In a drawing room of a Casablanca hotel, Eric Cantona is holding court. Shaven-headed and sporting a beard that is now more salt than pepper, he remains a formidable presence. A Google search says he is 6ft 2in but in person, the size of the man surprises you. He is taller and broader than you might expect. The top buttons of his white shirt are undone. His chest hair is visible. The shirt is paired with some arresting red chinos. He sips a glass of wine — a Moroccan red, Chateau Roslane.
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“Hello, I am Eric,” he says, greeting me with a fist bump.
Could Eric Cantona be any more Eric Cantona? Now 56 years old, Cantona has been retired from football for 25 years, the iconic collar coming down in the summer of 1997 when the man Manchester United supporters had crowned their King suddenly quit professional football at the age of 30.
He has since become an actor, appearing in films, TV dramas and stage productions, eventually earning the respect of the thespian community.
In English football, he retains prophet-like status. And when Cantona delivers a sermon, there is this sense he might just be telling you something you do not know about the world, in the same way we once hoped he would show us something we had not seen before on a football pitch.
On a balmy September evening, he is passionate and headline-making but also thought-provoking.
It is a conversation that takes us to Qatar, where Cantona, who has already said he will boycott this year’s World Cup, offers a view when asked about his former team-mate David Beckham’s sponsorship agreement to promote the Gulf state, which is worth tens of millions of pounds. He rails against the “cheap sheep” of modern celebrity culture, who rarely take risks when asked about social causes.
He gives his opinion on the Glazer family’s ownership of Manchester United, while also revealing, surreally, that the club recently rejected his offer to return to the club as “President of Football”.
“I met him (United’s now former executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward) a few times. But they did not accept it. I still think me or somebody else, they should have somebody for football. It should be somebody from the club, who knows football and the club.” More on that later.
In an interview format, he is exhilarating. He talks how he played, delivering lines with the same imperious flourish he produced on the field.
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He is, also, almost impossible to control. I enter the room with an idea about where the interview might go. I know some quotes on Cristiano Ronaldo would be handy. Cantona on Ronaldo? Imagine the social media engagement. But there are periods where the passion is so pronounced that it becomes unviable to interject. Cantona takes the conversation in far more profound directions, from the Chinese visual artist and pro-democracy campaigner Ai Weiwei to the conflicts in Yemen and Palestine.
Later, over dinner at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant, Cantona’s personality retreats. He becomes a listener rather than a speaker. He says his grandfather once told him we have two ears and one mouth for a reason. While eating tapas, he recommends beaches to visit on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe and insists those of us present should watch the Oscar-winning Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher, where a man strikes up an underwater friendship with an octopus.
Before our interview can begin, Cantona must finish filming. He is in the Moroccan city of Casablanca to shoot promotional material for his travel company Looking FC.
Cantona runs a production company called Canto Bros, along with his two siblings, Jean-Marie and Joel. After making a series of documentaries such as Looking For Rio (2014) and Looking For Manchester (2010), in which he explored the cultural history of football clubs and their cities, the Cantona family ventured into the travel industry.
The concept came when a 33-year-old Moroccan entrepreneur, Charaf El Mansouri, contacted the Cantonas via Instagram to see if they wished to partner with his start-up, Dharma, which builds travel brands for what they call “the passion economy”.
Looking FC launched in January and runs four-day tours of cities including Manchester, Liverpool, Lisbon, Madrid, Milan, Buenos Aires and Casablanca, partially designed by Cantona, in which supporters meet local fan groups, tour stadiums, sample the culture of the place and attend a match.
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And so it is that Cantona is here, encouraged to play a game of word association to help promote his brand on social media, where he is asked to state the first response that comes into his head when presented with a word or a term.
“Press conferences?” He is asked.
“Vultures,” he responds.
Filming is briefly paused as the call to prayer is heard from outside the building.
Cantona muses: “Don’t stop, carry on, this is real life.”
