Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  The strength of feeling within the Leeds fan-base startled Howard Wilkinson. Season-ticket holders threatened to boycott Eiland Road. Ray Fell, the chairman of the Leeds supporters club, said: ‘I am amazed and stunned. I am certain the reaction of most fans will be one of bewilderment.’ One of these bewildered fans, Vivienne Olbison, told a local reporter: ‘I think it’s absolutely disgusting. Éric is the best player there’s been at Leeds for ages. To sell him makes no sense at all – particularly to Manchester United!’ Wilkinson’s critics had a field day in the climate of fury which surrounded the announcement of Cantona’s sale. He had just parted with his most skilful player, and who had he brought in? David Rocastle and Mel Sterland: an Arsenal reject and a thirty-something right-back who couldn’t command a place at Rangers.

  The manager first tried to justify himself by explaining why, in his view, ‘a deal was struck which was in the best interests of all concerned’. The move would, ‘perhaps, give Éric a better chance of first-team football than he would have had at Leeds United’. Leeds remained an ambitious club, a club ‘with aspirations to establish itself as one of the top names in the game’. Its manager must therefore rotate his squad, and players who couldn’t live with the disappointment of finding themselves on the bench had no place in his project. He used his column in the Post to hammer home his argument. ‘The long-term interests of our club have to be served at all times,’ he wrote, ‘and on this occasion this is the case. What happened yesterday [Thursday the 26th – the deal had in fact been struck twenty-four hours earlier] produced a situation which left everyone sitting round a table feeling satisfied. Alex Ferguson got a player and Éric Cantona has got a transfer which on the face of it offers him a greater opportunity of first-team football than which he had here.’ Such equanimity wouldn’t last.

  Leeds chairman Leslie Silver unequivocally supported Wilkinson. ‘Éric was upset that he had not been used as often as he would have liked this season,’ he said, ‘so it was sensible for him to go. He made a major contribution last season but was not entirely happy this time and was keen to move on. Éric thought he would be an automatic choice this season. But the manager picks the team and reserves the right to select the players he wants. Éric was a cult hero for the fans but the team is judged on results and Éric was not even on the bench when we beat Arsenal last Saturday.’ The chairman made no further comment when Chelsea beat Leeds 1–0 two days later, however; nor did he say a word after Nottingham Forest humbled them 4–1 at Eiland Road in the following league match.

  Wilkinson, his common sense perhaps affected by the hostility of the fans, advanced another reason for letting Manchester United get hold of Cantona for a paltry £1.2m – only £200,000 more than Nîmes had been paid for handing over the striker’s registration in May, and half of what Arsenal had received for David Rocastle. Leeds, he said, ‘were skint’, as ‘they had come up a very long way in a very short time’. The second assertion was a statement of fact; the first was rather confusing, as Leeds’ turnover had reached a record £8.5m at the conclusion of the 1991–92 season, and the club’s operating profit stood at a very healthy £500,000. The terraces soon proposed their own (totally fabricated) explanation of Éric’s dramatic exit: Cantona had been having an affair with Lee Chapman’s wife, actress Leslie Ash,27 causing discord in a previously united dressing-room. The unfounded allegations caused far more pain and upheaval than they purported to report, as, despite Wilkinson’s not entirely innocent suggestion that his players found it increasingly difficult to relate to Cantona, Éric’s popularity within the squad had not been dented by the breakdown of his relationship with the manager.

  Cantona wasn’t and couldn’t be everyone’s best friend, but even players whose outlook on life differed markedly from his – Gordon Strachan, for example – stressed that ‘nobody had anything against him personally’ and that ‘he wasn’t a problem to get on with’, despite the reservations he and others might have had over his contribution to the team’s performances, particularly in the previous couple of months. Strachan felt that Éric ‘found it hard to understand how Chappy [Lee Chapman] played and Chappy found it difficult to understand him’, and believed that the Frenchman could have done more to ingratiate himself to his fellow players. For the captain of Leeds, Cantona had retreated into his shell instead, and his play had suffered accordingly, particularly in Europe. Strachan balanced his criticism with an avowal that Éric had been frustrated by his side’s inability to embrace a more flowing style, in which his vision would have been put to better use. With more time, he said, ‘we might have been able to bring in some better players to play with him’ – but ‘he had just made up his mind he wanted to leave; there was no way he wanted to stay’.

