I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  Walk into the house of most footballers and you won’t see any silverware. At mine, in place of the bling, are the photos. They’ll only go up in my office, so they are nudges for me rather than show-offs in front of visitors (‘What, this old thing? Hadn’t even realised it was up – that’s me scoring for England at a World Cup. Take your time, enjoy the fine detail …’). There are photos of the scissor-kick for Liverpool against Galatasaray; lifting the FA Cup with Robbie Fowler, one of my childhood heroes; doing the Robot in front of Sven and Prince William; the volley for Stoke against Manchester City; the Kasabian gig at the O2 when Serge shoved a mic in my hand and I ended up singing my heart out to the entire arena. All of them seemingly impossible moments for a kid from Ealing who grew up booting a ball against the tennis court fence in Pitshanger Park – little stories from the past with the happiest of endings.

  Sometimes when you travel the world and arrive at a set-piece sight you can find yourself a little underwhelmed, just because you’ve seen so many photos of it, so many films, that the reality is slightly disappointing. The pyramids at Giza look smaller than you imagined. The Sydney Opera House looks less impressive from the perimeter wall than it does from a helicopter shot above the Harbour Bridge. The best trophies in football don’t have that problem. The FA Cup is an absolute beauty. It has grace, it has style. I always think of it as the brother of the Wimbledon men’s singles trophy: two beautifully dressed old gentlemen, their suits as crisp and ageless as they were in their youth. The history of them matters. I like the fact that the Wimbledon trophy has the inscription, ‘The All England Lawn Tennis Club Single Handed Championship of the World’, as if there was an alternative tournament for players who hit forehands with both left and right hands. I love the thought of all the other players down the past century who have also held the FA Cup aloft, those famous fingerprints that were there before mine. I like that there is a slightly smaller replica that looks exactly the same, made by the same jewellery shop in Bradford at the same time but used instead by the North Wales Coast FA for their annual trophy.

  I had so much fun with the FA Cup. It was like going on a date with someone I had fancied since school. I drank champagne out of it. I wore the lid as a hat. I cradled the base. It’s heavier than you think, which adds to its appeal for me. It shows that it has class and substance. The day after we beat West Ham at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Robbie Fowler and I were waving it from an upstairs balcony of a Liverpool bar to all the fans down below, in the way that Liverpool captain Phil Thompson had taken the European Cup to his local pub, the Falcon in Kirkby, in the back of his Ford Capri after beating Real Madrid in Paris in the final of 1981. I thought my life had peaked.

  The Champions League trophy is the FA Cup’s big brother. Taller, wider, bigger handles, but still the same casual beauty. The UEFA Super Cup, played for between the winners of the Champions League and the Europa League, is an often-forgotten attractive one, all easy curves and shining silver. I’m also a firm defender of the Community Shield, both as a trophy and a contest. I scored the winner for Liverpool against Chelsea in 2006, three months after our FA Cup win in the same stadium, and it felt almost as good – same packed stands, same celebrating fans. I appreciate for most people it’s forever attached to the phrase ‘traditional curtain-raiser’, but it was part of my childhood, signalling the fun about to begin, and it’s lovely to lift – unusual shape, good heft.

  A good trophy should be instantly recognisable. Hence the appeal of the League Cup, with its three handles, as distinctive as its current sponsor is forgettable. It’s a decent quiz question: how many can you correctly name from Milk Marketing Board, Littlewoods, Rumbelows, Coca-Cola, Worthington’s, Carling, Capital One and Carabao? The Premier League trophy is perfect in that it is everything the competition represents: flashy, cost a few quid, not particularly tasteful. It’s got lions, it’s got a gold crown. No one knew where to stop. It’s the trophy equivalent of a new-build mansion.

  A good trophy should have handles. It’s why the UEFA Cup doesn’t work for me. It’s too ice hockey. The exception to this is the old Football League Division One champions one, as held aloft by Tony Adams when Arsenal beat Liverpool at Anfield with Michael Thomas’s late goal in 1989. It was a silver ball on a silver spike but it was as elegant as it was short-lived.

