Michael Owen: Off the Record

That aside, Lilleshall was a time of opportunity and growth. I even managed to pick up an FA Youth Cup winner’s medal with Liverpool while I was there. I was on Centre of Excellence forms at Liverpool, and had been attending informal training sessions at the club since the age of 11; it was like a mini-club, always with the same lads. I wasn’t on schoolboy forms with Liverpool at the time, though, because the authorities at Deeside had a rule against boys having formal associations with clubs. Still, Liverpool had a right to request my services from time to time, and on this occasion Keith Blunt took a call from Anfield asking the FA to release me for a game against Sheffield United in the fourth round of the FA Youth Cup. The Liverpool strikers at that time were a few years older than me, and the team had just scored four against Bradford City and five without reply against Luton, so I was especially honoured to be summoned so young. The Liverpool youth side of the time had some very decent players too, particularly David Thompson and Jamie Carragher. John Curtis, who was also at Lilleshall, made the same jump from Lilleshall to FA Youth Cup games, but it was still unusual for someone as young as me, just 16, to be playing in U-18 football. For that reason I was pretty shocked by the club’s request. One of the youth coaches came to pick me up, and that night I slept in digs before playing against Sheffield United in a match we won 3–2. I scored two goals. Then it was back to Lilleshall and full-time training.

The fifth round came, and the phone rang again. This time we played Manchester United at Anfield and I scored a hat-trick in a 3–2 win. That is one of my special memories. Then we beat Crystal Palace in the semis, with me scoring three goals over the two legs. For the first leg of the final against West Ham I was away with England U-16s, but in my absence Liverpool won 2–0 in front of more than 15,000 spectators. I was back for the second leg of the final at Anfield to face Rio Ferdinand and co. in the West Ham defence. Now there were 20,600 in the stands. Within two minutes of the whistle going, Frank Lampard scored and narrowed our lead to 2–1 on aggregate. Then I managed to force in a header, and we scored again through Stuart Quinn. So we were crowned 1996 FA Youth Cup champions in front of a huge Anfield crowd.

If anyone asks me, I still regard that trophy as one of my major honours, up there with the FA Cup. The Youth Cup is the whole focus of junior and academy football, and to be exposed to that experience so young left a considerable mark on my development. Jamie Carragher and I still talk about it to this day.

My main friends from my Liverpool days are Carra, Danny Murphy, Didi Hamann and Steven Gerrard. I think of the other players as mates, but the four I’ve just named are my closest friends. But when I first joined the club everyone seemed to be everyone else’s close pal. In those days I would have struggled to pick out four names for fear of offending the rest. There were fewer foreign players back then, and the squad changed less frequently. Carra, as we all call him, has been my mate all the way through. We started to become close when I was at Lilleshall and coming back to Liverpool for those FA Youth Cup games. He made his debut in the first team a while before me, but then dropped away a bit before returning permanently around the time I joined the first eleven. We’ve been room-mates ever since, and have become closer and closer. I regard him as my best mate at Liverpool.

He’s an amazing character. He’s the resident joker and the social secretary, and makes the club tick behind the scenes. If we have a night out, Carra’s the one to organize it. He’s invaluable for team spirit. He’s very knowledgeable about football, and quite opinionated, too. He eats, sleeps and drinks the game. My relief, when I go in to training, is talking to Didi about horse racing, but if you talk about anything other than football to Carra he’s not interested. He won’t even pretend to be interested. He’ll tell you to shut up. But if you ask him to tell you the starting line-ups for the 1965 FA Cup final he would reel them off. He gets every football magazine and every book. If Sky showed a documentary about, say, the FA Cup glory years, Carra would be glued to it.