Listen to Cantona’s former team-mates at Manchester United and there is almost exclusively praise for the Frenchman.
Cantona arrived at Old Trafford from Leeds United in the pre-transfer window days of November 1992, after winning the previous season’s league title at Elland Road, and his impact was era-defining. In his debut season, United won their first top-flight title since 1967. Over his five years at the club, United won four Premier League titles and two FA Cups. He scored 82 goals and created 62 more in 185 appearances. During the 1995-96 title race, there was a six-game spell in March and April where Cantona scored the only goal in four matches, a last-minute equaliser in another and the opening goal in a 3-2 win.
Roy Keane, who inherited the captaincy from Cantona, noted: “A lot of clubs can have mavericks but they don’t turn up at the weekend. Eric turned up, did the business and scored so many big goals in big games.”
Cantona’s United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, adored him. Even in his most publicly vilified moments, Ferguson stood by his striker. In 1995, Cantona responded to abuse from the stands at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park by jumping into the crowd to kung-fu kick Matthew Simmons. Cantona received a nine-month ban from the Football Association. He also received a 14-day prison sentence, which was reduced to 120 hours of community service. Ferguson travelled to Paris and rode a Harley-Davidson to secretly meet Cantona and talk him out of walking out on English football.
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Cantona has probably been asked in every interview whether he regrets the kick. On one occasion, he said he wished he had kicked him harder. Cantona told the court Simmons had insulted his mother. It emerged that Simmons had previously attended far-right British National Party and National Front rallies. In 1992, Simmons had been convicted of attempted violent robbery at a petrol station.
This time, before the question of regret is even fully out of my mouth, Cantona cuts in: “I regret nothing; not Crystal Palace, not this interview, not the wine — nothing.”
Cantona’s career before United was littered with controversy.
The French media christened him “Le Brat”. He played for six clubs between 1985 and 1991. In 1987, while playing for France, he was fined for punching Bruno Martini, a team-mate. He was then banned from international football when he called the French coach Henri Michel a “s***bag” — or “a bag of s***”, depending on your translation. At Montpellier, he threw his boots at a team-mate’s face. Then, while playing for Nimes in 1991, he threw a ball at a referee. At his subsequent hearing, he received a ban and responded by calling the disciplinary panel members “idiots”.
Cantona had already publicly stated he would retire when football no longer nourished his mind and so, in 1991, he retired for the first time. He went skiing with his family. An intervention came from Michel Platini, then the France manager, who suggested an agent could take him to England.
“I didn’t want to play anymore in France, or in a Mediterranean country,” Cantona explains. “So I retired and went away from football for two months. But I thought England could be a good country for me. I needed this kind of energy, this kind of football. Football in England was Kevin Keegan, it was George Best. It was rock ‘n’ roll stars.”
In England, Cantona found a connection.
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“At this time I found something,” he explains. “I realised I expected too much from people before. I thought I loved these kinds of people and I wanted them to love me. Then I realised, you become a prisoner of this idea. So I tried to find the solution. I found the words. In French, it is to say ‘Je suis de passage’ (I am in transit). It helped me a lot as a man and a player.”
Cantona’s first experience in England was a trial at Sheffield Wednesday, before signing for Yorkshire neighbours Leeds. He was in Leeds for just under a year but they won the last title of the pre-Premier League era in 1992 and his impression was significant.
One of my colleagues at The Athletic, born in 1992, is from a Leeds-supporting family. His parents decided his middle name should be Eric as a tribute to the Frenchman, only for him to subsequently become arguably the most iconic player of modern times at the club Leeds fans loathe like no other.
Upon joining Manchester United, Cantona decided to live in a hotel. He says he liked the idea of one day being able to hand in a key card and, at the click of the fingers, walking away.
“Just before I left France, I said there was something wrong with me,” Cantona concedes. “I am a bit emotional. I thought, ‘Why doesn’t he look at it like this? Why doesn’t he say that?’. But I started to not care. Living in a hotel, it was a way of being in transit. I arrived in England as someone in transit and it gave me the freedom to express myself. If I had stayed in the same mentality as before, I don’t think I would have succeeded in England. Manchester United understood that very well because they said, ‘If Eric wants to leave, he can leave’.”