  The current World Cup trophy is the other great handle-free controversy. Baddiel and Skinner were right to point out on Fantasy Football League that it looked like a man’s hand holding a grapefruit and dipped in custard, but it works against all the odds. There are so many flaws – the fact that it’s almost certainly hollow, because someone worked out once that a solid gold version would weigh as much as an adult man, and thus be impossible to hoist triumphantly into the skies; that the original version of it was nicked in Rio de Janeiro in 1983 and probably melted down; that the base was made too small to be engraved with the names of many winners, and so will need biffing off in a decade or so. I’d also like there to be more than one element to it, because a trophy needs to be shared around – a lid for one man, a plinth for another. You can’t drink out of the World Cup, and I could never have been the skipper to lift it, because we couldn’t have done that thing where all your team-mates put a hand on it as you hold it up. The photo on the front of the papers would have been me, the World Cup and a load of stretching fingertips. The alternatives – team-mates stroking my face, me lifting it while sitting down – would be even less iconic.

  It still works. The warmth of the gold, the contrasting green of the base, which is maybe more of a nod to Brazil than is fair on the rest of the world. The balance of the thing, the fact it can be held with one hand but equally looks magic when borne aloft by two. Nothing looks like the World Cup, which I’m sure is one of the reasons they were happy to let the old Jules Rimet trophy go to Brazil back in 1970. The ‘won it three times’ clause had been stipulated by Jules back in 1930, but the argument doesn’t work for me. Manchester United weren’t given the Premier League trophy in perpetuity in 1996. Roger Federer doesn’t get to keep the All England Lawn Tennis Club Single Handed Championship of the World. I think FIFA were secretly a bit gutted that Pickles the dog found it in that hedge back in 1966 when everyone thought it stolen and gone for good. They were ready to move on, and Pelé, Rivelino and the rest gave them the perfect excuse. You know when it’s time for an upgrade.

  Everyone’s happy in a trophy presentation photo. Everyone except the bloke doing the presenting. They’re the most awkward-looking person in the stadium: part of it but in no way really part of it, someone who has looked forward to their big moment and then realised as it unfolds that no one could care less about them, that they are purely functional and that function is merely to pass something to someone else more popular. With champagne going everywhere, he’s right in the mixer and can’t wait to get out. I still feel sympathy for Sheffield Wednesday’s players, who won the League Cup at Wembley in 1991 and had it presented to them by Rumbelows’ employee of the year, a woman named Tracy. You wait half a century for a major honour, beat the Manchester United team of Sir Alex Ferguson at the home of football and get to shake hands with someone who has flogged a slightly higher than average number of microwaves.

  I’ve always fancied a play-off winners’ medal. Not because of the tin itself, or the gaudy trophy, but because of the day itself. As a player and fan, going up by winning the play-off final at Wembley is surely better than going up as champions. It’s Wembley, it’s a sensational day out, it’s doubling your wages in one game. They’re always good games. So much hangs on them. There is so much to lose, which is why the gate receipts from the Championship play-off final all go the loser. The club that’s just gone up to the Premier League won’t even notice it. Have a few crumbs off our table, lads, we don’t flipping need them now.

  I will never get one of those awards but I’ve had some personal beauties that mean a great deal to me. Stoke gave me a lovely trophy to mark my 100th Premier League
goal. The player of the season ones I got early in my career at QPR and Portsmouth are still precious and appreciated. I would have loved the Premier League goal of the season award in 2011–12, and thought I had it in the bag after crashing home that volley against Manchester City, only for Papiss Cissé to pip me at the death for his goal for Newcastle against Chelsea. I’m still fuming all these years later. I’m convinced his was fluky.

  The match ball you collect after scoring a hat-trick is always special. I have one from Liverpool against Arsenal, England against Jamaica. I got one for Stoke in the League Cup and gave the ball to a little lad in the crowd. There is a pleasing tradition where all your team-mates sign it for you, typically with moving personal messages like ‘Couldn’t have done it without my crosses’ and ‘Should have had four, that miss was a disgrace’. No one ever likes to point out that the ball you’re given may not actually be the one you scored your hat-trick with, merely the last one lobbed onto the pitch by a ball-boy. But you go with it, in the same way that at 2am after a big summer barbecue in the back garden you end up playing headers and volleys with a half-deflated ball that represents one of your happiest days and by the end contains signatures which are smudged at best and erased more often than not.