I could never be like that. I would burst. When Carra’s injured or suspended, he nearly explodes. Without his football he’s like a time-bomb waiting to go off. When we talk about what he’s going to do when he finishes playing, he’s deadly serious about being one of the supporters, travelling to every away game. He’s a fan through and through who is just living the dream. On a couple of occasions my parents have spotted him in the crowd, at Middlesbrough and Chelsea. If he’s suspended, he’ll go to the game with his friends and sit among the supporters. He keeps it quiet because the manager worries he might have a drink on the way to the match. Carra’s just a diamond like that. Deep down, he might still have a feeling for Everton, who he supported as a boy, but he loves Liverpool Football Club. Above all, he’s a fan of football. He loves the lads and he loves the craic of getting on the team bus to head off for a game.

He works incredibly hard, too. He’s a solid, reliable full-back. We all take the mickey out of him, calling him the stereotypical club pro, Mr Dependable. He believes he’s got more in his locker than that. He gets irate if someone who isn’t playing as well as him gets heaps of praise. Carra’s an unsung hero, there’s no question about that. He’s always the last Liverpool player to be sung to by the crowd, yet he has given as much to the team and the club as anyone currently at Anfield. It gets him down, because he feels like one of them. He sees himself as one of the supporters and asks himself why they don’t love him as much as they should.

But all this, of course, was still to come back in the mid-1990s. When Carra and I met I was still a young dreamer working my way towards a career in the Premiership.

I honestly think I did as much as I possibly could as a schoolboy and youth footballer. I don’t see how I could have added much more to my CV. I think I’m right in saying that only Terry Venables and I have represented England at every age level. I played only one Under-21 game for England, and then went straight into the senior squad. Similarly, I played only 10 reserve games at Liverpool before being promoted to the first eleven. As soon as I left Lilleshall it was bang-bang-bang: A-team, reserves and first team within minutes of one another, or so it seemed.

The issue of my nationality was a theme of my early days in the game. Given my goalscoring record for Deeside Schools – an average of three per game – it was inevitable that the Welsh schoolboy selectors would take an interest and try to persuade me to pledge my allegiance to them. I always knew when a scout was present: I had only to look over to Dad’s usual vantage point to see whether he had company. Nobody would talk to my father during a game because he would make it clear that he wanted to concentrate on the match and on how I was doing. Mum would make all the conversation with the other parents, who wouldn’t intrude on Dad’s privacy in his spot behind the goal. So I had an early warning system: if anyone stood next to my dad, it had to be a scout. To anyone else he would have said, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, I’d just like to watch the game.’ I glanced up often, for reassurance, so no scout could have slid up to my dad without me knowing.

When I was first approached by Wales I was playing for Flintshire schoolboys. I ended up at the national trials, two years younger than I should have been. I didn’t enjoy trials; I never have. You would end up staying in a college for two days, not knowing anyone, very much on your own. But you have to put yourself about if you’re going to get anywhere in football. So I went to a training session, then the first trial, then the final one, not thinking much of it. For the equivalent trial with England a couple of years later it felt like life or death, but with Wales, at the age of 13, I think I regarded it as an elaborate football course rather than as an audition for international representation. I didn’t feel a weight of expectation, which probably helped.

During the final session my dad approached the organizer and said, ‘If you’re thinking of picking him, you should know that Michael’s not going to be available to play for Wales.’ Dad had spoken to Steve Heighway at the Centre of Excellence, as well as to a representative from Lilleshall. The advice was that if I got tied into the Welsh schoolboy system it would prevent me from playing for England at the same junior levels.

In that final trial, I knew it wasn’t going to lead to a place in the Wales team. And the following year, of course, I was selected for Lilleshall after a windswept trial at Chester’s Deva Stadium, which meant that I was away for two years and studying at an English school. Besides, the only option I ever had was to play for Wales schoolboys; it was never going to be possible for me to go on and represent Wales at senior level because there’s no trace of Welsh blood in me, though my surname has Welsh overtones. I’m English, with Scottish ancestry on my dad’s side. I always try to make that clear to people who may wonder whether I turned my back on Wales.