Did Ferguson really say that? “I think it was the chairman Martin Edwards.”
Cantona adds: “So if you say that to me, I will stay, because then I feel free. If you say, ‘Hey, Eric, be careful, you have signed for three years, therefore you have to stay for three years’, then I become a prisoner of everything and I feel tight everywhere and I feel bad.” He becomes dramatic, clawing his hands over his chest like an escapologist trying to worm his way out of a straitjacket.
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At Old Trafford, Cantona was indulged by his manager. It was not only over the assault on a supporter. It would be little, everyday things, too. Former team-mate Ryan Giggs, for example, recalled one civic function where the squad were ordered to report in formal black-tie attire, only for Cantona to turn up in a “white linen suit and red and white (Nike) Tiempo trainers”.
Cantona’s lips curl and a little grin emerges. “But — and you can ask the players this — I trained very hard and when I played, I tried very hard, which is the most important.”
Ferguson agreed. I read Cantona one of his former manager’s quotes. Ferguson said: “Nothing that Eric did in matches meant more to me than the way he opened my eyes to the indispensability of practice.”
Cantona nods. “That is the most important. Ferguson is a great psychologist. He knew for me to have a pair of trainers with a suit, it was not a big deal. We would not destroy our relationship for this kind of thing.”
“But,” he says, pausing. “I did not do it for provocation — I did it because I think it looked nice!”
25 years ago today Eric Cantona announced his retirement. Here's a letter that Sir Alex sent him a few mths later. pic.twitter.com/6HJdIBqRVs
— David Scott (@arghkid) May 18, 2022
His brother Joel, also present, lets out a giggle. Cantona is now in his stride. I put to him that United’s young players from that time — Beckham, Giggs, Paul Scholes, the Neville brothers — saw him as a leader.
“Yes, but as I said before, I wanted to feel in transit and I did not want to feel this responsibility of being an example.”
Did he actually want to be skipper?
“No, if you ask me to be the captain, I will be the captain. But I will not say to myself that I am ‘an example’ because I am the captain. If you give it to me, I will do it as well as possible. But without saying to myself, ‘I have to be a leader, an example’.
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“No, because I am not an example.”
Why do you say that? “Because to be an example in the world of football is to be…”
Boring?
“No,” he says, “It is like being a sheep. Sometimes I reacted in a certain way that most people did not like and maybe they were right. But where they were not right is where they were saying, ‘He was an example for millions of people, he cannot react like this’. No, the only responsibility I had was to work hard and win games and if you are an example like people say, it is because you think you are above everything.
“Most of the time I am very humble. I joke that ‘I am a legend’ and all that stuff. Because I don’t care. I know that we live in a circus, so I play. I do the clown, like everybody.”
Is Cantona more self-aware than others of this role? “Maybe, yes,” he acknowledges. “I am just a human being like everybody and sometimes I am more fragile. Thousands of times I heard some things and I don’t react. Then, one day, I react. And if you want me to be an example, I don’t like that. I don’t like this idea that footballers, politicians, singers, famous people, have to be examples.
“I behave the way I want to behave. Nobody will tell me how to behave. Sometimes, like in friendships or with wives or with our kids, sometimes we do not do right. Do you think everybody does the right thing? Do you think you have the secret of the perfect education? You can have three kids, who are all different, with the same parents, but the kids are all different. We say something, two of them hear it. The other is in the room but does not listen. We do not have the secret. And it is good. I love this uncertainty. We are not like robots. I am not a robot, I am just a human being. I can be fragile.”
Increasingly, I suggest, footballers are expected to be robots. It is rare for them to be open like Cantona is.
