Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  Michael Browne puts the finishing touches to The Art of the Game.

  Acknowledgements

  My task as a biographer was two-fold. I first had to assemble and sift through thousands and thousands of pages of documentation on my own, which I did by reading through every single piece written about Cantona in the French and English publications I believed to be the most trustworthy,57 starting from his professional debut at Auxerre, when he was just seventeen. collating all the interviews he’d given from 1987 to the present day; and watching every video of Éric in action that I could get access to. The staff of the British Library in Colindale must be thanked for their willingness to carry hundreds of rolls of microfilm throughout the best part of two years for my sake, and so should my colleagues at France Football, who bore my constant questioning with fortitude for an even longer period.

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude in that regard to my French fellow journalists, three of them in particular: Erik Bielderman, Jérôme Cazadieu of L’Équipe Magazine (whose superb 2007 ‘Cantona Special’ provided me with vital first-hand material) and Jean-Marie Lanoé of France Football. Their generosity in passing on and allowing me to use the information they had at their disposal I’m not sure I can ever repay. This was a rewarding exercise: a great deal that appeared mysterious at first found a ready explanation in contemporary accounts, provided one was prepared to search long and hard for a credible source – and spend the time and effort to check it. Most of this material has never been made available to the British public before. Cantona, despite his reputation of being a silent, brooding type, was remarkably approachable and forthright with French reporters until the long ban that was imposed on him in the spring of 1995, but the British tabloid press had yet to acquire its present habit of cherry-picking ‘exclusives’ in foreign publications. The translations are mine; the awkwardness of some of Éric’s statements is more often than not a fair reflection of his idiosyncratic speech patterns rather than that of my own limitations, however.

  Once I had established a factual foundation for my work, I approached many of the most most significant protagonists in Cantona’s story, who were not always the most famous ones. As they number into the hundreds, I hope to be forgiven if I single out Gérard Houllier, Guy Roux, Didier Fèvre, Henri Émile, Célestin Oliver, Gary McAllister and Sir Alex Ferguson, as their testimonies (Sir Alex’s in person on two occasions, but mostly through the conduit of Erik Bielderman, with whom he enjoys a truly unique relationship) provided the spine of much of this work. I should also add that several of my interviewees asked for their anonymity to be preserved, and that I respected their wish: their discretion had purely personal motivations, and, crucially, none of them used it as a licence to blacken Éric’s character – in fact, the contrary was true.

  Thus armed, I threw myself into the actual writing of this biography. Though French, it is in English that I composed it, and as I’m neither Joseph Conrad nor Vladimir Nabokov, it was fortunate that I had, in Richard Milner and Jon Butler, two editors of tremendous skill and sensitivity, as unstinting in their encouragements as they were in their hunt for gallicisms. Foreigners tend to ripen their adopted language to the extent that a mouthful of it can tease the palate, and another one make you feel like retching (as this sentence illustrates). Thanks to them, and – in the last furlong – to Natasha Martin and John English, the worst was averted. Jonathan Harris and David Luxton, without whom this book wouldn’t have existed in the first place, showed me that ‘agent’ needn’t be a dirty word, and can sometimes be synonymous with ‘friend’. Photographer Isabelle Waternaux didn’t just provide me with a magnificent portrait for the cover of this book, but also with precious reminiscences. Last, a merci to Jonathan Wilson, the sharpest of readers, who spared me a few blushes by pointing out some factual errors which would have greatly endangered what standing I enjoy in the press box had they gone unnoticed.

  1 Galtier played for a number of professional teams from 1985 to 1999, including Lille, Nîmes and, twice, Marseille, and finished his career holding together the defence of Liaoning Yuandong, in China. He then became the most trusted assistant of manager Alain Perrin, following him from club to club – among others Portsmouth FC, Olympique Lyonnais and, at the time of writing, St Étienne. Galtier was also a key member of the French under-21 side that gave Cantona his only international honour, the European Championships of 1988.