So, in international terms it was England or no one, and I had a really successful youth career. I broke the Under-15 scoring record that had been shared by Nick Barmby and Kevin Gallen, and at Under-16 and Under-17 I also scored plenty of goals. You hear so many rave reviews about young players who are going to make it, but experience teaches us that a lot of them disappear. I’m so pleased that I managed to escape that fate, not to mention proud that I lived up to the promise I showed as a kid.

That aspect of football has changed dramatically even from when I was a teenager. Then, if you got offered a two-year deal and £500 a week you were ecstatic. And you had to be some player to be offered a formal deal at 15 years old. Nowadays, it’s so important not to let a Michael Owen or Steven Gerrard slip through the net that clubs employ a scattergun approach, offering lucrative contracts to just about anyone. In one sense it devalues what it meant when I was a teenager. The grapevine is alive with stories about how much teenagers are being offered these days, and I’m not sure every young player who gets that kind of deal necessarily deserves it. People are getting paid left, right and centre on the basis of promise rather than achievement. In the past, you got the money when you made it to the top; now, there are people getting paid well for being good one year and ordinary two seasons on.

But there will never be any lack of gratitude on my part at how football has changed the lives of the Owen family. And it’s my mum and dad who deserve the credit. Throughout those early years, my parents were a constant presence. Interestingly, the highlight for them, of my whole career so far, remains an Under-15 England v Scotland game in Newcastle on 28 April 1995 in which I scored in a 2–1 win. Right from the restart after Scotland had equalized the ball came to me and I ran all the way through their team to score. What made it so special for them was that all the Owens and the Donnellys had gathered to watch the game. The Donnellys were my dad’s Scottish relatives, and many of them came south to watch the match. He got dozens of tickets and was as proud as punch just to see me in an England shirt in that setting. When the final whistle went I ran up to the crowd, found Dad and hugged him. He was crying; in fact, the whole family was sobbing. It just meant so much to us. It was only Under-15s, so nobody outside the family will remember it, but the Owens will never forget that day. (I should add that Mum has her own private highlight: the day I won the 1998 BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.)

The most meaningful international goal I’ve scored was either the one against Brazil in the quarter-finals of the 2002 World Cup or the one I struck against Argentina four years earlier, but that goal against Scotland in Newcastle was certainly the finest. I may never score one of higher quality. I ran through the entire Scotland team and smacked it into the top corner. I’m not sure the Donnellys appreciated how good it was, but the Owens certainly did.

Long before I signed professional forms for Liverpool, which I did on my seventeenth birthday in December 1996, I did the rounds, checking out some of the clubs who had expressed an interest in me while I was at Lilleshall. I didn’t particularly enjoy that process because I’ve never relished the experience of turning up at a place where I don’t know people. But I always felt comfortable at Liverpool. I’d been there in my school holidays and, of course, had signed Centre of Excellence forms. This was a fairly loose arrangement and didn’t commit us to each other, but already a bond was being formed. I was becoming reassuringly familiar with the players, the coaches and the other staff at the academy. As I said, one of my dreads in football has always been walking into a dressing room where I don’t know anyone. The thought kills me. But, quite rightly, Dad wanted me to accept a few invitations to visit other clubs and extend my education.

I went to Manchester United and spent a week or two there undergoing trials. I always had the impression that United wanted to bring me into their successful youth system. It was when I went to watch a game at Old Trafford that I first came face to face with the man who had shaped the careers of David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and the Neville brothers, Gary and Phil. Plainly I was in an environment where homegrown talent was valued very highly.