  Had he stayed, what might have been? Sixteen years on, Gary McAllister still harbours regrets shared by every Leeds fan I have spoken to. ‘Don’t forget that Leeds is a one-club town,’ he told me. ‘The title should’ve been a massive catalyst for the club. We could’ve moved on, especially now we’d beaten our biggest rival to the championship. If we’d got the right players, it might have been the start of something big.’ But the ‘right players’ didn’t come. Instead, ‘the money that Howard Wilkinson got to spend was used to recruit footballers who couldn’t necessarily command a place in the team, and there’s no doubt that Éric felt frustration because of that.’ Judging by McAllister’s tone, Éric was not alone in feeling that frustration. ‘After a few months, we were more or less back to the team that was playing at the same stage of the season before! And we found it very difficult to replicate what we’d done. We were a good team – but we were not a great team. A great team wins year after year, and we failed.’

  Let’s hear one last voice, that of Gary Speed, for whom Éric’s playing style was ‘off the cuff and [ . . .] a bit of a luxury’, words that show plainly enough that he couldn’t be suspected of bias towards his moody teammate. But the Welsh midfielder refused to blame Cantona for the unravelling of their club’s expectations. ‘We were that kind of side where everybody had to be working as hard as one another to be successful,’ he said. ‘The year after [winning the title] when Éric was in the team and things weren’t going well, we weren’t good enough to accommodate him and Man United were.’

  ‘We failed’. ‘We weren’t good enough’. Not good enough to keep the man who would engineer Manchester United’s renaissance. But it would be under the guidance of a manager who had found a key Howard Wilkinson had looked for without believing it really existed.

  Accusations and counter-accusations kept flowing over a number of months, years even, and would be rekindled by the publication in Britain of Cantona’s autobiography in 1994. By then, adulation had long turned into hatred at Eiland Road. Some supporters – a tiny minority – retained their affection for the hero who, to them, had only been guilty of putting his proud manager in the shade. But within a few weeks of Éric’s startlingly successful introduction to the Manchester United line-up, the initial wave of grief that had engulfed a whole city was but a distant memory. The pitifully small amount of money Leeds had received for Cantona – which could and maybe should have served as an illustration of Wilkinson’s managerial shortcomings – was taken as proof that the decision to get rid of the ‘mercurial Frenchman’ had been forced on the coach by the player’s behaviour, ill discipline and flouting of club rules (charges that Wilkinson repeatedly brought against Éric with little outside encouragement). Cantona saw this as a Machiavellian trick played on public opinion by his former manager. Wilkinson wanted him out, whatever the cost might be, and selling him on the cheap was a way of saying, ‘But what else could I do?’ and thus draw some credit from a catastrophic decision.

  Questions were bound to be raised about Wilkinson’s competence as Manchester United’s star rose spectacularly in the wake of this oddest of transfers, while Leeds got sucked into the quagmire of a struggle against relegation. The manager naturally sought to defend himself, sometimes fairly, sometim
es less so, as we’ll soon see. But before rejoining Éric in Manchester, I cannot resist adding another quote of Wilkinson’s. Having alluded to unspecified events (‘[Cantonas] life off the pitch was sometimes colourful and required assistance’), he added: ‘Once you cut away all the myth and all the dressing-up and all the manufactured stories, he was fairly straightforward.’ Once you cut away all the myth, and . . . Not an easy thing to do.

  Let’s go back (or sixteen years forward) to Le Murat in Neuilly, where Gérard Houllier hasn’t quite finished his Dover sole – or his surprising account of how Alex Ferguson secured the best transfer deal in Manchester United’s history. Leeds United had already been sounded out (at least indirectly, though at what level isn’t absolutely clear), but no formal proposal had yet been made. Let’s accept that. What about the famous phone call, then?

