#2Sides: My Autobiography

I would like to thank my wife Rebecca for her ongoing support with my football career and off-the-field projects – you have been a rock. My children Tia, Lorenz and Tate for making me smile. My father Julian and his partner Lisa, my mother Janice and her partner Peter for their unconditional love and support, my brothers Anton and Jeremiah, my sisters, Sian, Chloe, Anya, Remy and everyone who has played a part in helping me to get to this point in my life; you have all played your part, thank you, love always.

I would to say a big thank you to Sir Alex Ferguson who has been a great manager and inspiration to me, Harry Redknapp who gave me my first opportunity in football, all the coaches, physios, kit men, and canteen staff that have looked after me throughout my career. Thank you.

A big thank you to all the players I have played with over the years – too many to mention – it has been amazing. Thank you to all the players I have played against and kept me on my toes, thank you!

A special thanks to the fans, the rock of all football clubs, you have been a pleasure to work for and I thank you for that.

I would also like to give a big thank you to Pini Zahavi, Jamie Moralee, Pete Smith and all the staff at New Era Global Sports
Management who have been the catalyst behind helping me prepare for life after football, supporting and guiding me through my football career and being there for me through the good and the bad times.

Thank you all

Rio, July 2014

I always said when Rio was a skinny 16-year-old wonderkid at West Ham that he would go right to the very top – and he did.

What a player he’s been! He fulfilled all his early promise and made himself a fantastic player – the best defender in Europe without a doubt.

A Rolls-Royce on the field, he was always a smashing guy off it as well.

He began his career as a player with me at West Ham and I’m so happy we’ve been able to hook up together again at QPR.

But there’s more to Rio than a great footballer.

He comes from a lovely family and, as this unusual, honest and thoughtful book shows, he’s matured into a remarkable man: intelligent, decent and with lots to say about football and life.

It’ll be a sad day when he finally hangs up his boots, but I’ll make another prediction. Whatever he does next will be worth watching too!

Harry Redknapp

Between the two blocks of my building on the estate there was a little green. It was crap. But it was fantastic. It was our Wembley, our Old Trafford. When you played football there you had to avoid the trees and make sure you didn’t twist your ankle in any of the holes in the ground. We didn’t have the sort of nice goals with nets that kids have today. One goal was a tree; the other would be someone’s jumper. Sometimes we’d play three- or four-a-side. Sometimes it was 15-a-side. It all depended who was around. I didn’t like playing with kids my age because I found their games childish. I preferred playing football with the older boys. Normally they’d have said I was too young, but they respected me because I was good at football and let me join in. We used to sit on the stairs and laugh and chat about the game and life until late at night. They were good players too, and Liverpool fans mostly. One of
them, Gavin Rose, was two years older than me, and better than I was. We called him ‘our John Barnes.’ He’s still my best friend.

My Dad didn’t care much for football. He was more into kung fu. But I played every day, every weekend, every hour. After school I’d be outside messing about with skills, or kicking about on the estate. There was nothing else going on. It was all quite natural and rustic. We might have been on a council estate in south London but our outlook was international. A guy called Stefan had all the latest videos from Serie A in Italy, which was the best league in the world at the time. So we’d troop over to Stefan’s house, watch Italian football then go out and try to replicate what we’d seen. The entire world of football wasn’t available to us at the touch of a button via satellite, cable and the internet like today. But we watched everything we could on TV, with programmes like
Match of the Day, Grandstand
and
Saint and Greavsie
.

These days my son, before he goes to bed, will say, ‘Dad, can you put on that YouTube video of Neymar please?’ Back then, my hero was Maradona. I loved Stefan’s videos of him doing keepy-uppies and playing in the World Youth Championships with Argentina. The way he took people on and ran past them was just fantastic. When we played, we all wanted to be Maradona and we’d do the radio commentary of the goal he scored against England. You’d be dribbling and shouting it out: ‘He turns like an eel, the little squat man …’ (we knew it by heart) ‘… He comes inside Butcher, leaves
him
for dead … outside Fenwick, leaves him for dead …’ Then I’d score by hitting the tree … ‘And that’s why Rio is the
greatest player in the world!
’

Maradona was the first person I thought ‘I’d love to be like that guy.’ But physically I could hardly have been more different. As I got older I started liking other players like Frank Rijkaard, John Barnes, Paul Ince and Gazza. If someone was just a runner or
kicked people, they weren’t for me. I liked the flair players – we all did. John Barnes was the best-loved English player. But mostly we admired the foreign stars, and worked on our technique. Whoever produced the best bit of skill was considered the main man on the estate.