It’s here that I have to make a confession that many readers will find odd. I had no raging desire to play for Manchester United ahead of all other clubs, and even in Sir Alex’s formidable presence I couldn’t pretend that I did. Before the match we had the traditional meal in the stand, and then we went to Ferguson’s office. I will always remember him looking me straight in the eye and asking, ‘So, do you want to play for Manchester United?’ The question was so big and so simple that it threw me off balance. I was sitting opposite one of the world’s leading managers, and I wanted so much to become a professional footballer. But I was a kid, and I didn’t want to lie, so something stopped me from giving him the straightforward answer he was seeking. The truth was that I didn’t want to play for Manchester United more than any club in the world. I had no special feeling for them. There was no basic allegiance of the sort a local lad might have felt. So my answer was ‘sort of’, followed by a meandering ‘yes’. I just couldn’t have stood in front of him and said, ‘Oh, yes, Mr Ferguson, I’ve always been dying to play for Manchester United.’

As much as I respected him, I was extremely nervous in his company. It wasn’t a fear of being bullied; more a case of finding the whole routine uncomfortable. It required me to hold conversations I wasn’t ready to have. So, generally, I found myself agreeing with a lot of what managers said – being diplomatic, I suppose.

‘Do you want to be a professional footballer, son?’

‘Yeah, I do.’

That’s pretty much the way it would go. You only really give one-word answers when you’re a kid, don’t you?

I don’t know what Alex Ferguson made of it, but I do know that Brian Kidd, his assistant, had been to watch me lots of times and had got to know my dad quite well. For a while, if United didn’t have a game on the Saturday Brian Kidd would often be on the touchline to see me play. The United scouts stayed in touch and asked Dad to let them know when it was decision time on which club I was going to choose. If I’d been older, I might not have been quite so naive in front of Sir Alex, but at that tender age I was listening to my heart more than my head. I wasn’t old enough to make calculations about who was the biggest club or who might have the brightest future.

I also went for a week’s trial at Arsenal, and then, later, to Highbury to watch a match against Coventry, who won the game with the help of a hat-trick by Mickey Quinn. We watched from one of the new executive boxes at the Clock End, with smoked salmon and other delicacies to tempt us. I’d never seen smoked salmon before, and I’m not sure my parents had either. We were all pretty nervous in that environment. An hour before kick-off Arsenal’s chief scout took me out of the box and down to the dressing room. The Arsenal players were getting ready for the match, and I especially remember Ian Wright making a big fuss of me. As he bounded over, there was a cry of, ‘Hey, how are you, mate?’ Being naturally shy, my response probably didn’t quite match Wrighty’s enthusiasm.

From the changing rooms I was taken to meet George Graham, still the Arsenal manager at that time, who shook my hand and said, ‘I hear you’re a good player, we’d love to sign you.’ But he was speaking, of course, to a child, and I just about managed to mumble, ‘Oh, great, thanks.’ I never went to these clubs to give them a tick or a cross on my list of possible destinations. It wasn’t about finding the right team; it was more a case of my dad wanting me to see these great clubs and meet the people who had made them what they were. It was an educational process, and I didn’t experience it as pressure. I just assumed that the big clubs provided that kind of welcome for every promising young player. Only now do I realize that no manager would waste his time with a kid unless he was really keen to have him on the books. It’s only now that I understand how privileged I was to be given time by some of the most prominent people in the English game.

At Arsenal I didn’t have to prove what I could do. I think I scored four in a game my team won 5–4, but they were already making a huge fuss of me before I actually pulled on one of their shirts. They had a scout in North Wales who must have been sending down glowing reports, because the Arsenal staff couldn’t do enough for me. At some clubs you have to prove your worth in a formal trial. They don’t automatically take the scout’s word, but Arsenal clearly did. So my time there was more about the club showing how much I would be valued and what a terrific youth system they had.

Chelsea was another stop on the tour. I went there for a game against Sheffield United, and this involved another dressing-room visit. I couldn’t believe how small their players were. In those days they had John Spencer, Gavin Peacock and Dennis Wise, who all seemed about the same size as me. Glenn Hoddle was the manager. It would have been stretching even a child’s imagination to believe that this was the start of an association that would take us both to the 1998 World Cup as England striker and manager. When I walked into his office, Hoddle had written my name on a board. He studied me for a while, then said, ‘Look, there are a lot of youngsters we’re after, but as you can see, you’re top of our list.’ Later I did ask myself whether he’d written the list a few moments before I entered his room, or whether I really was Chelsea’s number-one target.