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“For decades, it is like this,” he argues. “You know when I sign a contract with a brand, they say to me there is a clause (in the contract) and I cannot give my idea about politics. So I say, if you want me to sign, then you forget that clause. You want to work with me? Why? Because of who I am. You know how I am. Everyone knows how I am. But you want to work with me and want me to be somebody else? No.
“Most people accept this, because they are ‘examples’. They are cheap examples, little examples.”
He impersonates a sound a sheep might make. “Or a cheap sheep example! There are a lot of cheap sheep examples. in football, like everywhere….”
Cantona continues: “I heard recently people say footballers have to be engaged socially, to be active, like artists. But artists — 90 per cent of them are active in easy things, with no risk at all. Where it is risky, you have nobody, so they are all cheap sheep. They are just in the business like everybody. They say they are against this or that but it is always the easy thing. Today it is the climate, which is good, but you think you are (somebody) really engaged and who takes risks because you say, ‘We have to be careful about the climate’?.
“Now, Ai Weiwei (a visual artist who has criticised the Chinese state). Yes, that is somebody strong. Banksy (the graffiti artist) is somebody strong. You have people in some countries who are really engaged, where it is risky for their lives. We made some documentaries about the rebels of football but when I say rebels, I do not mean the guys with tattoos and gel in their hair. They are fake rebels. I mean the one who puts their life in danger, who fought for democracy, or like Carlos Caszely in Chile (a footballer who opposed the Pinochet dictatorship). They took his mother, they tortured his mother.”
“Am I right?” he asks, in a way that suggests it would be wise for me to nod.
He concludes: “Everything is easy. They wait, they wait, they wait, and then they say, ‘Now I can go and say something’. There are plenty of things you can fight for today. So, fight for Palestinians. Fight for Yemen. Fight against Saudi Arabia and the countries who sell weapons to Saudi Arabia. Speak about that.”
In January 2022, Cantona took a bold public position of his own. He declared his intention to boycott this year’s World Cup in Qatar.
He said: “It’s only about money and the way they treated the people who built the stadiums, it’s horrible. And thousands of people died. And yet we will celebrate this World Cup. Personally, I will not watch it. I understand football is a business. But I thought it was the only place where everybody could have a chance.”
He suggests he might ride a motorbike around South America instead of watching the tournament, or spend time with young kids in poor areas of the world and kick a ball around.
Yet he says it would be wrong to expect today’s players to turn their backs on the tournament.
He says: “If you have a player who says, ‘I will boycott the World Cup’, you say, ‘Bravo’. But you cannot condemn a 20-year-old player, who has a 10-year career, who lives in a world surrounded by people from football 24 hours per day.”
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His voice rises: “But do speak about the federations, speak about the politicians, who have the power to say, ‘No, we do not go to the World Cup’. We cannot be disappointed if players don’t want to boycott the World Cup, because at the top, the politicians, the presidents, the federations, the ministers…”
The power, I suggest.
“The real power, everywhere in the world, they have the power to boycott it. It is too easy to say the players.”
What about the former players who are not only attending the World Cup but actively promoting the host country? One of Cantona’s former team-mates, David Beckham, is a paid ambassador. I ask if it is something Cantona would do.
“I would not do it at all. I do completely the opposite. In January 2022, I started to say that. Maybe I was the first one.
“But I am free to do it. And of course, an ex-player paid to do this kind of thing…”
He pauses, for almost 10 seconds, almost as though his mind is deciding whether he ought to go further.
“It could be they don’t know what has happened there,” he counters. “Or, if they know it, I think they did wrong. I think they made a big mistake.”
He repeats himself, for emphasis: “A big, big mistake.”
As for the France national team, which he once captained, he says he does not pay much attention. I frame the question differently, highlighting a recent quote from another former France international, Patrice Evra, who said: “When you play good and win, you are celebrated as French; when the team lose, you are singled out as Senegalese.”
Cantona has previously made a powerful documentary in which he traces the immigrant roots of leading French footballers such as Zinedine Zidane. I ask whether progress is being made in the way footballers from such communities are framed by media and supporters.
