Cantona (14 page)

I am very much in demand because journalists have the feeling they’ve discovered a gold mine. They are under the impression they can make me say things which are out of the ordinary. As for me – saying these things doesn’t bother me. But you must know that I am not duped by it. I’m not a cretin, I say what I want to say.

. . .
with the reputation of not mincing your words.

I do my job on the pitch, the journalist does his by asking me questions. If I don’t play the game, I’m ruining his work. That’s why I’ve made it a rule to be sincere.

Is that why people are seduced by you?

I don’t think about consequences. These are impulsive reactions. I haven’t the power others have to calculate everything they say. I haven’t got the strength because I haven’t got the desire to have it.

Guy Roux says that the media interest in you at the moment is twice as important as what he’s known with [Jean-Marc] Ferreri or [Basile] Boli. Even magazines like
Paris-Match
talk about Cantona. How do you explain this?

People must have noticed through several press articles that I was not interested in football alone. By the way, I prefer to answer the questions of non-football journalists.

Why?

What can you invent in football? The only possible innovation is to say out loud what players think in silence. That’s all.

But you have, in the space of three or four interviews, invented a new language for a footballer: frank, with no taboo or concessions.

I’m not making it up when I say things that all players feel. When I say that the French players’ frame of mind explains why we’ve never won a European Championship [sic] or a World Cup, I’m not teaching anything new to the players. They’re aware of it. They know that football is played in the head more than with the legs.

Has Cantona got more in his head than in his legs?

I have [as much in the head as in the legs]. Fortunately so, because the day I won’t be able to improve will also be the day when I stop. [
He would repeat these words verbatim at his very first press conference in Manchester
.]

Talking about heads – it’s shaving yours which really kicked off your career!

I didn’t shave my head to attract attention or to make an ad for myself. It was just an impulse; we were in Brest, preparing for a game, and I felt like having my head shaved, there you go.

Did you do it yourself?

I went to the hairdressers. It took me half an hour to find one who’d agree to do it.

And if you had to do it again, knowing the impact this gesture had?

I’d do it again. I regret other people’s reactions, but they’ll never make me regret my actions, or prevent me from fulfilling my whims, my desires, my fantasies. It only proves that the milieu of football isn’t that deep. If a great painter shaves his head, they’ll say: ‘That’s normal, he’s a creator, he’s a bit crazy.’ In football, people are too used to seeing healthy boys, with nice haircuts, who weigh everything they say . . .

A footballer has no right to be crazy?

A footballer isn’t allowed to be crazy. And that is regrettable.

Would you like to be crazy?

But I am crazy! I need to have crazy reactions to be happy – and even to be good on the pitch. You must have the strength to be crazy. Not there and then, when sincerity is paramount, but afterwards, to claim one’s originality. Football doesn’t accept differences, that’s why it disappoints me. Players are too banal. They are playing machines, they’re not allowed to think for themselves.

Don’t you fear being ‘normalized’ in the end?

I can’t picture myself as anything but crazy, because I need to be happy. Crazy am I, crazy I will be.

Do you know the story of Jean-Christophe Thouvenel
⁹
who, when he started, had a very critical discourse on the football world, and today admits he was wrong?

I can’t answer you. He’s seven or eight years older than I am. Come back in seven or eight years and ask me the question again. But even if he doesn’t speak out any more, I am convinced that, in his head, he hasn’t changed. He’s simply acquired the mastery of his self.

And you haven’t?

I am too disappointed by the environment of football. People who come and watch the games have no sensitivity, no craziness, no capacity to think. I do not live the life I want to live in this milieu. It is only an approach to another life, another life which I’m waiting for.

A life without football?

Yes. Football is a minor art. What interests me is major art.

Painting?

Everybody now knows that I paint. But I have other passions. I want to live in the madness of the creative artist. What interests me is his suffering. Because a great artist is always misunderstood.

Is it how you would live if you weren’t a footballer?

I’d have been a creator or an adventurer. But, above all, I’d be poor. When you’re rich, sincerity is not what comes through. Many people would give their arse to earn money; I who have money, I’d like to be poor. Money doesn’t make me happy.

Does it make you unhappy?

No. The money I earn at the moment is for my children, not for me. I put it all in a bank account so that they’re happy, so that they don’t suffer from my madness. But when football is over, I’ll leave like someone who hasn’t got money. I won’t have more than two hundred francs in my pocket.

That’s totally crazy.

But you need crazy things! You can’t understand me, and that’s normal: you’re not on the same wavelength as I am. All I’m telling you is that I’ll do that because, as a footballer, I am not completely happy.

Will you be happy one day?

Life is a big dream you wake up from feeling in a good or a bad mood; it depends. Happiness has to be found so that it is not a nightmare, [so] that it is a pleasant dream. That’s what I’m looking for.

You have said that if you weren’t a footballer, you’d be an adventurer. What is an ‘adventurer’ in 1987?

He is a traveller. But not a tourist like soccer players. I’ll give you an example: in Athens, they’d organized a coach trip to the Acropolis. If I hadn’t been a footballer, I’d have walked miles to see the Acropolis. In this case, I stayed at the hotel. It was too easy, it didn’t interest me. The day I go there, I want the impulse to come from me. I’d say that, up to a point, I want to suffer in order to appreciate the Acropolis. Simple things give me no joy.