  2 This title, Un Rêve modeste et fou, is taken from Louis Aragon’s collection of poems ‘Les Poètes’, and was set to music by the French communist/romantic troubadour Jean Ferrat. An approximate translation of that stanza could read, with apologies to Aragon, ‘To have – maybe – been useful/This a humble and crazy dream/It would’ve been better to silence it/You’ll lay me in the earth with it/Like a star at the bottom of a hole’.

  3 That book, published in France by Robert Laffont in 1993, written with the help of ghostwriter Pierre-Louis Basse, was hastily translated into English a year later under the title Cantona: My Story. Éric himself seems to have shown little interest in its preparation, and, as the deadline loomed, two members of his entourage were drafted in to fill in gaps in the text. In the first two pages, the reader was informed that Time [sic] Square was in London and that Gérard Philipe (died 1959) was France’s main screen idol at the time of Cantonas birth (1966). Other factual inaccuracies include the date of Cantona’s signing his first professional contract with Auxerre.

  4 Jean-Marie, the least gifted of the three brothers, became a businessman and later rejoined the footballing world, but as an agent. He still looks after a number of French professionals, the World Cup-winning goalkeeper Fabien Barthez among others. Joël managed to carve a peripatetic career with Olympique Marseille, Stade Rennais, FC Antwerp, SCO Angers, Ujpest and . . . Stockport County, a point at which his story and Éric’s become entangled for good, as you will see.

  5 Prunier would be Cantona’s teammate at Manchester United in the 1995–96 season; see page 414.

  6 AJA had finished third in the league in 1983–84, and, having drawn Sporting Lisbon, exited the UEFA Cup at the first hurdle.

  7 On 28 November 1995 (after an unsuccessful appeal), Tapie was sentenced to a two-year jail term (sixteen months suspended) and a FF20,000 fine for ‘subornation of witness’ in the ‘OM-VA affair’, which I’ll come to in greater detail later in this book. He served six months in prison. Two years later, he was convicted of embezzlement by the Tribunal Correctionnel de Marseille on 4 July 1997, and sentenced to a three-year jail term (eighteen months suspended). The appeal court of Aix-en Provence reduced the sentence to three years (suspended) and a FF300,000 fine on 4 June 1998. Last, in December 2005, having been found guilty of tax evasion (‘fraude fiscale’) he was sentenced to a three-year jail term (twenty-eight months suspended) by the 11th Chamber of the Tribunal Correctionnel of Paris.

  8 There was also a heart, as Tapie showed on the darkest day in OM’s history: the tragedy of the Stade de Furiani, in Corsica. On 5 May 1992, a couple of minutes before a French Cup semi-final between SEC Bastia and Marseille was supposed to kick-off, a makeshift stand which had been erected to accommodate an extra 10,000 spectators collapsed, causing the death of eighteen people (a number of journalists among them), and maiming dozens more for life. The OM chairman spent the evening tending the injured and administering first aid when needed. One of the victims he helped had swallowed his tongue and, without his intervention, would have died that night. The man who owed his life to Tapie was my friend Jean-Marie Lanoé.

  9 French international defender, who was part of the gold-winning French team at the 1984 Olympic Games and would be Cantona’s teammate at Bordeaux.

  10 In the 31 games they played together for France, Papin scored 22 goals, Cantona 10. But Éric provided 3 assists to JPP, and only received a single one from him.

  11 PSG finished a mere three points behind OM in the end.

  12 The Cantona and Paille transfers were financed – for the most part –
by the City Council of Montpellier, then under the control of local Socialist panjandrum George Frèche, who topped up the FF10m grant the club received each year with another FF4m of taxpayers’ money. The County Council of the Hérault département chipped in with an extra FF3m in exchange for a renaming of the club, previously known as Montpellier-La Paillade, and Nicollin himself plucked FF4m from his company’s bank account (a company which specialized in the collection and recycling of domestic and industrial waste in the region and, yes, derived much of its income from the patronage of various institutional bodies). Such municipal involvement in French football was common at the time and entirely legitimate. It was a political gamble as much as anything else, not that Éric and Stéphane were aware of it.

