded by an unease of pin-striped lawyers and, by their lights, they did their boy proud. When Jeanette was invited by a learned friend to leaf through one of the bundles – an enormous ring-binder containing a yawn of legal documents – and it exploded, bursting out its contents, Jeanette started to giggle like a schoolgirl, a refreshing moment of humanity in the bleak courtroom. Wayne Senior and Jeanette and the rest of the Rooney clan may have left finishing school a term too early but on the essential things of life – looking after your family and friends – they’re not bad people. Coleen is gracious and good for him. And Wayne? If your house was on fire and he was passing, you could rely on him to kick the door down, rescue your loved ones and do the right thing. He’s rough as rough can be, but he’s still a hero.
A word about Liverpool because the city, too, is a character in this book. Overseen by the two Liver Birds – the female bird looking out to sea, checking to see whether there are any handsome sailors coming in to port, the male bird looking over the city, waiting for the pubs to open – Liverpool comes in for a fair amount of stick in this book. It can be too big for its boots. Take the Mersey ferry on a sunny winter’s day. Observe the quick brown slosh of the river chopping against the ferry’s bow. To the north, Liverpool Bay and beyond that the Irish Sea and the Atlantic. To the south, Stanlow oil refinery. To the west Tranmere oil refinery, an old U-boat and the empty sheds of the great Cammell Laird shipyard. To the east, Liverpool, the Pier Head dominated by a snazzy new-fangled ferry terminal, and behind that the Chicago mobster era architecture of the Liver Building, empty docks, canyons of brick and concrete and rows of terraced houses. The commentary from the ferry’s tannoy booms: ‘Liverpool’s Maritime Mercantile City has been named as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with the Taj Mahal.’ In Liverpool, you’re never five minutes from something that makes you howl with laughter.
Some of the stories in this book might give you the idea that Liverpool is populated only by unsaintly football players and gangsters and prostitutes – I didn’t make them up – but that wider impression is not fair and not true. I know that because the Mersey runs in my blood, er, so to speak. My mother was born in Liverpool. Her mother, Edith Owen, was a theatrical landlady with a wicked sense of humour. She looked after young actors at the Liverpool Rep like Richard Briers and the lady who played Mavis in Coronation Street. On a film set once doing a story, I bumped into Briers and he instantly remembered my gran: ‘Oh, of course, Mrs Owen. She cooked our wedding breakfast.’ My father was born on the west bank of the Mersey in Birkenhead, and grew up to become a ship’s engineer in the Battle of the Atlantic. I learnt the arguments why Everton was the best team in the world from my uncles, why Liverpool was the best from my Auntie Jean and why Tranmere Rovers was the best from my dad. For some reason I cannot explain, I follow my dad’s team.
True, Liverpool was once an imperial city through which, in the early part of the nineteenth century, passed 40 per cent of the world’s trade – including profits from the slave ships. Those days are long gone. In living memory, Liverpool did its bit in the Second World War, the base from which Britain fought Hitler’s U-boats. In those days the Mersey was full of ships and, come midnight on New Year’s Eve, the whole city would echo with the sound of the ship’s foghorns. The ships have gone too, and the old docks, and for a while it was a city that seemed to be dying.
But the Liverpool I know is full of life and fun. I remember visiting my gran, who lived in Page Moss, not far from the Eagle and Child pub, when I was a schoolboy, and sitting on a bus when a bread van cut in ahead of us, causing the bus driver to stamp on the brakes. Quick as a flash, the bus driver yelled through his open window: ‘Use your loaf!’ I remember visiting Knowsley Safari Park in Auntie Jean’s Mini, and the monkeys ate the windscreen wipers. If New York never sleeps, then Liverpool never bores.
The former Conservative leader Michael Howard, born in Wales but a long-time Liverpool fan, is a very different kettle of fish from Wayne Rooney. He once said that the difference between Liverpool and London is that when you step into a lift in London, when you arrive at the ground floor everybody gets out unsmiling; in Liverpool, everybody gets out laughing.
Boots of Gold pokes fun at Brand Rooney and Wayne Rooney. But it also recognises that celebrities, however moronic they can sometimes be, are human, too. It’s hard to imagine the pressure on someone like Wayne Rooney. If you’re in the public eye, you shouldn’t lose your temper – not several times, not even once. He loses his temper too often and that is his fault. But he is still a great footballer and football is a great thing: it converts the passions and hatreds of tribe, war and battle into a game, which sometimes can be beautiful. And if you lose, no one dies. The challenge for Wayne Rooney has been for him to unlock the genius but lock up the anger inside him.
That way we can be proud of him, all of the time.
But we know he’s only human.