Gazza: My Story

by Paul Gascoigne

  For the last five years I’ve been homeless. By which I mean I haven’t got a house. I’ve been living in either hotels or rented flats. Of course, I’ve owned quite a few good houses in my time, and over the years, I’ve bought enough for my parents, sisters and brother, but I’ve ended up without one for myself.

  I’ve heard that Robbie Fowler has lots of properties. They might, of course, include a lot of places in Liverpool he bought cheaply to rent out, but he’s obviously invested wisely and well. So have many other top footballers. It’s the sensible thing to do. I wish I had done it.

  I was fortunate enough to come into the Premiership at a time when wages were high, if not as huge as they later became. I’ve always considered myself to be rich, from the moment I left Newcastle for Spurs in 1988. I played in the Premiership till 2002, when I left Everton, so I did very well, and I was lucky. It’s the players who played ten or twenty years before me who are the unlucky ones. They made very little in comparison. They didn’t end up millionaires who could afford to retire when their careers were over and never needed to work again. But that’s what every established player in the Premiership should be able to do today.

  So where did all my money go? Well, a lot has gone to Sheryl over the years. The main divorce settlement was around £700,000, plus £120,000 a year in maintenance. I was paying out a huge amount of money when we were married, and before that, so for about thirteen years altogether. Then I gave her the Loch Lomond house. So let’s say around £2 million in total has gone on Sheryl. I’m not moaning, or blaming her. I’m just trying to work out where the money has gone.

  Another £2 million has probably gone on my own family, in houses and cars and presents and treats over the years, and £2 million more on presents for other people. Not just Jimmy, but friends, people I happened to meet, people begging for money, needy people, people who helped me. I have always given to charity as well, when I had the money and even when I hadn’t. I was giving away between £50,000 to £100,000 to charitable causes every year. I haven’t got as much now as I had, but I’d still give away my last 5p if I thought someone needed it more than I did.

  I began getting begging letters, sacks of them every year, after the World Cup of 1990, and I still get them now. I read them all, and then tear up the ones that are rubbish. But I try to help if I can, if I think someone is genuine.

  When I was at Rangers, I got a letter one day from a boy near Newcastle with leukaemia. He said I was his hero and that his dying wish was to go to Disneyland. I didn’t know whether his story was true or not. The lads in the dressing room said it was obviously a total con, and they wouldn’t fall for that. So, after training, I jumped straight in my car and drove to Newcastle. I found the boy’s house from the address on the letter and knocked on the door. When his mother opened it, I asked her if her son had written it. She said he had. I asked if I could see him. It turned out it was all true. So I gave him money, enough for a trip to Disneyland, two or three thousand pounds, then jumped back in me car and drove home to Glasgow. It must have been a 200-mile round trip.

  At Everton, I did something similar when an old woman wrote to me from Norwich, saying she had only two sausages for her Christmas dinner, to feed her and her dogs. I was really touched by her letter, but I wanted to check out whether it was true. It was. I gave her the cash for a turkey and all the trimmings.

  When I’ve been feeling down, I often think, what a selfish bastard. What have I got to moan about? I’m so fucking lucky. That’s when I try to help someone or go off and visit a local hospital.

  I was walking down the street in New York once when I saw this tramp crouching in a cardboard box, begging. I got in beside him and gave him a can of lager and $25. He started crying. He said no one had ever done that before. I asked him how he’d ended up begging and he told me a long story about falling into debt, being made homeless and starving. I then took him to a hotel for a champagne breakfast and gave him $100.

  Another tramp gave me a sob story about some terrible operation on his stomach. He took his shirt off to show me the scars. He said his wife had died of cancer and he’d gone to pieces. I gave him money as well.

  The press reported both these incidents. They happened at a time when I’d gone off on a binge and was being followed around by the rat pack. They cross-examined both tramps after I had moved on, and discovered that the first one had been telling the truth, but the second had made it all up – his stomach wound had been self-inflicted and his wife hadn’t died, but left him for another man. However, he did say that he was grateful to me, and that if he ever won the Lottery, he’d give me the money back. I liked that.