You’d said – when you were almost unknown – that players ‘disgusted’ you. Would you say the same thing today?

When I say something, I don’t repeat it fifty times. What people must understand is that I am not a criticizing machine. I am a realistic man who says what he thinks.

People stick many labels on you. Do these seem justified to you: a rebel on the fringe of society?

Others see me like that. But it’s true that I may be different.

Desperado?

I think that’s . . . quite apt.

Provocateur?

Provocateur? . . . yes, yes.

Insolent?

No.

Haughty?

Who said that?

No one in particular. It’s a label.

Never heard it. Haughty, haughty . . . yes, that’s a word that suits me fine.

In the end, all of this makes you a media animal?

Probably. But I’m not trying to be one.

. . . and an icon for the young?

If I have a piece of advice to give to the young – as I am haughty! – it is to count on nobody but themselves to succeed. It gives me pleasure that ten-year-olds have my poster on their bedroom wall. But I ask those who, one day, will be contacted by professional clubs, to tear that poster up.

‘When I was a little boy, what made me dream was the Stade-Vélodrome. And this love will never leave me. In Marseilles, I was happier than anyone else could have been in the whole wide world. My most beautiful memories are . . . my youth.’

Éric speaking to
L’Équipe Magazine
, April 1994

‘Unfortunately, in Marseilles, there is a culture that glorifies cheats when they win. [ . . .] The Marseillais is sometimes only proud of himself when he’s managed to get something by cheating. Because it harks back to the image of the old Marseilles, of the Marseillais
voyou
[lout]. Fake wide boys who think they’re mafiosi. That’s Marseilles. The cult of the mafia. The guy who steals a kilo of clementines, there he goes, he’s a mafioso.’

Éric speaking to
L’Équipe Magazine
, April 2007

Éric was not the only little boy who dreamt of the Stade-Vélodrome in the early seventies. The brittleness of the French national team exasperated its supporters. It suffered from staggering physical deficiencies, which nullified the technical excellence of what was otherwise a fine generation of players.
Les Bleus
, who did not figure in any major competition between the World Cups of 1966 and 1978, earned the dubious nickname of ‘the world champions of friendlies’, performing decently when the pressure was off, capitulating as soon as qualification for a tournament was in sight. Two clubs took it on themselves to produce football that didn’t suffer from comparison with what could be seen on the English, Scottish, Dutch, Italian and German pitches of the time. These exponents of ‘
le football total’
were St Étienne, winner of seven league titles between 1967 and 1976 (as well as three Coupes de France), and Olympique de Marseille, the aesthetes’ choice, who won the double in 1971–72, and were the only rivals of the
Stéphanois
in the nation’s hearts. Fickle hearts they were, as they were bound to be in a country where club culture is yet to take root in 2009, thirty-three years after the Bayern Munich of Franz Beckenbauer pinched what would have been France’s first European Cup from under the nose of St Étienne, on a still-lamented night in Glasgow. It’s a story which is as deeply ingrained in the psyche of the French as England’s disputed third goal in the 1966 World Cup final is in that of the Germans. If the goalposts hadn’t been square, at least one of the two shots which rebounded on Sepp Maier’s woodwork would have gone in, and the adventurousness of St Étienne would have been rewarded with a European title in May 1976. Or so it is believed to this day.

As a native of Marseilles, one of a handful of French cities where football is more than a stick-on patch in the fabric of daily life, Éric was bound to develop a powerful attachment to the white and sky-blue of OM rather than the green of St Étienne. St Étienne was a powerful, dynamic, efficient unit, not unlike the Liverpool team of the day. OM appealed to romantics much in the same way that Danny Blanchflower’s Spurs had years before in England. In the Yugoslavian ‘goal machine’ Josip Skoblar, who scored an astonishing 138 goals in 169 games for the Marseillais between 1969 and 1975, and winger Roger Magnusson, ‘the Swedish Garrincha’, who cast his spell over the Vélodrome from 1968 till 1974, they possessed two of the most exciting players of that era. Their posters hung in Cantona’s childhood bedroom, next to photographs of Ajax’s gods, whom Éric had seen in the flesh on 20 October 1972, when they beat Marseille 2–1 in the European Cup.

Cantona, the matador, must have hoped that the shirt worn by Skoblar and Magnusson before him would be his mantle of light. But it turned out to be his tunic of Nessus. It consumed him, causing pain that the passing of years has done little to relieve. Marseille wounded the child in him, perhaps mortally, and it could be argued that his later career was an attempt to conjure back to life the youth he was stripped of by his home-town club. At Auxerre, he had rarely missed an opportunity to tell the world what he thought of the game’s milieu (not much). But one could sense teenage bravado in his expressions of dismay at what surrounded him, and that a part of him wished his instinct to be wrong. Those who doubt it should cast their minds back to what he achieved for Roux and Bourrier: footballers never lie on the field of play. But Marseille was different. The fantasies he had entertained were cruelly shown to be mere daydreams. He craved innocence, light, splendour. What he got was betrayal, pettiness and what he called a culture of cheating, a perception that would be substantiated in 1993 two years after he had left the club, when OM was found to have suborned their way to success. In the summer of 1988, though, the talk on the Vieux-Port was of the rebirth of the
Phocéens.