I also went training with Everton. I didn’t get to meet the manager, though Joe Royle, who was in charge at Goodison Park, did phone my dad to express his admiration. (As an ex-Everton player, Dad takes plenty of good-natured stick for allowing me to sign for their arch-rivals. I think he’s got used to being teased as a ‘turncoat’ when he goes back to his old club.) I called in on Oldham and Norwich too, and I trained with Wrexham and Chester because they were local. I did quite well at Manchester City, whose youth development officer had seen me at the early England get-togethers. I went away with City for a week for a tournament in France, which we won. Again, I can’t remember ever meeting the manager, though their representative was the most persistent: he called Dad often to invite us to City games.

So why did Liverpool stand out from this crowd? Three names: Steve Heighway, Hughie McCauley and Dave Shannon. They were the three youth coaches. I’d worked with them on and off for several years before decision day and I liked them all. Steve Heighway had a huge influence on me and is still at the end of the line for a chat. We have a special bond. My parents think the world of him, too. He’s dead straight with the mums and dads of boys at the Liverpool academy. He would never make any false promises. My parents liked that. My academy experience also meant that I was never nervous when I walked into a Liverpool dressing room. I knew all the lads. I like routine and I hate being knocked out of my stride, so I just thought, ‘Why change?’ Another factor was that I’d been away at Lilleshall for two years, and I faced the prospect of having to stay away from home again if I joined a club other than Liverpool. As much as they wanted me to live in club accommodation, they were willing to sign me on the basis that I could commute from home.

I suppose I was fortunate to escape the cycle of grotty pocket-money jobs that go with being a teenager. I was away from home from the age of 14, and when I returned I went straight into being a full-time YTS trainee on £42.50 a week. In that sense I was a full-time footballer from a very early age, and £42.50 would just about see me through so I didn’t go out hunting for spending money. Thanks to Mum and Dad, I was used to not spending my cash on frivolous things.

When it was time to leave Lilleshall, I received my international cap from Jimmy Armfield, one of the elder statesmen of English football, at a graduation ceremony which dispersed our band of brothers across the professional game. I was now ready for life at Liverpool. But another big change was on the way: the full blossoming of my relationship with Louise Bonsall.

We lived about 15 doors away from each other on our estate in Hawarden, which was brand new but not at the mega-expensive end of the market. All the children of the same age from those houses became good friends, and Louise is just two months younger than me. We went to the same infant, junior and then secondary schools. Louise’s dad, John, thought of me as the cheeky kid who was always wandering round the estate with a ball under his arm.

People always try to put a date on when Louise and I started going out together, but this begs the question: when you’re a kid, what does ‘going out’ really mean? When you’re eight, if you kiss someone on the cheek you’re supposedly going out with them. When I was a child, my whole focus was football, so I didn’t have an eye for a girl until I was 13 or 14. Then, of course, your interest in the opposite sex starts to get a bit more serious, and it was then that Louise, through a friend, asked me to ‘go out’ with her. I really don’t know why I said this, but I told her mate, ‘I’ll think about it.’ Maybe I wanted to be chased even more. I had every intention of saying yes because I fancied her right the way through. I’m not sure exactly what her friend relayed to Louise, but, as I discovered later, it was positive.

I heard nothing from her for a week, but during that time Louise must have assumed we were an item. I was playing football in the playground one day and can only have been entranced by the game because all I heard of Louise shouting my name was a faint ‘Michael’. I turned round immediately to see her walking away in a huff, so she must have called my name a few times. I was a bit too embarrassed to chase her, so I carried on with my game. Later, I spoke to her friend and said, ‘Sorry, I didn’t even know we were meant to be going out with each other.’ She replied, ‘Don’t worry. Forget about it.’ And that was that. Things didn’t progress any further before I went off to Lilleshall. If it had, maybe it would have been difficult for me to be away from home for two years.