  I’ve probably spent about a couple of million on myself. I don’t mean on just living, but on daft things I didn’t need to spend money on: mad luxury holidays, drinks, running up ridiculous bills in hotels. I must have donated a fortune to Disneyland over the years, taking all the family and the kids several times, treating them all. And also treating myself. I love Disneyland, being a big kid myself.

  I don’t know what Mel and Len made, but with hindsight I wish I’d parted company with them earlier. I appreciate that they made me a lot of money for many years, organising all my business, financial and legal affairs, which took the load off me. But charging me £200 or so an hour for advice, plus expenses, made it a costly service for me. If Mel and Len came out for the weekend to see me in Rome, for example, to discuss business matters, the bill could easily come to £5,000, what with the plane fares and hotel bills.

  Their statements came in every month but often I didn’t really grasp them or even read them properly for up to six months, so it’s my own fault.

  In addition, I must have frittered or given away something like £8 million. All of which I would have now, if I had been sensible, or if things had been different. If, over the years, I’d put that sum into property, for example, it could have grown to about £30 million today, judging by some of the increases in house prices.

  I haven’t the energy to try to work out where it’s all gone – or even where it came from. My best wages were at Lazio when I was eventually on over £24,000 a week, and then £17,000 at the end of Rangers. Boro’s were also good, around £16,000. And those were only my basic weekly wages, don’t forget. I was actually paid a lot more than that as there were always extras, appearance bonuses, bonuses when I played for England. I got £10,000 every time I pulled on an England shirt. And then there was all the commercial stuff. The best deal I got was £1.2 million over four years from adidas, but there were plenty of others.

  I did invest in a little company once, in Newcastle, a clothing company. I met the two blokes who ran it and they seemed all right, so I put £120,000 into their firm. They had two shops, and some other ventures, like a café. After a year or so it became clear they weren’t making any profits, or at least, if they were, I wasn’t seeing any of them. I wasn’t being ripped off – the business just wasn’t making the money they had hoped it would. In the end, they offered me one of the shops, the café and some cars, so that at least I would get my investment back. But I thought, bugger it, it’s my mistake. I shouldn’t have got into something I didn’t know anything about. So I just gave the shop and café and the cars away to friends. I couldn’t be bothered with them any more.

  Looking back, I’ve obviously been stupid, and I should have done things differently. But at the same time, I have no regrets about money. I suppose that doesn’t quite make sense. I just know that, given my time again, I would probably do exactly the same.

  One regret I suppose I do have is that I never could seem to get the right balance with the press. The media first became interested in me because I was seen by many as a genius on the pitch, but I didn’t want them to follow me around all the time off the pitch, reporting everything I did. You could say that I drew attention to myself, doing daft things in public. But I would have done those things whether I was rich and famous or not. That was just me. I’d always acted spontaneously, pu
lling stupid stunts and playing practical jokes. But I don’t think they should have been reported and held against me.

  From the beginning, when the press and TV were after me, Mel Stein always said I should charge them. He got a fee out of everyone, sometimes enormous fees; if they didn’t pay, I didn’t speak to them. He said I had to make the most of my position, earn money while I could, because I’d be a long time retired. And why, he argued, should they get things for free anyway? They were commercial people, trying to sell newspapers.

  That all seemed fair enough, but what I didn’t realise, not at the beginning, was, of course, that the papers that don’t have an exclusive will try to get at you in some other way, to beat their rivals. And I realise now that I was hardly ever interviewed about football, or written about in the so-called serious papers, the big papers, as I call them. I haven’t kept my own cuttings – I’ve got nowhere to keep them – but me mam has, piles of them, filling stacks of cases, all sitting in an outhouse in Dunston, covered in dust. But they are mainly tabloid scandal-type stories.