  13 ‘5m Francs were set aside each year to buy matches in the French League and the European Cup, that is 20m Francs from 1989 to 1993, including European games against Athens and Sofia.’ This is a verbatim excerpt from the report submitted on 21 November 1995 by the prosecution service of Aix-en-Provence’s Court of Appeal to the French National Assembly, in order to lift Tapies parliamentary immunity. This document was leaked to French magazine L’Express in December of the same year. Even though they were raised in the courtroom, it should be stressed however that neither Tapie nor his clubs were prosecuted specifically for this alleged infringement.

  14 One of these is worth a mention: a 2–1 victory over West Germany in February 1990, in which Éric scored the decisive goal. The Mannschaft would, of course, be crowned world champions in the summer. What could France have achieved, had Cantona not been suspended for over a year in 1988, when qualification was still within their grasp?

  15 Eydelie (whom Walsall followers may remember, as he briefly wore their club’s colours in 1998) spoke to L’Équipe Magazine in January 2006, and later wrote a best-selling ‘confession’ (Je ne joue plus – I’m not playing anymore) in which the doping allegations (and numerous others) were reprised with a wealth of detail, including a full account of how, according to Eydelie, all OM players had to stand in line to receive an injection before the 1993 European Cup final, won 1–0 against AC Milan. Bernard Tapie strenuously denied the allegations, and immediately instigated a court action, which concluded that Eydelie’s assertions could not be considered libellous. Tapie lost his appeal against the verdict in February 2008. Other doping allegations were also made in December 2003 by former Marseille player Tony Cascarino in his regular Times column, in which he also wrote that chairman Bernard Tapie ‘made it clear my place in the team depended on me partaking’.

  16 Both the European Champion Clubs’ Cup and the European Championship of Nations were born out of initiatives spearheaded by L’Équipe, France Football and the French FA, in 1955 and 1958 respectively.

  17 Éric’s love of tauromachy inspired a series of photographs, which he exhibited in Marseilles in October 2008.

  18 The actual fee was £999,999, as Forest boss Brian Clough didn’t want the £1m tag to go his recruit’s head, or so he said. When various taxes had been added to this sum, however, Francis had cost Forest over £1.1m.

  19 Cantona played alongside Graham Hyde, Nigel Worthington, Chris Bart-Williams and Gordon Watson against an American touring team, Baltimore East. He scored a hat-trick.

  20 The club had found him a discreet, somewhat ramshackle house in this leafy but unremarkable suburb, where West Indian and Pakistani immigrants lived side-by-side with dyed-in-the-wool Yorkshire natives. The very ordinariness of his surroundings pleased Éric, who had no taste for the trappings of footballing success, and the friendliness of his neighbours helped to forge a genuine bond between the exile and his adopted city. In fact, Roundhay remained the Cantonas’ base in north-east England long after Éric had been sold to Manchester United.

  21 This was an adaptation of an earlier (and much less famous) chant, originally created in honour of Manchester United’s Irish defender Paul McGrath. For Mancunian supporters, singing it for Éric was a re-appropriation, not a theft.

  22 A local dance music outfit, Ooh La La, used a sample of Éric’s ‘love’ speech on a single which achieved moderate success in the Leeds area.

  23 This was the Yugoslavia of Prosineki, Savievi, Panev, Boban and Stojkovi, potentially one of the greatest sides to have emerged from beyond the Iron Curtain, which many felt would have gained European supremacy just as Red Star Belgrade had done at club level a year previously.

  24 I’ve since wondered whether Éric was familiar with his hero Diego Maradonas famous quote deriding Real Madrid’s obsession with star players: ‘You need someone to carry the water to the well.’ One sees what he meant by that, but only just.