He says: “France, for more than 10 years now, since the financial crisis in 2008, since the COVID-19 pandemic, these countries become more nationalist. Not only France. Many countries. Britain. Germany. Hungary. Italy. Spain. Everywhere. The danger is that if we go back to 1929, after the crisis (of the stock market crash), in 1933, Adolf Hitler was elected and it was a world war. Little by little, we become more and more nationalist, that everything is the fault of the foreign guy, of the immigrant.
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“This is because nobody will accept responsibility. So it is always framed as the fault of the ‘weak’ ones, so it is always the fault of immigration. When the country is good, we say that is because of everybody. But when it is the bad times, it is always the fault of immigration.
“After that, it is world war. It seems today that big countries have an interest to have a world war. But instead of learning from the past, we completely reproduce what happened in the past. I hope there will not be a world war. I hope so. But we are closer and closer and closer every day.”
On the weekend before this encounter with Cantona, I call my uncle, a lifelong United supporter. Cantona is his hero.
Less than a minute after being told about this interview, my uncle recalls a scene in his own living room, 26 years ago.
It is the morning after one of Cantona’s most famous goals.
On December 21, 1996, Cantona turned sharply, beat three Sunderland players, combined with Brian McClair, and impudently chipped the ball, almost in slow motion, over the head of the goalkeeper. The celebration, chest puffed out, his hands held out, basking in the adoration of Old Trafford, is almost as iconic as the goal itself.
Most players walk into Old Trafford and supporters wonder whether he is big enough for the stage. But Cantona flipped that notion on its head, almost asking whether the stage was big enough for him.
Back in my uncle’s living room, he watched the repeat of Match Of The Day the following morning. He took out his camcorder and filmed the small television screen and then the reaction of his baby son, then six months of age and dressed in a United shirt and writhing around on the sofa.
Later, during dinner, Cantona watches the footage and appears a little emotional and affected. He asks for it to be sent to his wife (Cantona only has an old Nokia phone, the kind most of us disposed of decades ago now). Again, could Eric Cantona be any more Eric Cantona?
I ask, though, whether he realises how special the moments he created remain to those who observed him — how instantly they can be recalled, where a person was, how they felt, who was present.
“We all work hard to create this kind of moment,” he says. “But if you live this moment in an empty stadium, it is not the same. So if I gave something to the fans or something memorable, they also gave me something memorable. The celebration I did was this — taking the energy of thousands of people.”
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What about that celebration? “I never thought before that I would celebrate a goal like this. You see some players who always celebrate in the same way but a goal is a unique moment. I wanted to give a place to instinct. Every moment in life is special and unique. You cannot repeat it. Now, for example, I do theatre and I go on stage. I go with the same words but one night and the night after are not the same. Sometimes you find a moment you love and you want to replicate it the day after and it does not work. Or it works, but it is different because the people in front of you are not the same and the energy is not the same.”
Cantona says that acting gives him a “great feeling”.
“But it is not equal,” he warns. “Football is unique, the intensity is unique but when you retire from football, you can live with your memories and you become a prisoner of your past, or you have new passions, and I am lucky that people still want to work with people who want me to express myself. I depend on the desire of these people.
“I am very happy. I still live great moments, in another world, which is much better I think than becoming a manager or staying in the world of football. I don’t know if it is better. I admire Ryan Giggs or Paolo Maldini, who played in the same club for 20 years as a professional. I admire them because me, I cannot do it, I get bored very quickly, maybe because I have other passions.”
In his new life, Cantona lives in Lisbon with his second wife Rachida Brakni, who is an actress, along with their son Emir (translation: The Prince) and daughter Selma. Cantona has two other children from a previous marriage. The couple decided to move to Lisbon after an enjoyable holiday in the Portuguese city.
With Cantona’s blend of movies, television dramas, documentaries and advertising campaigns, football is unlikely to ever reclaim his services. He says he does not watch much football these days but when he does, “it is Manchester” and for Cantona, there is no need to state whether he means United or City.