It was only much later, when I trained at various clubs, that I realised skill wasn’t exactly the quality most appreciated in the English game. I was so lucky, especially at West Ham, that I had coaches who never tried to brainwash me into a different way of playing. They embraced my style and wanted you to keep your own identity. A lot of the West Ham players who came through around that time have a touch of flair: Glen Johnson is not your typical right back; Michael Carrick’s got great feet, great class, vision, range of passing; Joe Cole, especially when he was a kid, was an incredible skill man; Frank Lampard was always his own man. We were never forced to play a certain way; nobody ever shouted ‘get rid’ at us.

When I was about 13, Gavin had the idea of going over to Burgess Park on Sundays to play with some much older African guys. They were from places like Sierra Leone and Nigeria, and they were tough and aggressive, and terrific footballers. My Mum didn’t want me to go: she thought we’d get into trouble and if something kicked off, we’d either have to stand and have a fight, or run very fast to get away. Mum eventually came round, but the first few times I actually sneaked off the estate to go. To get to the park, we had to walk from the Friary Estate through two other estates, which was tricky in itself. Then we had to cross a bit of wasteland, a gypsy caravan site where there were big dogs roaming about which could be a problem especially when it got late.

The African guys were hard bastards and about twice our age – in their 20s and 30s. They turned up in cars and probably had
families. We were of no interest to them at all, so we had to kind of force our way in. By this time, I’d already begun to think I could make it as a professional. But my motivation was always the same: I played for respect. Respect from your peers, respect from your opponents and your teammates, and respect from the people watching.

Anyway, my mates and me would go over to the park and just kick a ball about and try and show off our skills, hoping they would want us to join in. At first we’d ask and they’d say, ‘no, you’re too young.’

Then one time they let us play and realised we were quite good. After that they used to let us play all the time. Playing on my estate was fun; this was something else. These guys were quick and strong, and your own teammates would kick you if you didn’t pass the ball. We never wore shin pads and when you got hacked down, which was often, it hurt and you’d want to cry. But you saw how they looked at you and realised that if you started crying they wouldn’t let you play again, so you had to just get through it any way you could.

These guys were much taller, quicker, bigger and stronger than me. I reckoned if I could play with them, I would be doing well, I learned to pass and move with a bit more thought. It wasn’t a great standard and there were no tactics to speak of. But physically and emotionally it was demanding. I couldn’t outrun or out-muscle any of these guys so I had to try different things and work out ways of getting by people without just using my speed.

Playing there really helped me mature as a player but the funny thing is we never got to know any of them. If you ask me any of their names I wouldn’t be able to tell you. We had a purely football relationship. We’d turn up on a Sunday, play for a few hours, and then go. They weren’t interested in hanging out with teenagers.
But when the game was finished I could walk away knowing I’d won their respect. If I was walking around anywhere and they saw me, they could say, ‘Oh, that’s Rio, he’s a good footballer.’ That’s all we wanted people to say.

I really worry that youngsters coming into football today are overprotected. Compared to the generations of players who went before, they’re treated with kid gloves and surrounded by cotton wool. But when things get difficult in their careers or in their lives they may struggle.

One of the big differences between now and when I was a kid is that they now get ferried to and from training by car. Everything is done for them. When I was 14, I had to make two-hour journeys by buses and trains just to get to and from training. After school, most of my mates just wanted to play spin the bottle and snog birds, so they made fun of me when I said ‘I’ll play for ten minutes but then I’ve got to go. I ain’t missing my trains.’ But there was no way I was going be late. Some of those guys were good enough to have played football professionally. But they were the ones who said: ‘That bird’s alright over there’ and stayed. Now they’re working on building sites.

This was the journey: from Blackheath Bluecoats, my school, I’d take a 53 bus to New Cross. That was 20-minutes. From New Cross I’d take the East London line to Whitechapel, then walk through to Bank and get the tube to Stratford from where I caught an overground train to Dagenham and Redbridge. Then it was another bus to Chadwell Heath and then a 10-minute walk to the West Ham training ground. And then the same back. We’d do that every Tuesday and Thursday night. There were three of us who did that every week from Peckham: Me, Andy McFarlane who’s now a football agent and a good mate called Justin Bowen who still plays
amateur football but works a normal job. It was a tough schedule, but it helped to make me the person I am. To make it, you had to have discipline and desire. I was moving in an adult world and learning to duck and dive.

