It was 2019, and the morning after a 3-0 Champions League semi-final first-leg defeat to Lionel Messi’s Barcelona, dazed Liverpool supporters are quietly making their way home through the city’s El Prat airport. At the gate, some of them notice one of the club’s greatest goalscorers sitting alone, his chin nuzzled into his breast.
It is a bit like the scene where Alan Partridge tries to get the attention of “Dan” by shouting at him repeatedly across a car park. Except, this is Michael Owen. “Michael,” bellows a fan. “Michael,” he tries again. “Michael…” Eventually, Michael turns around. He knows what is coming. I think I know what is coming. The queue can sense it. It all feels very awkward and a bit sad. “You Manc…” and, well, maybe you can probably imagine what comes next.
“Yeah, yeah, alright mate,” Owen says reluctantly but firmly enough to thwart any further insults coming his way. Even so, rarely can a sportsperson of such standing have looked so lonely and exposed.
Owen looked bruised that day, and his pain at being marginalised at the club he joined as a 12-year-old and served with distinction for 13 years is still raw. Speaking to The Athletic now, he says his heart still “bursts with pride” whenever he approaches Anfield but he also realises fans see him differently to how he sees them. It makes him nervous. “I don’t feel as though I’m welcomed or loved and it bloody hurts, so I prefer to avoid it.”
Owen’s story shows that a player can score 158 goals in 297 games — placing him seventh in the list of Liverpool’s all-time scorers at the time — but still end up unloved on the basis of their career choices.
The move that took Owen to Manchester United in 2009 — referenced in such hostile terms in that Barcelona airport queue — may have been the most controversial but the man himself is convinced that his reputation has been shaped more by his decision to move to Real Madrid five years earlier.
Michael Owen’s decision to join Manchester United was controversial (Mike Egerton – PA Images via Getty Images)
He is adamant that it was always his plan to go to Madrid for a year or two and come back, like Ian Rush had when he had a brief sojourn at Juventus in the 1987-88 season. Yet in Madrid, Owen speaks about “losing control” of the options in front of him. Indeed, he was close to returning to Liverpool but Newcastle United came in with a bigger offer which Real accepted and Liverpool could not match. Even when he joined Manchester United, he says he tried his best to persuade the influential people he still knew at Liverpool, like Jamie Carragher, to convince the manager Rafa Benitez to bring him back to Anfield.
Instead, he was left with four options: aside from United, there was Hull City (relegated at the end of the following season), Everton (another unpopular move for any significant Liverpool figure), or simply retire. Owen chose United because it gave him the best chance of finally winning the Premier League, which he did in 2011.
He told me in a 2016 interview, conducted at his horse stables on the border between England and Wales, that the decision to go to Old Trafford was made easier because he felt marginalised by Liverpool supporters. One night in particular stuck in his mind — a Champions League game where he did some television work while still contracted to Real, and was barracked by fans. His family left the stadium that night in shock.
The subject of a footballer leaving Liverpool for Real Madrid is relevant now because the teams face each other in the Champions League tomorrow at Anfield against the backdrop of the Spanish club targeting Trent Alexander-Arnold.
As Owen points out, perhaps there are clearer comparisons to be made between Alexander-Arnold and Steve McManaman who followed the same path in 1999, especially as he was out of contract and Liverpool did not benefit financially from his departure. The sale of Owen for just £8million allowed Benitez to secure the signing of Xabi Alonso — yet at that time, it annoyed supporters that Owen seemed to be unwilling to renew his own deal.
Owen insists he was not pushing for an exit from Liverpool at any point that summer and the approach from Real was a surprise to him.
“Real Madrid is a glamour club but I never had any thoughts or dreams about playing for them,” he says. “When I got wind of their interest, I had mixed emotions. There was pride that a club like that was interested in me. There was an intrigue, I guess. I tossed and turned for nearly a week from the moment I heard about the interest and deciding to go.
“I spoke to the manager (Benitez) and I spoke to Rick Parry (chief executive). It was like, ‘Let’s agree I’ll do a year or two then I’ll come back’. Subconsciously, that was what I needed, reassurance. I didn’t really want to leave — Liverpool was my club. But I also wondered whether I’d end up regretting it if I didn’t try it.”
Owen insists it is not a “crime” if Alexander-Arnold chooses to trade the club where he has spent his whole life for one that has won a record 15 European Cups. Even so, he says he lives with the consequences of a decision that could have been made with “the toss of a coin”.
If Alexander-Arnold chooses to go, Owen thinks he will retain his legendary status. While the right-back has helped Liverpool become Champions League and Premier League winners, Owen never got that close. The furthest the team got in the Champions League was the quarter-finals and despite Gerard Houllier’s claims that Liverpool were “10 games from greatness” in 2002, a year which also presented title possibilities, the campaign fizzled away.
Owen was also Liverpool’s best player. He could win the biggest games single-handedly, as he did in the FA Cup final against Arsenal in 2001. His departure, therefore, made it seem less likely that the club had a chance of winning the biggest prizes. To some, it felt like an abandonment.
Owen scores the first goal for Liverpool in the 2001 FA Cup final against Arsenal (Ben Radford/ALLSPORT)
For Alexander-Arnold, however, Owen offers a warning based on his own experiences in the Spanish capital, where he felt he surrendered any grip on the direction of his life but also his own sense of his identity, blurring into a dressing room of big names.
