German police put pictures of my face up on trees saying: Find this guy
Marko Arnautovic on running with gangs in Austria, sharing a flat with Balotelli and why West Ham haven’t seen the best of him yet...
SOMETIMES in life, you have to address your failings if you are going to move forward. Marko Arnautovic feels that he knows this well.
At 28, Arnautovic is West Ham United’s record signing but is not yet the footballer he wants to be or feels he should be. Not this season, not ever.
Teenage years spent running with the gangs in Vienna maybe did not help. Regular expulsions from junior football clubs definitely did not help.
And then there was the time he was late for Jose Mourinho three times in a single day.
‘ We were at Abu Dhabi for pre- season with Inter in 2009,’ Arnautovic told Sportsmail this week. ‘I overslept for breakfast. Late No 1. Then there was the team meeting. The hotel was huge and my room was on the 75th floor. I am waiting for the lift and I press and I press and still I have got seven minutes so I am OK. But then I still didn’t make it. Disaster No 2.
‘Then before we meet for the game it was happening again and I was like: “He is going to kill me”. So then we fought a little bit and I was out of the team that day, training on my own.’
Arnautovic learned from that mistake. Sort of.
‘Back in Milan I thought we were training in the morning and I went in just perfect,’ he reflected. ‘There were no cars there. We were actually training in the afternoon that day! Mourinho is there with his staff and he stands up and starts applauding and laughing.
‘He said: “You are my man. You come here five hours before training. I love you! Here, take my watch”. I still have that watch in my house.’
Mourinho subsequently described Arnautovic as ‘a fantastic person with the attitude of a child’. The big Austrian does not dispute that this is how it was back then.
‘I don’t see it as rude,’ he said. ‘I know what he meant.’
Now, though, Arnautovic purports to be different and that is the point. That is the bit about addressing your failings.
The forward’s career is littered with controversy and colourful stories but he believes his time in England has been different — and must continue to be so if he is not to end with more regrets than those he has accumulated already.
He arrived in England at Stoke City in 2013 and since then, perhaps for the first time, the most notable thing about him has been his football. He wants to take that to the next level with West Ham but has not started well.
A red card at Southampton and a bout of flu mean he has started only four Premier League games and when manager Slaven Bilic substituted him to cope with Andy Carroll’s sending-off at Burnley on Saturday, it felt telling.
Now West Ham face Brighton at home tonight stuck in the middle of a cluster of teams with only eight points. Arnautovic will start and knows he still has some making-up to do.
‘Expectation of me is high and I know people are not happy,’ he said. ‘I have apologised for the red card, it was stupid. And then I’ve been ill but I can’t change it. So it’s not been great and I know that.
‘I hear people saying I came for £27million and have done nothing. I want to show the club they didn’t pay so much money for nothing.’
Arnautovic’s exit from Stoke was rancorous, with manager Mark Hughes railing at his suggestion he was joining a bigger club.
‘I will never say a bad word about Stoke,’ said the player. ‘I respect MarkHughes and I know the fans were upset. Stoke did well, always top 10, but come on, history tells us this is the bigger club. You know that, too, even though you can’t say, don’t you?
‘People at Stoke say in pre-season that I was faking an injury. I wasn’t. I twisted my knee.
‘The problem is that people think once and talk 10 times. It’s better to think 10 times before you talk once.’ IF ARNAUTOVIC’S move to West Ham left behind some bitterness, it pales compared to what he left in his wake at Werder Bremen. The Austrian was unhappy in Germany and it appears some people there didn’t like him much, either. ‘In Bremen a lot of stuff was my fault but even when it was not my fault it was portrayed as my fault,’ he recalled. ‘ The German police were actually after me when I was first in Stoke. They had put pictures of my face on the trees in Bremen and said: “Find this guy”. They said I had an ¤80 fine to pay or something. But I spoke to my lawyer and I didn’t owe anything.’ If this all sounds a little haphazard then it fits with the first half of Arnautovic’s career and indeed his young life. Born and raised in the north Vienna suburb of Floridsdorf to a Serbian father and an Austrian mother, Arnautovic switched clubs five times between the ages of six and 16.
‘Everywhere they threw me out,’ revealed Arnautovic. ‘I didn’t give a f*** about what I did. I didn’t care about anyone or listen to nobody, only my father or mother.
‘I would fight my coaches and say: “Who are you to scream or shout at me? Are you my dad? Talk to me normally”.
‘Everywhere I went, Rapid Vienna or Austria Vienna, there was always a problem. I just wanted a coach who said: “Just go out and win us the game”.’
Away from football, Arnautovic hung out with his friends in Floridsdorf. Turks, Croats, Serbians. Football was the main pastime but there was other stuff, too.