The hardships of being an apprentice also tended to make you resourceful and resilient. Twenty years ago cleaning boots was part and parcel of becoming a professional footballer. On one of my first days at West Ham as an apprentice I was drilled by Tony Cottee; he was one of the club’s best players at the time, the number nine, and one of my tasks was to take care of his boots. I remember being in the boot room, savouring the smell of dubbin and having a laugh, giving it loads of banter when I heard someone shouting my name: ‘where’s that fucking Ferdinand?’ I came out and saw this five-foot-nothing stocky geezer standing there. Tony Cottee.

‘Where’s my fucking boots?’ he said.

‘What boots?’ I said.

‘You’re my boot boy. Where’s my boots?’ he said.

I said they were hanging on his peg in the boot room where I’d been told to put them. He said: ‘I want my boots with my training kit, wet top and track suit in my place every morning.’ When I said that wasn’t my job, he got angry: ‘You’re my boot boy and you’ll do what I fucking say.’ And then he walked off.

So every day that year Tony Cottee had
everything
just exactly the way he wanted, because that’s the way it was.

That sort of thing is unimaginable now. Apprenticeships have gone. Aspiring stars don’t get chapped fingers because it’s freezing and they’re outside having to scrub the mud off a pair of senior player’s boots. I used to have to clean the away changing room and teams used to take as long as they liked. You’d poke your head round the door and say, ‘can I come in now? I’m going to miss my
train home.’ And they’d say: ‘Fuck off! Get out!’ Every day there were these problems and little things you had to deal with. But dealing with them made you a little streetwise and sharp.

One of the worst jobs was to clean the toilets and you’d do anything to avoid that. So you’d do extra training and when someone challenged you you’d say ‘I can’t. I’ve got special training.’ I was like Del Boy finding ways to use football to get out of horrible jobs. Frank Lampard and Joe Keith used to play games together all the time to avoid the nasty jobs. When Tony Carr, the youth team manager, told us to sweep floors, we’d say ‘OK, but if our shooting and passing is rubbish on Saturday it’ll be your fault.’

Where we had to
earn
privileges, young players today get them automatically. I think there’s a downside to that.

For example, first team changing rooms used to be no-go zones for any young player. You had to really prove yourself before you went in there. Nowadays it’s almost nothing. Adnan Januzaj was in the United changing room from day one as if it was completely normal – which for him it was. It’s not his fault. He didn’t know there used to be all these little staging posts during the course of a long career. You used to have to climb the ladder slowly. But society changed. I talked with Ji-Sung Park about how things were done in South Korea. ‘The young players can’t eat until the older players have eaten,’ he said. ‘They’re not even allowed to sit down until the older players have been in and eaten.’ I was like: ‘Quite right!’ But here things are all heading the other way.

There was a telling little incident with the exercise bikes at United. There’s a row of bikes for the whole squad to use before training but it’s understood that every first-team player has a particular bike they normally sit on. We all went down there after a meeting and one of the youth players is on Juan Mata’s bike. ‘Hey, that’s Juan’s bike.’

Then the youth team player looks at another youth team player as if to say: ‘I’m not moving.’

I don’t know if it was banter, but back in the day that was an immediate slap. ‘You what?’ Bang! ‘Off that bike
now
!’ But do that these days and you’ll get reported and probably end up in the paper. Quietly someone told the lad: ‘next time you see a first-team player coming and it’s their bike you get off the fucking bike, right?’

Last season I was told that one of the United youngsters had cried in front of the manager. I asked what the matter was. ‘I thought I was going to play today,’ he explained. I reminded the player he was 19 years old and told him to stop crying like a little baby. Getting angry about not getting picked? Fair enough. But
crying
to the
manager
about not getting picked? It’s mad.

Of course, plenty of kids are going to come through and do well anyway. But some other kids need to keep their feet on the ground, stay humble, and toughen up a bit as personalities and people. It will put them in good stead for the future and for what they’re going to come across in their career. They might not make it at Manchester United. They may have to go back down to Bournemouth or Yeovil or Carlisle. And down there, if you’re not hard enough, you’ll get eaten alive because those guys are fighting for their lives. They’re struggling. It’s an entirely different environment.

Then there’s the problem of money. It’s not just that young players are getting huge amounts before they’ve proved themselves. Some are paid so much they think they’ve made it before they’ve even got off the bloody training pitch, and a lot of young players just want to be rich. It’s a hard mentality for me to get my head round. For me the game was always about glory and winning and achieving things as a player. If you’re successful you’re going to be
rich in most fields. But that’s a side effect. Money has truly never been an issue for me.