  On those same boozy nights you can also make the most chastening of discoveries. Running out of beverages, you remember those bottles of man-of-the-match champagne you have stashed away. You dig out a couple of the ones from the Liverpool days, pop the cork, slosh it into the waiting champagne flutes to cheers from your assembled guests, make a toast to all assembled and then knock it back … only to find out it’s actually Carlsberg. I enjoy a lager. I just don’t enjoy it when I think it’s champagne. Tepid Carlsberg in a flute at two in the morning is probably not the best drink in the world.

  None of those trophies is the most popular one in our house. The one that brings the most joy to guests wasn’t even won by me: it’s the glitterball given to Abbey after she won Strictly Come Dancing with Aljaž Škorjanec in 2013. My daughter keeps it in her bedroom, while Abbey carries her own reminder with her everywhere she goes: a chip on her tooth, after she pretended to bite it, in the style of Olympic gold medallists nibbling their medals. The trophy bites back.

  AGENTS

  You hear a lot about agents. About how much money they make. About the deals they do. About how they persuade a player to sign for them in the first place: hundreds of thousands of pounds, free cars, houses for the extended family.

  My own sweetener was a box of free Adidas gear. I was fourteen, so it blew my mind. There was a pair of the latest Predator boots, some lounge gear, shorts, trainers and a few tops. I remember staring in joyous disbelief at the agent. ‘You mean I don’t have to pay for boots?’ He gave a nonchalant shrug. ‘Yeah, got you some moulds, some studs …’

  I was right at the start of it all for the agency I’m still with, quarter of a century later. Ledley King was the first, Ashley Cole one of the next few. We were all teenagers and something of a long-term punt. It was Ledley who recommended me: Crouchie is a proper player, he told them. You should take him. He also gave them advance warning. ‘When he walks in, don’t laugh. You’ll want to, because he’s six foot seven and weighs about nine stone, and you’ll never have seen a football player who looks less like a football player.’ They listened but not that carefully enough. Apparently when I arrived at their offices the main man was fuming. ‘Fuck’s sake. This is actually a wind-up. Nice one, Ledley …’

  At the time I was on a YTS contract at Spurs, getting paid the grand sum of £45 a week. When I signed full-time professional terms I did the negotiating myself, and got it up to £275 a week for the first year, rising to £300 in the second if I did well. I thought of myself as a prototype Alan Sugar, which was a mistake when the chairman actually was Alan Sugar. There was only one man walking away from that deal having got value for money.

  When my agent found out he was furious. ‘How long is this deal? Are you sure it’s not for five years? You could be banging them in for the first team and still be stuck on that. Leave this stuff to me.’

  Unfortunately at that point I was yet to understand how ruthless the game was. It still is. If someone can take advantage of you, they will. I went to see Gerry Francis at QPR, told I had no future at Spurs, excited that my local club might be interested in taking me on. Gerry was an experienced manager. He understood what agents do and that his life was a constant running battle with them. So the first thing he said to me was, ‘Son, I’ll give you a chance, but you need to know that I never deal with agents. If you try to get one involved, the move is off.’

  I panicked. I thought, right, better not tell my man. If it could kill it, it’s not worth the risk. I told my dad. He agreed. So we went to Loftus Road and did it all ourselves. They offered us £800 a week. I couldn’t quite believe it. Almost triple my previous deal! Not for a moment did I remember that the existing wage was a sorry sort of benchmark that anyone with both an agent and sense would have pied off rather than sign. I just thought I’d made it. I was still living at home in Ealing: that would be £800 in my pocket every single week. I thought I was flying. I told my mates, who had all left school and were slogging around in the dullest of jobs for that much every three weeks. They thought I was flying too. Dad, we’ve played a blinder here.

  And then my agent saw a photo on the QPR website of me holding up the home shirt. The call was brusque. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Yeah, but Gerry doesn’t deal with agents.’

  ‘Deal with agents? I spoke to him last week!’

