Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King

by Philippe Auclair

  His fate was made public the next morning, when the media assembled to listen to Martin Edwards (Cantona himself received official confirmation of his punishment from a bailiff). The disgraced footballer would play no further part in United’s season. He would miss a minimum of sixteen games, and a maximum of twenty, should his team reach the FA Cup final, and the club had fined him two weeks’ wages (£10,800, not £20,000 as reported at the time). Edwards justified the club’s decisions in the high-minded language that is to be expected in such circumstances: ‘The game is bigger than Manchester United, and Manchester United is bigger than Éric Cantona. [ . . .] We have proved here that the reputation of Manchester United is above trophies.’ There was, however, a thinly disguised promise to Éric in his chairman’s message: ‘At some stage, we might wish to include him in [practice] matches to maintain his fitness and sanity, [but] that should not happen for a few weeks.’

  United were playing a risky game. On one hand, they had fulfilled their promise to the FA, and hit their biggest star as hard as they had said they would: there was no precedent to a punishment of such magnitude in the recent history of the game. It was also hoped that the speed and harshness with which Cantona had been dealt by his club could persuade the criminal justice system to show leniency in its dealings with the player, and maybe even avoid an appearance in court. On the other, by suggesting that Cantona would be allowed to carry on training with his teammates, and even take part in games of an unspecified nature, the United board, wilfully or not, was forcing the FA’s hand, opening the door for its disciplinary commission to extend the ban to all matches. Should they do so, Cantona’s resentment might switch from his employers to the governing body, a neat reversal of responsibility in United’s view.

  One can see the logic behind this carefully worked-out strategy. Once a decision had been reached to keep Cantona on United’s books (a decision that 82 per cent of the club’s fans agreed with, according to a poll commissioned by the Manchester Evening News), placating the notoriously volatile individual was no less a priority than satisfying the public’s opinion and the FA’s thirst for ‘justice’. By his own account, Éric was a particularly difficult man to live with when deprived of football, be it through suspension or injury. This is how he described his state of mind when forced to sit out two months of a season after the ball-throwing incident that ended his career at Nîmes:

  My body and my head were so completely accustomed to that physical exercise which comes from training and football effort. I was deprived of that motivation and that thirst which make you surpass yourself. I was deprived of the need to work and of that energy you take with you to the stadium. I missed everything, the smells and the atmosphere of the dressing-room, the feeling of belonging to a group, of winning together. I had need for air, for space . . . and I needed the ball.

  Whether he played or not, Éric still needed to be managed. Should United fail to care for him and, more importantly, to convince him that they did care, for the man as well as for the footballer, others would step in. Rumours already circulated of a departure from England to Barcelona, where Romário had just left to return to Brazil. More seriously, everyone in football knew that Internazionale were circling in the water, waiting for the player to be thrown overboard in time for them to pounce when the Italian transfer market reopened in a few weeks’ time. Barring separate action from an international body, an FA ban would only be enforceable in England, and Cantona would be free to play for the interisti as soon as a deal was reached. Martin Edwards later confirmed that, hours before the game at Selhurst Park, two emissaries of the nerazzuri (a young Massimo Moratti, shortly to become the Milanese club’s chairman, a position he still holds today, and his advisor Paolo Taveggia) had met him to discuss Cantona’s transfer to San Siro. They later watched the game from the relative comfort of the Selhurst Park directors’ box, sitting next Edwards and Éric’s solicitor Jean-Jacques Bertrand. ‘We had a cup of coffee and a nice little chat,’ the United chairman said, ‘but it was only out of pure courtesy. I told them that none of the players they were interested in were for sale.’ The players in question were Paul Ince – who would indeed join Inter six months later – and Cantona, then valued at £5m. Éric knew of Moratti’s interest, and was keener to listen to his proposals than he cared to admit once his future at Old Trafford had been secured. As several members of his close entourage assured me, United’s repeated failures in Europe had led Cantona to wonder what could have been if, six-and-a-half years earlier, he had instructed his agents to open negotiations with AC Milan instead of signing for Marseille. Inter could not pretend to be a force on a par with Silvio Berlusconi’s team, but it had huge resources at its disposal, and clearly thought of Cantona as a potential catalyst for the club’s transformation. To United, Éric’s violent outburst was a near catastrophe; to Inter, it was more of an opportunity, and Alex Ferguson knew it. But the United manager also knew that, should he support Éric unconditionally, the surrogate son could never find in himself the strength (or, in his eyes, the weakness) to betray the surrogate father. Cantona had by then transferred so much love on to his elder that ignoring the hand offered to him and running away, to Italy or elsewhere, would have turned Éric into a defenceless child again, alone in a terrifying wilderness.

