He’s guarded, Michael Owen. Guarded by the ever-present minder from his agents, SFX, guarded, too, at a slightly greater distance, by the people from Tissot, the watch manufacturers who pay him to wear their products, and guarded in any case by a personal preference for avoiding controversy. “I never wanted to be famous for anything but football,” he wrote in his recent autobiography. By way of illustration of this young man’s caution, when I ask him whether he’s been to see a bullfight since his move from Merseyside to Madrid last August, he says no, he has not. Would he like to? “Not really, no.” Why not? “For starters, I’d probably get mortified back home.”
Mindful perhaps that this answer leaves open the possibility that he would like to go to a bullfight, he adds, “It’s not really my game, I’m quite a lover of animals.” Then, perhaps with his host country’s own press in mind, a press that devotes page after page, day after day, to the goings-on at Real Madrid, reckoned by most to be the biggest football club in the world, Owen adds further, “I don’t want to knock their traditions, there must be some skill [involved], everyone tells me there is, but...” But it’s not entirely a fair contest? “No,” he agrees, and then he shuts up.
For most of our hour together, spent on the terrace of the Moraleja golf club in suburban Madrid, Owen is similarly diplomatic. The first few months of his stay had been difficult, cooped up in a hotel with his fiancée (and former childhood sweetheart), Louise Bonsall, and their toddler, Gemma, living off room service and tiptoeing round after Gemma’s bedtime, “whispering for three hours and watching Spanish TV”. But, conscious perhaps that a £200-a-night suite with a sponsored Audi and a sponsored Jag outside and “not a drop of rain since I got here” isn’t the worst experience a person can endure, Owen stays positive. “It forced us off our backsides, really. We explored a bit of Madrid, saw the palace and the museums... It’s a lot easier now we’ve got a house to welcome people into.” His is a large family (two brothers, two sisters) and close, too. “All of them, with partners, come over once a month.”
He hasn’t been picked for the first team as much as he would like, but he doesn’t want to complain about that too much either. After eight seasons at Liverpool, most of them as the main man, his dissatisfaction with being a substitute has surfaced, suitably coded, once or twice in the sports pages. The pattern has been for him to come on late in the game, score more often than not, but rarely make the starting XI for the subsequent game. Other, even more famous names are ahead of him in the queue. But no way is he going to moan about any of this in public. “What can you do? You can’t do anything bar play and do as you’re told.”
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Since he was, what, eight years old, Owen has been the star of every team he’s been in, breaking records, scoring that wonder goal against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup when he was just 18. “If it was all about my ego, I wouldn’t have come to Madrid. I mean, look at the players on display. The fans have taken to me. They even sung my name the other night, gave me a little shiver down my spine.”
The players he’s talking about are Beckham, of course, and also Ronaldo, Zidane, Figo and Raul, the near-enough world XI amassed by Real president Florentino Perez (although many observers think some or all of these stars are now past their best). These so-called “galácticos” start every game, irrespective of form. Owen (being, many would say, rather harsh on himself) puts it starkly: “If I’m good enough, I’ll play, if I’m not good enough, I won’t.” I ask him what he understands by the term “galáctico” and he shrugs and says, “I dunno, some kind of superstar, isn’t it? Isn’t it a galactic, in space or something?” As in galaxy? “Yeah.” And does he consider himself to be one? “Nah, no, no. I leave that title to other people. If people wanna call me one I don’t really give two monkeys. It’s never meant anything in life, has it, what you get called?”
Just occasionally, as in the “two monkeys” remark, Owen shows a glimpse of a more extrovert, carefree soul; of the joker he was by repute at Liverpool; of the striker, as it were, keen to break through any defence, even his own. Once or twice, on more peripheral subjects than his progress at Real, a pungent turn of phrase emerges, as in, “Yeah, tapas, it’s great, in England you order one thing you don’t like and you’re knackered for the night.” No danger that Owen, despite his boy-next-door image, will prove another Ian Rush, that other Liverpool legend who, after one unhappy season at Juventus in the mid-Eighties, returned home reportedly declaring that Italy “was like a foreign country”. I’m guessing that, free of restrictions, Owen is an amusing man, gregarious, a good laugh. “I’ve got this image,” he says, “but I don’t go to bed at 8pm every night and never go out or touch a drop of alcohol. I’m not a saint.”
To be fair, Owen isn’t nearly as tight-lipped as many footballers have become. Nor is he rude. He makes an effort to answer questions, even those with potentially hazardous tabloid consequences. When I ask him about David Beckham, now his clubmate and neighbour, he does not, to my surprise, deflect the inquiry. “I’ve been round to his house a couple of times,” he says. “When we were in the hotel, David and Victoria were phoning us up, saying get out of the hotel and come round. We went round for Sunday lunch once, and Gemma played with their two lads. They all get on great, they’re really nice kids.”
Owen and Louise (their wedding, bought and paid for by a celebrity magazine, is scheduled for the summer) have rented a house a short distance from the Beckhams, not far from where we are now. Is this the Alderley Edge of Madrid, then? I ask, referring to the Cheshire village favoured by footballers working in the Northwest. “There are lots of Alderley Edges in Madrid,” he replies.
