A couple of days later, in an interview at Leeds’s training ground, Jonathan Woodgate was still thinking about the Hierro goal, and that, with tighter marking, he might have prevented it. That day Woodgate went on to talk about how he admired the then Real Madrid captain’s qualities as a defender. He said then that he wanted to play outside England. Yesterday, as he was presented as a Real Madrid player at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, he told reporters (in Spanish): “It’s a dream.”
There so many Englishmen now joining Madrid that Woodgate would have known the drill. Alfredo Di Stefano, the club’s honorary president, handed Woodgate his white No 18 shirt, and the club’s president, Florentino Perez, gave him a short eulogy and set him a challenge. “We analysed all the options available to us and without a doubt Jonathan is the correct one,” said Perez. “He ’s a magnificent player, to many people the central defender with the greatest potential in Europe. He knows he is now at a club where the challenge is constant and he will have to provide an example on and off the field. He has our confidence, and we expect him to respond with complete dedication.”
Madrid don’t tend to roll out the red carpet for defenders in quite the way they do for attacking footballers, although of the two young Englishmen to join Madrid this summer, there is no question about which one the club coach, Jose Antonio Camacho, pushed hardest to recruit.
Woodgate’s arrival covers a position, centre-half, where Madrid have been found wanting since Hierro left 14 months ago. They conceded 54 goals in their 38 league matches last season, and that with a goalkeeper, Iker Casillas, who was one of the outstanding players of the campaign. The club had already spent more than £14m in the close season buying Argentinine centre-half Walter Samuel from Roma. Woodgate, who cost £13.5m from Newcastle United, can expect to partner Samuel in Camacho’s first XI.
His arrival takes to three the number of England internationals at the most decorated club in the game’s history — Michael Owen joined a week ago and David Beckham is beginning his second season with Madrid — a fact that ought to raise a “wow!” for a number of reasons. First, an English trio at a major club outside the British Isles is unprecedented in the post-Bosman period, when there have been no restrictions on the number of European Union players appearing for EU clubs. Even in eras when British players were moving regularly to Serie A, or France, Spain and Germany, they seldom did so in such concentration. Gary Lineker shared an employer, Barcelona, briefly with the Scot Steve Archibald and the Welshman Mark Hughes in the 1980s; David Platt and Des Walker coincided at Sampdoria in Italy, as did Chris Waddle and Trevor Steven at Olympique Marseille and Glenn Hoddle and Mark Hateley at Monaco. But three Lions in the same foreign shirt? It is unusual.
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The same agency negotiated the deals that Beckham, Owen and Woodgate signed with Real and will continue to advise Owen and Woodgate, but Madrid don’t sign players simply because they know how to reach them on the telephone. It says something for the growing strength of the Premiership, which has become an extravagant importer of leading talent, but not much of an exporter.
Since 1992, the only England internationals to have left home to play at the peak of their careers in the big European leagues are Paul Ince, at Internazionale, and Steve McManaman, who left Real Madrid after four seasons there last summer. English footballers are still considered expensive, and they have not always been thought adaptable.
Madrid, however, are insatiable collectors — in Ronaldo, Zidane, Figo and Owen, they have four European Footballers of the Year — and of course they hoard prizes, nine European Cups to start with. Under the presidency of Perez, they are aggressively international, too, keen to increase their support base well beyond their own borders. Beckham’s arrival last June was celebrated by the Madrid president, because, among other things, he was a way into what he called “the Anglo-Saxon market”. That is not to suggest Perez imagines as many white No 18 shirts are going to be worn in the streets of Middlesbrough, where Woodgate comes from, as Beckham’s No 23 in the streets of London or Tokyo. But a growing interest in “Británico Madrid”, as someone called them yesterday, from a country with a strong football culture, is good business.
To feel they have done good business with their latest asset, Madrid will want Woodgate to be available for them more than he was at Newcastle, where injury restricted him to only 37 appearances in the 18 months between his leaving Leeds for about £9m and the move to Spain. He passed his Madrid medical on Friday and said yesterday: “I hope I’ll be ready in two or three weeks, and I want be involved in all the competitions. I want to show I’m a good footballer.”
At his Bernabeu presentation, Woodgate recalled his admiration for Hierro. “I am joining a club of special players, from now and in the past, such as Fernando Hierro and Raúl,” he said. Woodgate was asked about the lowest point in his career, a 2001 conviction for affray. “I was involved in a brawl in England,” he said. “It was a mistake I made, a very hard phase of my life, but now I think I have become a better person and a better player.”
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The defender said he had heard of Madrid’s interest only three days earlier. “My agent called me on Wednesday morning to tell me. I could not believe it. I was speechless, with the receiver in my hand, overwhelmed.” But with Beckham and Owen for company, he hopes not to be speechless in the dressing room for too long.