  Hour after hour, it seemed, fresh blows rained in. Éric had unquestionably been a magnificent servant of the French national team for the past two-and-a-half seasons. He had swallowed the huge disappointment of a pitiful Euro 92 better than most, and, after an initial period of rejection, following Michel Platini’s resignation from his managerial post, had developed a close relationship with France’s new coach Gérard Houllier. The supposed ‘big player of small games, and small player of big ones’ had put his head on the block when others played the frightened tortoise and withdrew into their shells. In his quiet, unfussy way, he had proved to be a fine captain of the national side. It is often forgotten how important a role he played in the renaissance of Les Bleus after the door to the 1994 World Cup had been slammed shut in their faces by Bulgaria. It’s true that Cantona may not have been the spark that jump-started Aimé Jacquet’s world champions-to-be of 1998. But when others jumped ship, he stood firm. He provided the all-important link between two generations of players, and if he could not be held responsible for the failure of the first, neither should he be airbrushed out of the success of the next. His selfless attitude, the quality of his performances and his esprit de corps had earned him many friends within the ‘family’ of French football, but almost exclusively among fellow players and the technical staff.

  It was a different matter in the upper echelons of the administration – the ‘idiots’ for whom he had nothing but scorn. The suits he had been lambasting for years in his interviews were given a perfect excuse to exact revenge upon him after the Selhurst Park explosion, which got almost as much coverage in France as it did on the other side of the Channel. FIFA, though cheered on by Cantona’s blood-thirstiest critics, showed no immediate inclination to issue their own ban, indicating they would only consider one at the express request of the English FA. The panjandrums of the French Federation could have taken a firm stance without dumping the national team’s skipper in the dustbin the way they did. It appears they wavered at first, but not for long. Their chairman, Claude Simonnet, said: ‘Éric Cantona was captain yesterday, but I can’t say if he will be tomorrow.’ Almost in the same breath, he added: ‘I am stunned at such behaviour, which is against all sporting ethics. The seriousness of the situation forces me to consider this attitude as incompatible with what is expected of a captain of the national team’s colours.’ There was no talk of a disciplinary hearing. Éric was tried, convicted and sentenced in absentia. He was stripped of the captaincy. Cantona’s partisans could almost hear the sound of Capitaine Dreyfus’s sword being broken in the courtyard of a barracks. And if the decision itself wouldn’t come as a surprise to the culprit, the manner in which it had been reached and made public
caused him a great deal of pain. That same day – 27 January – he had called the chairman of the French League, Noel Le Graët,45 one of the few administrators he held in some regard, to convey the bitterness he felt at being ‘hounded and lynched by the press’. The rest of the world should forgive him, he said. Le Graët might have been sympathetic to Cantona, but what could he do? Éric’s future had been decided by men whose legitimacy he had torn to shreds in language of the most unequivocal kind. This was pay-back time.