  ‘I remember very clearly,’ Houllier tells me. But it is another phone call he has in mind, one he had made himself once Éric’s adviser Jean-Jacques Amorfini had advised him of the irretrievable breakdown between his client and Howard Wilkinson, not the astonishing conversation which took place in Martin Edwards’ office (of which more presently). Alex had a carphone, to which calls to his office were redirected,’ Houllier says. ‘I apprised Alex of the circumstances, and he told me: “I’ll have him” – meaning Cantona, of course. “It’ll cost you about a million pounds,” I said. “No problem – and they want a full-back, Dennis Irwin. What do you think of Cantona yourself?” I replied – using the same words I had used with Wilkinson, “Close your eyes, and take him. The only thing you’ve got to be careful of is [man-] management. He’s a good guy, who loves his work, and needs to be trusted, and not messed about.”’

  I feel utterly confused at this point. If we accept that Ferguson had had his eye on Cantona for a while (and that, I believe, is more than likely, especially since Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister had raved about him to their manager after United’s 2–0 victory over Leeds in early September), who said what to whom on that day – 25 November – and in what order?

  The story of how the deal was closed has become part of Manchester United’s folklore, one of Alex Ferguson’s best, which he’s always told with the glee of a canny horsetrader pinching the next Grand National winner from his biggest rival’s stable, and for a bag of oats at that. The role of the then general manager of Leeds, Bill Fotherby, is sometimes played by Howard Wilkinson (this was the case at the press conference that accompanied the unveiling of Éric Cantona as a Manchester United player), or vice versa. But Alex Ferguson remained true to his thread: Cantona was signed almost by chance, on a hunch, an afterthought.

  This is how the story goes. Desperate for a striker – United had failed to score in four of their last five games – Ferguson was sitting in his chairman Martin Edwards’ office, remarking what a shame it was that Manchester United had missed out on Cantona when he was available. Right on cue, the phone rang. It was Bill Fotherby, enquiring about the availability of Dennis Irwin, Manchester United’s Irish left-back who had started his career at Leeds. Edwards’s straightforward ‘no’ didn’t end the conversation; he seized this opportunity to tease Fotherby about some of his players, including Lee Chapman, a proven goalscorer he must have known Leeds wouldn’t get rid of. Then, on Ferguson’s prompting, Edwards moved on to Cantona, whose name the manager had scribbled on a piece of paper. The rift between Wilkinson and his Frenchman was common knowledge at the time, even if its real causes were a matter for guesswork. Edwards showed some surprise when Fotherby confirmed that some serious turbulence had hit the precarious relationship between coach and player. Edwards made it clear that he wanted a quick deal, and there the conversation ended – but not for long. A few minutes later, the phone rang again: the deal was on. Fotherby had consulted with Wilkinson, who had given his blessing to the transfer. By that time, Ferguson had left his chairman’s office and was given the news on his carphone. Mischievously, Edwards asked his manager to try and guess how much they would be paying for the catalyst of Leeds’ success the season before. ‘Like a TV quiz,’ Ferguson would say, several years later. Of course, he didn’t get the exact figure. Who could have? At £1.2m, Cantona was a steal.28 So much so that doubt could justifiably creep into the manager’s mind.

  Had he been too hasty? Would this prove to be another of these signings he had been caned for before in the press? He had looked for the missing piece in United’s jigsaw puzzle for a while, and believed he had found it on several occasions, only to be proved wrong every time.

  It was at this point that he talked with Erik Bielderman, to seek advice from perhaps the only journalist he would trust in such circumstances. Erik remembers what he told Ferguson on that day. His words echoed those of Gérard Houllier’s: ‘Éric can only work with a coach who’ll be a substitute for a father, who will stand by him in public as he would stand by his son, regardless of what he does; in private, he’ll be able to chastise him if he thinks he must, and the “son” will respond.’ Cantona, by nature so quick to confuse displays of authority with bullying, later explained this side of his character thus: ‘In fact, I’ve always had problems with people who can’t take decisions. I want to be given directions, but I want to know where I’m going. I have to be persuaded that a certain path is the right one. Otherwise, problems start.’29