When I came back permanently I spotted Louise in the local pub when I was there with my brothers. This time I asked a friend of mine to find out whether she was still interested in me. When the answer came back as yes, I went over and asked for her number. But within a couple of days I had to go to Ireland on a pre-season tour with Liverpool. I called her from there, and was very nervous; I just about managed to arrange a date for when I got home. By the time I returned it was quite late, so I had to drop the idea of taking her to a bar in Chester – which I’d come up with in an attempt to seem cool. We went to the local instead and had a nerve-racking chat for an hour before I drove her home and went into the house to carry on the conversation. That’s when we relaxed and began to speak more freely.

Louise was in college at that time, and then she went to work for MBNA bank whose headquarters are in Chester. She stopped working a couple of months before Gemma was born. On 14 February 2004 we became engaged, on Valentine’s Day, which also happens to be Louise’s birthday. We had no fixed date or venue in mind because my football commitments make things complicated. A brief window in the summer is the only clear time for us to get married – preferably in a non-championship year.

Our relationship has been a stable element throughout my adult life. If you start to become a man at 17, then I’ve been with Louise ever since I began that process. She was with me when I had nothing, so I’ve never had the problem that some prominent people have of wondering about my partner’s motives for being with them. The question ‘Is she here just because I’m famous?’ has never arisen because we go back such a long way. We can look each other in the eye and know we’re together for all the right reasons. It’s sad even to have to mention that element, but I do so because it’s one of the many advantages we have.

A lot of people treat me differently just because of who I am. Some of them fall over themselves to be friendly. That’s the way society is. In football and life you encounter a certain amount of falseness. With your girlfriend, your family and your friends, that’s never a problem. A lot of famous people marry other famous people because they understand the process of living in the public eye. Fortunately, Louise and I met before I achieved a high profile, and this was one of the foundations of our marriage in the summer of 2005.

One of the inconveniences we’ve had to put up with is reporters knocking on Louise’s door asking if we are ever going to get married, or split up, and offering her enormous sums of money to spill the beans. I don’t think my dislike of celebrity will ever change. I’d be happy if I could be left alone for the rest of my life. I’m content to get on with my job and my life with Louise, Gemma, my family and friends. I don’t really like the flashing lights, the arm round the girlfriend for the cameras. It’s not my scene.

Having a steady girlfriend has also helped me in my playing career. For a young footballer, the pitfalls start to open up at around 17 or 18. A lot of my time around those ages was spent with Louise. I’m not saying I would have been out drinking or doing things I shouldn’t have been, I just know that I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Stability has certainly helped me as player.

In my eyes, Louise is so down to earth. Like me, she has no desire to be in the limelight. We’ve moulded ourselves around each other. She’s wonderful with Gemma and great to be around – really good company. She has no desire to compete with anyone in terms of fame or wealth and would never show off or boast about new clothes or possessions. I’d like to think that if she was in the players’ lounge talking to the family of someone who had just joined Liverpool, they would come out saying, ‘I’ve just met Michael Owen’s girlfriend and she’s so down to earth. She really made me feel welcome.’ She would go out of her way to make anyone feel included. And she would speak to everyone on the same level. I’d like to think I’m like that as well. I’d like to think that I am everything Louise is.

4 Liverpool: Sugar and Spice (#ulink_48994665-8189-5cb1-a7d2-5456beeff810)

My Liverpool career started in earnest on my seventeenth birthday, when I went into chief executive Peter Robinson’s office to sign my first professional contract. They gave me the classic red shirt with my name and number on, and that was the best part of the ceremony. Never mind the money.