  Back in England, where Éric was keeping the lowest of profiles, the media frenzy showed no sign of abating. Psychologists were brought in to enlighten the reading public, in much the same way old generals are pulled out of retirement by the BBC when a conflict erupts in some far-flung country. No one expects them to do much beyond fulfilling a quasi-decorative function. The Telegraph ushered in John Syer, who had worked with Spurs for five years in the 1980s, and one Dr Dave Collins, lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, who argued that ‘Cantona may have found from previous experience that by acting aggressively he gained some advantage, which would make him more likely to do it again. If I’m Vinnie Jones, for example, and I keep seeing my name in the paper all the time, then I’m getting rewarded by fame, or maybe infamy, but at least some sort of respect which I personally find rewarding. Cantona appears more complex than Jones: we hear he is a musician, philosopher, artist and poet. So the reward he seeks is likely to be more complicated.’ What this reward could be Dr Collins did not specify. The Mail on Sunday dispatched a reporter to Marseilles, whose brief was to dig out clues to Éric’s wildness in his childhood. It’s fair to say that the locals enjoyed the attention of the Mail’s envoy. They spoke a lot, but said little. Jean Olive, the father of one Brigitte Quere, a girl who had known Éric when he was a schoolboy, contributed the revelation that ‘Éric’s father pushed him with his football and everything else. He was very strict. Even when Éric came to eat with us, he had to be back at a certain time.’ It is no wonder that, when piffle of that kind was devoured by millions, the father himself felt puzzled. A local television crew parked its van in front of Albert’s home in the Hautes-Alpes. After having defended Éric with splendid one-eyedness (‘Everyone knows it is unfair’), he sent the journalists away with: ‘When my son plays well, you never come here. And now, you’re running! Put away that microphone, because, with the fur around it, it looks like a rabbit’s tail, and rabbits – I – shoot them!’ The crew withdrew.

  In retrospect, it is tempting to see in this extravagant pursuit of pseudo-information a defining moment in the history of the English Premier League, as it mutated from a souped-up version of the old championship into a bloated media machine depending on the production of news as well as the scoring of goals to feed its hunger for growth and money. It is now customary for broadsheet newspapers to devote pages by the dozen (and supplements) to transfer rumours, micro-incidents in the lives of Premiership stars and the like. Back in January 1995, most so-called ‘quality’ papers still distanced themselves from such trivia. Games of secondary importance sometimes went unreported; Monday editions, for example, featured perfunctory accounts of the matches that took place on the Saturday and were sometimes only mentioned en passant in a lead article or a review of the weekend’s action. Nobody seemed to care about the cost of a Newcastle striker’s wedding, and Hello! magazine (launched in 1988 in the UK, while its competitor OK! waited until 1996 to become a weekly) showed little inclination to pay six-figure sums to footballers willing to invite its photographers to the nuptials.

  With Cantona – who never allowed publications of that kind into his own home – all this changed, one is tempted to add, overnight, on 25 January 1995. With one eye on the circulation figures and the other on many of their staff who resented the cheapening of their profession, editors driven by the fear of losing out to competitors oversaw the transition from investigative journalism to mere gossip, while Sky television engineers screwed yet more satellite dishes on the fronts of yet more English homes. Cantona himself was in no way an architect of this transformation, and part of him hated it. But he was also a significant agent for change, and if his conscience was stirred by qualms about pocketing advertisers’ fees, he knew how to silence these. His charisma, his exoticism, his excesses gave a veneer of relevance to the pursuit of the inconsequential, if not the meaningless. Offered a chance to explore the gutter press’s hunting grounds, the more respectable British papers went in with all guns blazing. If Cantona was not a ringmaster in the Premiership circus, he must at least be considered its first true star attraction.

  Cantona’s main sponsor, Nike, immediately understood how the disgrace of its figurehead could be put to good use. Its famous posters (‘66 was a great year for English football. Éric was born’) were not taken down from Matt Busby Way. Its reps had noticed a surge in the sales of Cantona replica shirts, thousands of which found buyers in the week following the Selhurst Park incident. ‘Éric’s deal will not be affected,’ they announced on the 27th. You bet – on the morning after the assault, the Daily Record had printed on its front page a picture of a Nike (rugby!) boot, accompanied by the headline ‘LETHAL WEAPON’. How much is publicity of that kind worth? The multinational corporation had almost immediately sensed how a sizeable part of public opinion had mellowed towards Éric once the initial shock of his assault on Matthew Simmons had receded, and would later exploit the fracas in characteristically unapologetic style, with a TV advertisement in which Cantona could be heard saying, ‘I apologize for my mistakes . . . at Selhurst Park . . .’ (in case you are wondering, the punchline was: ‘I failed to score a hat-trick. I promise I’ll never do it again’). Provocatively, they went on with another advertisement, which was only shown in cinemas because of the coarseness of Éric’s language: ‘I have been punished for striking a goalkeeper, for spitting at supporters, for throwing my shirt at a referee, for calling my manager a bag of shit. I called those who judged me a bunch of idiots. I thought I might have trouble finding a sponsor.’ No, not in an age when Richard Kurt, a regular contributor to the Manchester United fanzine The Red Issue, could write: ‘Football needs the Cantonas as much as the Linekers – the Establishment might not admit it, but this is an entertainment industry that thrives as much on controversy and bad deeds as it does on good play and clean living. Brawls, bugs, drugs, and karate – we love ’em all. You can save your family values for the tennis club and the PC Nineties.’ The mainstream media were trailing behind their consumers, and their ferociousness contributed heavily to a shift in the public perception of Éric’s outburst, and of how it should be dealt with by the authorities.