  No one can doubt that the exchange related in Ferguson’s 1999 autobiography (Managing My Life) really took place. I finally got a chance to put a couple of teasing questions to Sir Alex about this episode late in the winter of 2008–09, which he answered with the candour that is part of his character, and which he’s rarely given credit for. Yes, Houllier had alerted him of Cantona’s availability on a couple of occasions (this much I never doubted); moreover, he had been told about Éric’s problems at Sheffield Wednesday – but he’d been ‘caught on the hop’, and Howard Wilkinson had been quicker to react, perhaps because of the close relationship he enjoyed with Trevor Francis and his advisers. Had Ferguson been able to pounce then, in January 1992 (as he would have wanted to), Éric Cantona would have become a Manchester United player several months before he did. When the opportunity presented itself, not to correct what can hardly be described as a mistake, but to exploit the circumstances, Sir Alex seized it with impeccable timing. The phone call, the slip of paper passed on to Martin Edwards, all this was true. What no one knew was that Cantona had been a target for Manchester United for a while already. In my opinion, Houllier’s, Roach’s and Bielderman’s accounts actually add to the tale rather than detract from it, and show a Ferguson who was not only able to trust his instinct, but also had the clear-mindedness to seek advice and, more importantly, take heed of it.

  Manchester United could easily afford Cantona, but whether Ferguson could afford a failure was less obvious. His once fragile grip on the manager’s position had been strengthened by wins in the 1990 FA Cup and the 1991 European Cup Winners Cup, but the feebleness of United’s title challenge in the last few weeks of the previous season had led some to wonder whether, given the means at his disposal, Alex Ferguson really had it in him to deliver the championship craved by the club’s followers since their 1967 triumph. That albatross had hung heavily around the neck of Manchester United managers since then, and his team’s mediocre start to the 1992–93 campaign made it heavier still.

  The fee involved in Éric’s transfer represented a negligible outlay for a club which had already broken the £1m barrier on eight previous instances since Ferguson had taken over in 1986. Moreover, of the players involved in those deals, only one – Dion Dublin (purchased for £1m from second division Cambridge United in August 1992) – had cost less than the French international. Ferguson had been willing to part with far more money to lure Alan Shearer away from Southampton during the summer, until Blackburn Rovers broke the English transfer record to bring him to Ewood Park instead. The name of Peter Beardsley (then at Everton) had also been frequently mentioned and, a few days before Éric’s arrival was officially annou
nced, Ferguson had failed in his second attempt to buy the superbly gifted (but troubled) Sheffield Wednesday centre-forward David Hirst. The Yorkshire club had rejected an offer believed to be well in excess of £3m, another figure that highlights the derisory nature of the amount Leeds were prepared to accept in exchange for their most gifted footballer – the man of the match of a sumptuous Charity Shield which had been played little over three months previously. In that context, the reassurance Ferguson sought maybe had as much to do with the questions he was asking about himself as about his new recruit. It would be excessive to speak of a ‘last roll of the dice’, but how long could he hold on to the keys of power if this latest gamble didn’t pay off?

  Regardless of Ferguson’s long-standing interest in, if not active pursuit of his recruit, events had unfolded at tremendous speed: the deal had been struck just four days after Cantona’s exclusion from the Leeds squad for their game at Arsenal. Forty-eight hours later, on the morning of 27 November, Éric passed his medical and was treated to the traditional stadium visit by his new manager. Cantona wandered on to the pitch on which he had played half an hour of football with Leeds twelve weeks previously. As he approached the halfway line, Ferguson stopped him and, with a sweeping gesture to the stands, asked: ‘I wonder if you’re good enough to play in this ground . . .’ to which Éric replied: ‘I wonder if Manchester is good enough for me!’ As it is no secret that players with an inflated sense of their own worth rarely last long at Old Trafford, it might surprise some that Alex Ferguson rather enjoyed this show of bravado. But the Scot could distinguish pride from cockiness, and was looking for a protagonist big enough for the ‘Theatre of Dreams’. Any Manchester United fan can name footballers of undoubted talent who failed to live up to their billing at their club. An incontrovertible sense of self-belief is crucial for those who wish to survive and flourish in an environment where myth has tended to be out of step with actual achievement. Cantona’s reply, for all its mock arrogance, at least manifested a genuine desire to succeed, and a refusal to be intimidated.