  25 Michel Platini left his position on 2 July, the day FIFA announced that France had been awarded the privilege of hosting the 1998 World Cup. Houllier, until then Platini’s assistant, officially succeeded him a week later.

  26 Of the 20 goals Éric scored for France (in 45 games), only one was scored from the penalty spot or from a direct free kick.

  27 ‘He’s French, he’s flash/He’s shagging Leslie Ash/Cantona’ was an especially popular chant with Manchester United fans seated in the Stretford End. The Leeds fanzine Square Ball published a photo-montage of Éric in the shower, wearing bra and suspenders, and linking the whole thing to the Leslie Ash rumours: ‘Mrs Chapman [ . . .] noticed that her underwear drawer had been tampered with and found several ladders in her fishnet stockings. Suspicious, Lee placed a hidden camera in the Chapman bathroom and was astonished when confronted by the photograph shown here. This proved too much for the Eiland Road players who approached manager Howard Wilkinson demanding Cantona’s immediate removal.’ A cartoon published in the same fanzine (called ‘The Temptation of Cantona’ and attributed to one Fra Filippo Magsonioni) depicts the crucifixion of ‘Leeds Pride’ with ‘Judas’ Cantona being led off, with his thirty pieces of silver, by Alex ‘Beelzebub’ Ferguson to ‘Sodom and Manchester’. ‘Pontius’ Wilkinson is shown having his hands washed, a kneeling disciple beside him saying: ‘Forgive him Lord for he knows not what he does.’ What ‘Beelzebub’ Ferguson tells Cantona had something prophetic in it: ‘Behold – I shall make thee master of all thou surveys.’

  28 That same afternoon, Ferguson contacted his assistant Brian Kidd and asked him if he’d like to see Cantona play for United. Kidd said yes. When told that this would be the case – and for little over £1m – Kidd gasped: ‘For that money? Has he lost a leg or something?’

  29 Ferguson’s perception of Cantona’s ‘unmanageable’ character would evolve over the years Éric spent at Manchester United. Comparing him with another player, Sir Alex told my friend Marc Beaugé: ‘You could reach Éric, because there was a common thread of humanity you always felt you shared, whereas X— was beyond it, beyond everything.’

  30 This interpreter had very little to do. When asked if he’d submitted a transfer request to Leeds, Éric replied, ‘Non,’ and that was more or less that.

  31 One of Cantona’s closest friends in Manchester, Claude Boli, remarked in a much later interview that Éric ‘was particularly successful against the clubs which United supporters despise the most: Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Leeds United, which led fans to say: “He’s close to us, he understands us, he knows it’s far more important to win at Anfield than in the European Cup; [more important to win] against Liverpool than against Barcelona, that’s very English! He’s the man we needed.” Claude Boli PhD (in history and sociology) was the brother of Éric’s former Auxerre teammate Basile Boli and had come to Lancashire to write a sociology thesis about football which later formed the basis of his book Manchester United, L’Invention d’un club (Deux Siècles de Métamorphoses), to which Cantona contributed a foreword. Another excerpt from this interview, given to France Football’s Xavier Rivoire in 2003, is worth quoting: ‘From the very first day [with Manchester United], Éric told himself, “I’m going to learn; I can succeed here, but I’ve got to take my time, to adapt, and people will have to adapt t
o me.” Éric was very humble. He wasn’t there to change United’s style, but to bring something extra. The rapport between him and Alex Ferguson meant that they gave each other time to succeed.’

  32 Leeds had been knocked out of the Champions League before the group phase, Manchester United had been thrown out of the UEFA Cup by Torpedo Moscow in the second round, Sheffield Wednesday in the third (by Kaiserslautern), Liverpool falling against another Muscovite team, Spartak, in their second tie of the Cup Winners Cup.

  33 The European Commission had that regulation scrapped in 1996, following the celebrated ‘Bosman ruling’ (‘arrêt Bosman’) of the European Court of Justice (15 December 1995), which redefined a player’s right of movement within the European Union.