  When I was in demand, being offered £100,000 for a story, it was always because of some personal drama: going on the booze, falling out with Shel. That was what they wanted. I agreed not only for the money, but also because I saw it as a chance to set the record straight. Whenever there was a nasty piece in a paper, people would come up to me all the time and say, ‘Ooh, I read about you doing so and so – aren’t you terrible?’ So I thought if I told one of the rival tabloids the truth, put my point of view, at least some people would read an accurate version. The tabloids were, after all, the papers all my friends read, not the big papers. So why would I want to be in them? But if I were starting again today, perhaps I would do more with the big papers, and concern myself less with being paid for it.

  I remember, at Spurs, seeing Gary Lineker giving interviews for free to kids’ comics and fanzines when he could have earned a fortune for the same stuff and same amount of his time elsewhere. It was a sensible thing to do. He wanted to broaden his outlook, to see all sorts, as even then he was thinking of a career in the media.

  I did once give an interview for free, to Brian Viner of the Independent, when I was at Everton, and that was, for a change, mainly about my football, not my personal life. I should have done more of that. The kiss-and-tell, booze and binges stories eventually became the only part of my life people read about, and it just led to them wanting more, or finding more, or making up more of the same, if they couldn’t get it from me. It gave no insight into what I was really like, or into my dedication and passion for playing football.

  “Gascoigne suffered more than anything from being Gazza, a showbiz character designed to keep his name before the public. The professional game turns over billions of pounds and it continues to produce woefully inadequate human beings. Some of these highly paid social misfits would struggle to sit on the toilet the right way, were their agents not on hand to show them. Gascoigne’s story is not over yet. And don’t kid yourself. It won’t have a happy ending.”

  Michael Henderson, Spectator, 25 January 2003

  “This is what I will be aiming to do. To show you how to do the best for your client and still earn enough money for yourself. Greed is not good, but making money for yourself isn’t bad either.”

  Mel Stein, How to Succeed as a Sports Agent, 2002

  29

  BACK TO MY ROOTS

  It’s December 2003 and I’m sitting in my hotel in Shropshire, Patshull Park Hotel, which has 280 acres, a golf course and a huge fishing lake. I’ve played some golf but I haven’t done any fishing. They have trout and pike, but I don’t like them mixed up in the same lake. The estate and the landscaped gardens and the original manor house date back to 1768, so it says in the information by my bedside. It was originally laid out by Capability Brown, it says. Dunno who he was. Perhaps a relation of Wes Brown.

  For the last two months I’ve been playing for Wolverhampton Wanderers Reserves. This place has been handy for their training ground, where I’ve been going each morning, taking a taxi there and back. I haven’t been getting paid, just training with them. It was my old England and Boro mate Paul Ince who suggested it. I told him I wanted to get fit, do some proper professional training, and he said, ‘Why not come here?’

  David Jones, the manager of Wolves, was very good, letting me join in. He told me when I arrived I was in too much of a hurry. ‘You want to be fit yesterday,’ he said.

  In my first game, at home to Sunderland, I played the full ninety minutes, which pleased me, although we were beaten 3–1. It was at Telford United’s ground. The gate was about 2,000, instead of the usual 200-odd. So I must have brought in a few interested spectators.

  In the next game, against West Brom Reserves, I couldn’t get back on to the team coach because of all the fans wanting autographs, hundreds of them. I hate turning people away, but I knew the lads on the coach would be getting pissed off waiting for me, and I just couldn’t get through. In the end I borrowed a steward’s orange jacket and was able to dodge between the media and the fans. The steward had to run after me to get his jacket back.

  In the local evening paper next day, the Express and Star, they said that putting on the steward’s jacket was a ‘classic Gazza prank’. They went on to say that my body ‘will no longer obey the brain in time for English football to once again savour one of the most glorious and instinctive talents’. Bastards.

  I played four games (we lost three and drew one), scoring one goal. Then I got a groin strain and had to come off in the last game. Wolves are bottom of the Reserves League, which was where they were when I arrived.