I had always been a number 9, right the way through my FA Youth Cup years, but I was about to say goodbye to the centre-forward’s traditional number. I was number 18 in the full Liverpool squad to begin with, but the following year, when John Barnes was retiring, Ronnie Moran, the assistant coach, approached me one day and asked, ‘Do you want the number 10 shirt next year?’ Robbie Fowler was number 9, and plainly he wasn’t going to be giving up his jersey any time soon, so I moved up to 10. Funnily enough, I went through the same routine with England. Alan Shearer was the resident number 9 at international level and there was no chance of getting that one off him. So it was number 10 twice. And I’ve held it ever since.

Ten is, of course, a special number for a footballer, because everyone associates it with Pelé, Zico and Maradona. But in the English game the number 9 has a particular association. It’s the old symbol of the strong and determined centre-forward. Not that I get too fussed about these things. The number on your back provides no clue as to how many goals you’re going to score. It’s numbers on the board that count.

Peter Robinson had already been telling my dad for some months that I ought to appoint an agent, but at the time I was still only 16 and was initially reluctant to take one on. Still, Peter was adamant. ‘Michael will need an agent,’ he told Dad. Dad then spoke to Simon Marsh of Umbro, who had been supporting me since I was 15. Simon said he knew someone who might be ideal, and suggested both sides meet without knowing who the other one was. So, on my seventeenth birthday, with my new number 18 shirt with Owen on the back, the door opened and Simon and Tony Stephens walked in. My parents were there, too, and they sized up Tony to see whether he was the right man. They had a gut feeling that he was the one for me. Because Tony didn’t know much about me he wanted to go away and do some research, but Mum and Dad stopped him and said, ‘Well, we want you, so we want to know now whether you want us.’ They didn’t like the idea of him going off to think about. So he said yes there and then. Tony already had David Platt, Dwight Yorke, Alan Shearer and David Beckham on his books (this was before he merged himself into the big SFX organization).

Tony was impressive when we began talking to him more. I soon forgot that he had asked for more time to think about taking me on. I knew I could prove to him that he’d made a good decision. Ninety-nine per cent of the public don’t know what Tony looks like. If his picture appears in the paper he kicks himself because he tries to avoid being photographed. He never gives interviews. Most agents can’t wait to shout their mouths off to get business, but he does everything privately and low key. That’s a plus point I really value. His experience at the negotiating table is invaluable too. He has arranged huge transfer deals for Shearer, Platt, Yorke and, of course, Beckham. But that’s not the main reason I’m with him. If ever you have a problem, he seems to be the ultimate authority. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, he’s always knowledgeable. If you’re ever in trouble he knows all the right people. Life’s about contacts half the time, and Tony’s are second to none. He’s very rarely proved wrong. He’ll select deals that fit with your image and he’ll never send you down the wrong line. Shearer and Beckham, for example, were aimed in totally different directions. I couldn’t see Alan doing a deal with Brylcreem or a sunglasses company. It’s all very well saying, ‘It’s easy when you’ve got good clients,’ but it’s still possible to make big mistakes. Sure, Tony has all the right ammunition, but he knows how to use it.

The first contract I signed was with Malcolm Douglas from the watch company Tissot, who I’m still proud to be with. I was really pleased to attract their interest when I was on £500 a week, and I like the people associated with the company. Umbro’s support enabled me to buy my first car. Simon Marsh and Martin Prothero were there from the very beginning and became really good friends and golf partners. Jaguar were another good contact of Tony’s. Alan Shearer joined them first, and Beckham and I then signed similar deals. I’ve been driving a Jaguar since I was 18. I get two free ones every year. Walkers Crisps is another firm I linked up with – and they even named a flavour after me: Cheese and Owen. My first substantial soft-drinks contract was with Lucozade Sport. I’ve also written a column in the News of the World with Dave Harrison, a trusted friend, and had a link with Topps, who make sticker cards for kids. I was with Yamaha for a while, too, and I now have an arrangement with a Japanese suit company, Aoyami, as well as Vivid Imaginations, who make children’s football toys, and most recently Persil and Asda. My dad’s personal favourite is my annual calendar deal with Danilo.