‘My parents tried but I chose the other way — to be on the street,’ he admitted. ‘I wasn’t a gangster or anything but two friends went to jail. Nobody was killed but it was fights on the street and things.
‘When you are on the street, if someone walks towards you it’s better to look down but we were always looking at people in the eye to try to provoke something.
‘So we would fight. Then some of them started robbing. I am happy I got away as that wasn’t a good time. I was telling my friends: “Don’t go in that house to rob or that shop as you will end up in jail”.
‘I told them to go and work and have a good life. Robbing someone is not a good life.
‘ But look, let’s not exaggerate, most of the time we were just in the park playing football. Football was everything.’
If there was some anger, contradiction and confusion mixed up in the young Arnautovic, then there was some fear, too.
‘If I had continued to be that person I was then, I wouldn’t be here now,’ he admitted.
‘Yeah, I was scared that a career in football would never happen if I carried on.
‘I knew I had to go away and see some different things and calm down.’ ARNAUTOVIC’S first experience of English football was a trial at Nottingham Forest when he was 16. ‘I
‘I was late three times in one day for Jose so he gave me his watch. I still have it!’
‘Don’t judge me after just four games. Judge me at the end of the season’
scored two goals and made two assists,’ he recalled. ‘But the youth coach said they needed someone small and strong like Wayne Rooney. I didn’t even know who Rooney was. I told that coach he would dream about me one day.’
Soon after that, a move from Austria to Steve McClaren’s FC Twente in Holland started his career.
‘I had never heard of it and was saying I wanted to play for Barcelona or Real Madrid but they sent me there because there was a good academy,’ said Arnautovic. ‘It really worked.’
In Holland on a fortnight’s trial, the teenager was offered terms after two days. It was a pivotal moment. He stayed for four years before a move to Carlo Ancelotti’s Chelsea in the summer of 2009 fell through because of a broken foot.
‘They said they would buy me in December but I said no,’ he said. ‘Then Jose Mourinho called and I went to Inter for a year on loan.’
In Milan, Arnautovic shared a flat with Mario Balotelli. ‘He can be serious and can be a gentleman, all good, but if he doesn’t like someone he will destroy them,’ he said.
‘He can make you look so bad, you know, but he just wants to be the star — the best — and he is trying so hard. I don’t know what stops him, really.’
Arnautovic played only three times in Serie A — partly because of injury — but says Mourinho had offered him a five-year deal before leaving for Real Madrid. Mourinho’s successor Rafael Benitez did not follow that up and instead a permanent deal to Bremen came next — and so did some unhappiness.
Arnautovic fell out with everyone in Germany. Coaches, media, team-mates, the police.
He was even sent off for trying to kick a ball at a referee’s head, something he insisted this week was a complete accident. ‘I was aiming away from him,’ he said.
But in England he has been known largely for his excellent football. Married to Sarah with two daughters — Emilia and Alicia — he said life is different now.
‘I had a bad time in Germany but Stoke took me and I am grateful still,’ he said. ‘No one knew me here and that was good. I was very quiet as I had to start from new and focus. I was just at home with my family and didn’t go out late and do stupid things.
‘In Germany, I couldn’t cope and my head just turned. Here it’s calm and I owe my family for that.
‘When I had the red card and was sick, I was very down. Nobody could talk to me. I was just upset, you know. It’s hard for them at home when I am like that.
‘I want my kids to be proud of their dad and not to go to school and hear abuse. One day they will read many things about me and I would like it to be about football.’
Arnautovic is an expressive interviewee, forthright and with a sense of humour. He reflects openly on his own mistakes but contradictions remain.
It’s hard to believe him when he says he does not care about criticism and he denies some stories written about him in the past, including some in which he has been directly quoted.
But he does not duck other issues, such as my suggestion that he often looks unhappy on the field. ‘If my defenders saw me smiling they would think I was a clown,’ he countered. ‘I want to do everything perfect so if I miss a pass it makes me angry. I am not angry because someone doesn’t pass to me or the fans are booing.
‘It’s just me and my personality and I hope everybody understands this.’
What is clear during a 50-minute conversation is that Arnautovic understands the need to prove himself at West Ham pretty soon. If his career does not take him where he feels it should, he will be a long time getting over it.
‘I would change many things from when I was young but I am also happy and grateful that I am here,’ he said. ‘I am not finished. Things outside football have stopped me and I didn’t concentrate or focus back then.
‘I am 28 and still not where I want to be. I am trying hard to get there and I won’t stop. I want to show people — especially the haters — what I am capable of and bring this club up with everything I have got.
‘Don’t judge me after four games. Judge me at the end.’
And what of his time-keeping? Has that improved?
‘Of course,’ he laughed. ‘My kids wake me up. I can’t be late any more. It’s impossible.’