“Once you’ve moved once and you’re not in the place everyone assumes you are never going to move on from, you almost become a tradable asset,” he says. “I never grew up wanting to play for Real Madrid but it’s an honour I did. I grew up wanting to play for Liverpool. Once you move, you lose that absolute attachment to your club and you become a trading proposition. You lose the glue you once had, going from contract to contract, because you aren’t playing for the team you support. You’re just a player trying to do well for a specific club. It means more than that when you’ve come through the ranks.”
When Alexander-Arnold spoke recently about his determination to become the first player in his position to become a Ballon d’Or winner, it was unusual.
Generally speaking, Liverpool players — especially local ones — eschew talk about individual aspirations given the importance the club attaches to collective endeavour, a legacy of Bill Shankly’s ethos when he dragged it out of the old second division.
Perhaps it was the first clear sign that Alexander-Arnold sees himself differently. Owen can relate to the “elite mentality” that Alexander-Arnold talks about and that unshakable belief in their own ability. Owen speaks about the “delusion” of his own standards. What set him apart was not physical or technical but his psychology. “I thought I was the best,” he says.
Owen can remember Carragher trying to persuade him not to sign for Real by telling him he wouldn’t get into the side because of the presence of stars like Ronaldo, Raul, Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane. At that point in his career, however, Owen did not have any self-worth issues.
Owen was a teenage prodigy at Liverpool and for England (Patrick Kovarik/AFP via Getty Images)
“I get asked a lot about what it was like to play with the galacticos,” Owen continues. “I’ll say, ‘Why don’t you ask what it was like to play with me?’ I’ve never been starstruck by anybody. I’ve got loads of respect for people but when someone asks me if I could meet one person in life, I start scratching my head. I don’t really look at anybody and think, ‘Oh my word…’ I certainly didn’t think like that going into a new football club.
“One thing I did want to do was gain the respect of the players. I remember the first training session in Madrid, thinking, ‘I’ve got to show these I can play’. But I wanted to do that when I went to Newcastle. I wanted to do that the first time I set foot on the training pitches at Melwood. The first thing you’ve got to do is show your team-mates that they can be confident in giving you the ball, any time; that you are one of them — you are on their level, if not more so. If they give you the ball, it might even make them look better.”
Maybe it is this sort of understanding and confidence an average person on the street struggles to relate to, separating sportsmen like Owen and Alexander-Arnold from everyone else, increasing the possibility they will be scorned once they are not representing your side.
As far as football was concerned, despite playing under four managers in a particularly chaotic campaign, Owen was comfortable in Madrid. During his one and only season, he started 26 of his 45 games and scored 16 goals. He would have stayed for longer had he settled off the pitch. Unlike McManaman, he did not have six months to prepare and buy a house. Instead, he lived for a long time with his wife Louise and their first-born child Gemma in a hotel. It meant that he felt guilty at spending time away from them, trying to get to know his new team-mates. During rounds of golf with Ronaldo, Owen’s mind was back at the hotel.
He admits it didn’t help him that so many players spoke English either, because it made it harder for him to learn Spanish and assimilate with people outside of the club, where the media interest far exceeded anything he’d experienced on Merseyside. Not that attention fazed him: at one point in his life, around 1998 just after his breakout goal for England against Argentina at the World Cup, Owen was arguably as famous as David Beckham. who then became one of his team-mates at Madrid.
Michael Owen was not fazed by playing with Ronaldo (middle) and David Beckham in Madrid (Denis Doyle/Getty Images)
“The press were allowed to watch entire training sessions,” Owen remembers. “We’d be having a fun shooting practice at the end of a session and the next day in the paper there would be a table with all of the key details about the number of shots each player had, how many they scored, and which foot they used. They were marking you in training. It meant that every single day, you had to be right on it.
“Everybody was watching, everyone was marking down what you were doing and everyone was finding out what you were up to. There was no moment where you could make a mistake. The glare of the press was incredible. It was definitely a bigger animal than anything I’ve ever encountered. There were paparazzi as well. You’d be having lunch and they’d be taking photos.”
Owen remains the last English player to win the Ballon d’Or award that Alexander-Arnold covets. His nomination came because of his impact on Liverpool’s calendar year of 2001, when he scored 31 goals and Houllier’s side won three cups (five if you include the European Super Cup and the Charity Shield) while qualifying for the Champions League for the first time since the competition was rebranded in 1992. That period included his hat-trick for England in their famous 5-1 thrashing of Germany in Munich during qualifying for the 2002 World Cup.
Only three other Englishmen before Owen have collected the accolade: Kevin Keegan (1978 and 1979), Bobby Charlton (1966) and Stanley Matthews (1956). The process did not involve a gala ceremony in Paris, but rather a France Football magazine visit to Liverpool’s training ground at Melwood and then a presentation at Anfield ahead of a Premier League fixture.
Owen says he did not really understand what all of the fuss was about because the award did not mean as much in England as it did in other European countries. “I felt a bit embarrassed to be honest, because I just wanted to get on with the game.” On arrival in Madrid, it was a bigger deal, and it became clearer to Owen that the title would follow him around “like a knighthood”.
“It might be different for Trent if he gets it one day because the significance of the award has grown over the last decade, certainly in Britain,” Owen says. “But it didn’t change the way I felt about myself — I certainly wasn’t doing cartwheels. It’s only now when I look at the trophy sitting in my cabinet, knowing that no one else from this country has got hold of it since, that I think, ‘Maybe I didn’t do too badly’.”
(Top photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