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Unlike Beckham, Owen is a reluctant celebrity, happier talking about his game than his life. Here is how he summarises his six months in la Liga so far: “I’ve scored more goals than anyone in the league in terms of minutes played, I’m in a house, starting to learn a new language, I can look in the mirror every day and be proud and pleased with what I’m doing, never complaining about not playing, never rattled anyone’s feathers or shaken the boat, taken it as a man, and we’ll see what happens at the end of the season.” He isn’t overawed. “There are things [Zidane et al] can do where you think, ‘How did he do that?’ [but] I definitely see myself at their level. Some have got more skill than me, but haven’t got my speed or finishing ability or determination.” Especially determination. As one of The Times’s football specialists put it to me: “Owen’s a tough little bugger.”
“My dad taught me that if you get kicked, you don’t milk it, you don’t feign injury, and you don’t go down unless you’re gonna get stretchered off to hospital.” One thing he’s had to get used to in Spain is the theatrical overreaction of some players to any physical contact. “You’re standing there with your hands on your hips for half the game waiting for someone to stop rolling over. A little nudge and it’s a man’s game in England. Little nudge here and it’s a free kick.”
Owen’s instinct, you can tell, is to be candid. For instance, most sportsmen in team games publicly follow the fiction that their personal statistics are unimportant to them. Owen doesn’t bother. When I point out he’s scored 27 times for England, he says, “I think I’ve got one more than that”, and indeed he has, in 67 appearances, an excellent ratio that should, if he maintains it, see him overtake Bobby Charlton’s all-time England goals record around five years from now, when he will still be only 30. If his team loses he is “grumpy”, even if he has scored, but if his team wins and he hasn’t scored “there’d be a part of me saying, ‘Did I do my job?’” He is ferociously competitive. I make the mistake at one point of referring to a “friendly” game of golf. “What’s that?” he asks. “I can’t even let Gemma win at anything, and she’s only 18 months old.”
He was brought up to be competitive by his father, Terry, a former professional footballer himself, albeit a journeyman in the lower leagues. As he made his way through school, club, county and
national junior sides, Owen was only playing for one person. “My dad was the only person I wanted to impress. I struggled to play if my dad wasn’t there, behind the goal I was attacking. I couldn’t concentrate or show off to anyone.” Since his son moved to Madrid, Terry has barely missed a match. “He’s here probably three or four days a week.” Like a lot of successful sportsmen, Owen also has older brothers with whom he willed himself to keep up. “I had to really stretch myself when we went down the park. They were twice my size.”
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As a kid, Owen remembers, his father “would never tell me off if I’d played badly. He just wouldn’t talk to me. It would be the worst thing. I’d prefer to get a kick up the backside or a slap in the face. Them five minutes from the little local park football pitch back home lasted about two hours in the car, or felt that long. He never did it on purpose and he still doesn’t, but if I didn’t play well for England or Real Madrid he would definitely go into his shell. He says he doesn’t mean to, he just wants so much for me.”
There’s no rancour in Owen’s tone, quite the opposite. “Most people grow up and think their dad is the perfect dad. Ninety-nine per cent of the things they say and do and think is from their dad.
I mean, your dad’s your hero, right?” He says he felt no undue pressure from his father. “It wasn’t, ‘You be a professional or else!’ He wanted me to be a decent young fella that had manners and treated people with respect. It so happened I was a good footballer… the biggest compliment I could give to him is what he did with me, I’ll do with my kids. He made me into a real fighter, a winner.”
Made him a gambler, too, in all likelihood. When he played his dad at snooker “it always used to go to a black ball and he always used to miss and put his hands on his head and I’d think it was all real and take 50p off him and it’d be a great night”. If he has a vice as an adult, and if indeed it is a vice, Owen likes to bet: on horses, not only the ones he owns, and, infamously, on card games with other members of England squads. After the 2002 World Cup, a photocopy of a cheque he had written for £30,000 found its way into the papers. “It sounds like an unbelievable amount of money,” he wrote in his autobiography, mounting a forthright defence of his pastime, “but relative to the modern footballer’s income, it isn’t.”
Owen is missing his racing in Madrid. “There’s a couple of tracks but they seem dormant.” He hasn’t been nipping home much, only for England matches and once during the Spanish mid-season break, but “I don’t half miss my house, the horses, the dogs, everything.” His house is in North Wales, near where he grew up, near the close where, as soon as he started earning big money at Liverpool, he bought every member of his family a home. He is also having a place built in Portugal. “We had our house renovated and it was perfect and as soon as the last builder left, I was on my bike. I’m not complaining, I’ll have it for hopefully 60 or 70 years when I retire.” (Assuming he plays on to 35 or thereabouts, Michael Owen is preparing to live an exceptionally long life.)
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He misses the banter of an English dressing room, too. “I like being loud and listening to jokes. But I’m the new boy in class here. I’m not sure what the Spanish sense of humour is.” He’s had some Spanish lessons, one a week on average, but with two games a week, even if he doesn’t play, that’s four days out of seven away from home. “When I get home, I want to see my daughter. I can have a sort of conversation, but it doesn’t slip off the tongue.” He phones his Liverpool friends regularly. “When I speak to Jamie Carragher it’s who are we buying and how are we doing?” He’d been with Liverpool, his only club, since he was 11. “Yeah, it was a big move,” he admits, then shrugs, squints into the sunlight as the camera clicks away and adds, “but not many players get offers from Real Madrid.”