  I had no idea that there were senior players at the club on £8,000 a week. I did by the time I was voted player of the season as some of them were spending Saturday afternoons sitting on the bench, but by then the leggy horse had bolted. I had no idea that managers and agents consider it part of the circus, that they get on but spend most of their time trying to get one over on each other. Gerry had called my agent up in fits of laughter. ‘I’ve done you!’ My agent called me up as I looked at my £800 in a rather different way. ‘If this happens on your next deal, it’s over …’

  I’d learned my lesson. When I moved to Portsmouth at the end of that season, a £60,000 signing turned into a £1.2 million transfer and my agent handled the deal. Over the years, I think I’ve made it up to him – moving to Aston Villa, Southampton, Liverpool, Portsmouth again, Spurs and Stoke, all in the decade that followed. Each multi-million pound move came with with a cut for him, that slice of £800 long since eclipsed.

  The cut. My professional career stretched to almost twenty years, but I still couldn’t tell you the standard cut an agent might take from his player’s move. Part of the reason for this is that there is no standard cut. There’s no standard anything with lots of agents. There is a cloud of secrecy over the money they earn from a transfer, even from the person who is being transferred.

  You shouldn’t lose a chunk of your weekly salary. When I was on my £45 as a kid at Spurs, my agents weren’t demanding £7 of it. They didn’t need peanuts when the whole peanut-farm would be coming along later. As a grown player, the cut is supposed to be a percentage of the value of your deal, but the exact percentage might forever remain a secret between the agent and his accountant. Back in the day, a player would be told that the agent would get their slice from the buying club. ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not your money.’ The player would think, great, not realising that it was a rather obvious conjuring trick. It was still your money, and you were still paying: you just weren’t seeing it before you paid it. You were better getting the actual amount, asking what the agent’s chunk was going to be, and then paying it. At least then you knew.

  Transfers can happen without agents. They don’t partly because of the money that can be made and partly because everyone involved – players, buying club, selling club – usually find it makes things easier, even if can also make it more expensive.

  The buying club invariably works o
ut in advance whether a player is keen to go. An ear will be put to the ground. By the time that you the player get to the buyer’s training ground, the agent will have given you the ballpark figures for what you’re going to be earning and for how long. A great deal more will go into the contract, but you usually know most of the rest – what the stadium’s like, how good the support in the stands is, the facilities at training. You want to speak to the manager, to work out what his plans are for you, to see if he understands your game as you do, to discover which other players might be coming or going. Meanwhile your agent is speaking to the chief executive. He calls you and tells you the exact figure for what they’re offering. If you tell him you’re not happy he’ll go back in. If you tell him you’re happy he’ll still go back in. That’s agents.

  There’ll be some to-ing and fro-ing and a fair amount of thrashing about. Meanwhile, the player will be sitting in reception or a spare office, twiddling their thumbs and looking at their phone to see who else is moving where for how much. You’ll get bored and hungry and someone will be sent to administer to your needs. When I signed for Stoke, the deal was still to be signed as midnight approached. Tony Pulis made a couple of the girls at the stadium stay behind and rustle us up a curry. There was me, Pulis and Cameron Jerome eating curry off plates on our laps, while our respective futures were argued about in a room three doors down.

  I was always glad to have my dad for my dad. Despite the QPR shenanigans, he understood what might be going on behind closed doors. He had a lifetime of experience in the advertising business and while he didn’t know all the answers in football he knew what questions to ask. What’s that for? Where’s that bit going? Who gets that bit? Left on my own I would have struggled far more.

  But even with my dad, I still needed an agent, because I couldn’t say the tough stuff on my own. I hate confrontation. I don’t like arguing with people. Agents enjoy being the bad guy. Gary Neville? He could have negotiated with Kim Jong-un, and enjoyed every second. When we were with England, he loved going into meetings with the FA, just to say the opposite to what they’d said. You might remember his appearance on Rio’s World Cup Wind-Ups before the 2006 tournament in Germany. He was stopped by two actors dressed as traffic policemen and offered a choice between six points on his licence or match tickets for one officer to make the whole thing go away. I would have crumbled in seconds: if you’ve seen the episode where Rio set me up with some fake Russian gangsters you’ll know my style. Gary, by contrast, argued with them. He refused to take the easy way out. He relished the opportunity for a ding-dong, even with the long arm of the law. And that’s why he could never understand why players didn’t do transfer deals themselves. To him it was fun. To him it was a relaxing break from the football.