  The lunatic was turning into two of the British public’s favourite pets: the underdog, and the scapegoat. Within twenty-four hours of ‘the incident, hawkers were displaying what can only be described as ‘commemorative’ Cantona T-shirts, which had been manufactured by so-called ‘swag workers’ – small companies which specialize in the speedy production of instant memorabilia. It was they – not Manchester United fans – who were responsible for slogans such as ‘Rebel with a cause’ and ‘I’ll be back’, which they emblazoned on their rags. Others would soon follow. One of them featured Simmons’ face, (correct) address and (correct) telephone number, together with the caption ‘Wanted for treason’; and whatever one may think of the character or former exploits of Éric’s victim, his further vilification left a distinctly bitter taste in the mouth. Simmons paid a very heavy price for what he did and, especially, to whom he did it. He sold his story to the Sun, yes, a foolish act he soon regretted. But with no money, no home to hide in other than his mother’s flat, no pub he could have a pint in without being recognized and provoked by men very much like him, and with no girlfriend, he was by far the most severe casualty of the fracas, and was still paying for his part in it when my friend Marc Beaugé tracked him down for the French magazine So Foot twelve years later. ‘I was young and a bit of a cretin,’ he admitted, ‘but I had a really shitty time aft
erwards. I lost my job [ . . .] and ended up doing shitty jobs for five years. Cantona played again. I was as low as I could be: rotten jobs, no cash, people who looked me up and down, who knew what I’d done. Some of my mates and some members of my family never talked to me afterwards . . .’ If only Matthew Simmons had had a sponsor.

  Éric, however, did. Nike cleverly adapted the mindset and methods of the swag workers to a mass market. It might not have been edifying, but it worked. In a different, but still revealing vein, the Manchester Evening News published a photograph of Éric showering in the nude to accompany a piece entitled ‘Why girls love to get their kicks from Cantona’, and followed it up with a brief interview with a French florist who had enjoyed Isabelle’s custom in her Deansgate shop, and could testify that Éric, whom she had met ‘many times’, was ‘a very nice guy, calm and polite’. Richard Williams lightened the tone of the media coverage in the Independent on Sunday. ‘You didn’t have to look very long and hard at Mr Matthew Simmons of Thornton Heath to conclude that Éric Cantona’s only mistake was to stop hitting him. The more we discovered about Mr Simmons, the more Cantona’s assault looked like the instinctive expression of a flawless moral judgement.’ Talking of the same Simmons, Brian Clough was of the view that an appropriate course of action would have been for Cantona ‘to chop his balls off’. The tide was definitely turning.

  Non-partisan observers of this quite extraordinary hallali now felt bound to express their unease at the sight of a mere footballer being spoken of as if he were a murderer. The most consistently eloquent of these, Rob Hughes, feared for the very values that had led him to confide his doubts on Cantona long before that fateful night in south London. He wrote:

  English football has to decide if it wants to destroy Éric Cantona completely – or rather to complete the destruction he had begun of himself many moons ago. [ . . .] Before he is removed from English football for life, it must be asked if he alone was culpable, whether he is beyond redemption, or whether the game is capable of an interim punishment that would allow a man whose touch can be majestic some room to earn a pardon. Cantona is neither a god nor a devil, merely an errant, if sublimely talented, man.