  At the back of my mind, I suppose I was half-hoping that I might get a contract out of them. Not a big one, obviously; just a small, modest one, to last me for the rest of this season. I find it hard to let go of my old fantasy of finishing my British career in the Premiership. I had offers from several Third Division clubs, like Boston and Carlisle United, offering quite good money, around £5,000 a week and a share of the gates. Wes Saunders, my agent, thought I should have taken one of them, made some money and played competitively, rather than carrying on playing for no money in someone’s reserve team. But at the time I didn’t fancy the English Third Division. Mind you, things can change.

  I have to admit that the training has been knackering me. I’m fit enough, lean enough, but my whole body aches all the time. It’s so much harder to recover from any knocks when you get to thirty-six. I can’t remember feeling like this before, being in agony in training. Even three years ago, I don’t remember twinges or pains or tiredness when I was in full training.

  When you’re young, you can play two and sometimes three proper games a week, but not at my age. One is more than enough. In the old days, I could train for hour after hour, no bother. As you know, I was often half-drunk. Perhaps the alcohol killed off or disguised the aches and agonies so that I couldn’t feel them. Now, when I’m not drinking, I can feel every little twinge. Perhaps I should start drinking again. Only joking.

  I never actually liked drinking. That’s something people have never understood. I don’t understand it myself, for that matter. I didn’t even really like the taste. Stuff like Baileys I enjoyed, but that was because it was sweet. When I was with Chris Evans and Danny Baker, I very often poured my drink into a plant pot because I didn’t like it. Ask them. They’ll tell you.

  The only reason I drank was to numb my brain. It was good fun at the time, drinking to feel numb, and I enjoyed being daft with my mates. But my main aim was always oblivion.

  Danny always says I’m not a mad drunk, just a mad risk-taker. And I did take crazy risks, like jumping in front of buses without thinking. I did that on the pitch as well, which was why I had so many injuries. And I did it as a boy, swinging between trees, to see if I could, then falling off and breaking my arm. At the time I didn’t feel brave, or that I was taking a risk. I just didn’t think ahead to what the consequences of my actions might be. Of c
ourse, drink does make you braver, so I suppose I was even more of a risk-taker when drunk. Today I like to think I’m more careful, more cautious.

  Drinking also makes you dehydrated. With age, you’re more likely to get injured, and dehydration makes it harder for the body to recover from the injuries. I’ve been told all that often enough. In training at Wolves, I was thinking all the time, what the fuck am I doing? Is this really worth it? What’s the point of all this fucking training? Then I told myself I couldn’t give in, not yet. I was still a winner. I could still do it. I could still help a team.

  But now, sitting here in my hotel, I’ve had to admit to myself that it’s not going to work. Wolves are not going to give me a contract, however titchy. It’s heartbreaking, but I might as well acknowledge that that’s it. I feel devastated.

  I only hope I won’t go into a deep depression. For the last two months, training has been all I’ve really been concentrating on. It’s all I’ve done. I trained all morning, came back to the hotel and rested. Then I played a bit of solitaire on my mobile phone, or a chess game, playing against myself. I usually have the telly on as well.

  I still quite like living in hotels. It doesn’t depress me, thinking I haven’t got a house of my own to go to. Even when I was married, or had my own house, I would move into a hotel for the odd week or so, on my own, just to have peace and quiet, get away from everyone. I don’t eat in the dining room. I just stay in my room, order food from room service. I don’t get bothered. Other guests have been asking for autographs, so I’ve arranged a system with the girls on Reception. People leave their autograph books there, and I sign when I next pass through.

  I ring people a lot, talk for ages on the phone. Or people ring me, old friends like Archie Knox from Rangers and Everton. We have a laugh. Or I ring Jimmy, ask him to do little things for me. He came down from Gateshead and drove me to Telford for my first game for Wolves. When we lost, of course I screamed and swore at him, and he screamed and swore back, saying it was my mistake. Jimmy has been there for every first game I have ever played in my career, from Newcastle to Lazio, Rangers to China, every one.