I ask Cantona’s view on the United owners, the Glazer family, whose highly leveraged buyout and bumbling management of the club have exasperated supporters.
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“Last year, I proposed to the club to change their way,” Cantona says, explaining how he met up with the club’s former executive vice-chairman before Woodward left his post at the end of 2021.
Cantona says: “Ed Woodward is great at marketing but not great at football. United should have a chairman and then they should have a president of marketing and then a president of football, who is in charge of all the decisions in football. So I proposed to them that I should be president of football.”
It is not immediately clear whether Cantona is being serious. I seek clarity. You suggested yourself? “Yes.”
So, you said this to Woodward? “I met him a few times. But they did not accept it! I still think me or somebody else, they should have somebody for football. It should be somebody from the club, who knows football and the club.”
I point out the club do now have a football director in John Murtough. “Yes, but it is not a president of football.
“Since Ferguson retired in 2013, the club doubled their revenue but didn’t win anything (United have won the Europa League, FA Cup and EFL Cup since Ferguson but not a title or Champions League). So imagine if you succeed in football and also have great people in marketing, then instead of doubling the revenue, then you would treble it. But they do not understand that. The club spends a lot of money. But you have to spend it well.”
Cantona’s former team-mate Gary Neville has said it is time for the Glazers to go.
“Yes, maybe,” he says, hesitating slightly. “I thought about something also. This club has on social media hundreds of thousands of fans. If they create an application today saying that 50 per cent of the club can be sold, then why should you have one person or two people who invest £500million? Instead, you can have hundreds of millions of people who spend 10 euros, 20 euros, 100 euros, 1,000 euros, and 50 per cent of the club is owned by the real fans of Manchester United.
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“With social media now, you would do that like this.”
He clicks his fingers and then, with comic timing, he flaps his arms in the air.
“But they did not want me to be the president of the club! They did not want me! And the fans have to know that I went and travelled to Manchester to give them the opportunity to succeed in the next decades. And they did not want it.”
OK, come on, Eric. Be Honest. Do you think you would be the best person to do that job?
“I think I…” He is smiling. “I am smiling because I love what I do now in my life. I never earned so much money, even in football. I do many things I love, only things for which I have passion. But first I met Sir Alex Ferguson, to say this to him and to know what he thought about it. And he thought it was a good idea. He introduced me to Mr Woodward.
“I felt guilty not trying to help this club to do better. I said to myself, ‘For five years I will put everything on hold and concentrate 100 per cent on that’. And if I concentrate 100 per cent on that, then I can tell you, I would do it very well.
“Now I feel good with myself. I tried. So nobody in my family can say I did not try anything to help United. They do not want it. That’s their choice. But I tried it.”
Cantona is not one of the former players who is paid by United to be an official club ambassador.
“To be an ambassador of the club you have to do the promotion of the club. And me… well, if I want to say something, I will say it. Then the people are not happy. Most of the things I say are great things but if I think something that the people from the club do not like, then I am free to say it. As an ambassador, you lose your freedom.”
Cantona is now talking once more about his travel business.
“The trips are about going inside the passion of football, understanding the story of a club, how football is used, then how you live your life. We were speaking about my favourite football stadiums earlier but now all the stadiums are called Emirates or Allianz. These stadiums lost the soul and history of the club, like Arsenal and West Ham. I played at those old stadiums, like Highbury and Upton Park. I spoke with some Arsenal fans and they hate these (new) stadiums. These fans lost the soul of their clubs.
“Fortunately, Old Trafford is still Old Trafford. Anfield is still Anfield.”
For now…
“But can you imagine Old Trafford becomes a new stadium called by a brand? If one day they do that, I am sorry but I am not a fan of United anymore. And I quit football forever!
“But please, don’t call this stadium Nestle, or Amazon, please. Old Trafford is Old Trafford.”
(Top photo: Looking FC)
