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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
FIRST EDITION
© Daniel Storey 2019
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Cover photographs © Action Images/Reuters
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Source ISBN: 9780008320492
Ebook Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9780008320508
Version: 2018-12-10
CONTENTS
‘Go on, Cantona, have an early shower’
‘When someone is doing well we have to knock them down’
‘When seagulls follow the trawler’
‘Only a fool would say it didn’t cost us the league’
‘You have not let yourself be affected by all this bloody nonsense’
‘Obviously we don’t want to lose him’
‘You can’t win anything with kids’
‘A Mancunian version of Bastille Day’
‘He opened my eyes to the indispensability of practice’
‘Are you big enough for me?’
Eric Cantona was not the first foreign footballer in England, but he might well have been the most influential. No single player better represents English football’s rapid transformation from the working-class, kick-and-rush game of Division One – a sport that had largely remained the same for half a century – to the glamour and exoticism of the current Premier League.
Before the mid-1990s foreign players were a luxury item, mysterious circus animals tasked with performing for our entertainment. At that time, ‘foreign’ had a pejorative connotation: fancy, flash, weak-willed. Foreign imports could temporarily call England home, but it would never be their natural habitat. They would hate our weather, hate our food, hate the physicality of the game that we invented and then gave to the world. And they would soon leave for whence they had come.
That was odd, given the success of some memorable foreign imports in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa at Tottenham, Arnold Mühren and Frans Thijssen at Ipswich, Johnny Metgod at Nottingham Forest; all became fan favourites due to their natural talent and willingness to embrace the culture of their clubs. But their success did not provoke an immediate wave of immigration.
The first weekend of the inaugural Premier League in August 1992 demonstrated English football’s insular nature. The 22 clubs handed appearances to only 13 non-British players. Four of those were goalkeepers and another four (John Jensen, Michel Vonk, Gunnar Halle and Roland Nilsson) were defensively minded players.
A high percentage of foreign players in the Premier League’s early years were from northern European countries – Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands. They were preferred not only on account of their assumed comfort in dealing with the British climate, but also because they came from countries where English football was already a staple.