Graeme Souness: hard as nails
Liverpool’s Champagne Charlie reflects on his glittering career
Graeme Souness swaggers. He struts even when he’s sitting down. When he speaks, people listen. The 66-year-old Scot is a natural born leader. There were times during his brilliant career when it seemed like he was bent on heading a suicide mission, but Souness was the greatest captain the game has seen. Fearless, uncompromising and sometimes brutal, former team-mates talk about the man they still call ‘Champagne Charlie’ with awe. “It was all about leadership with Charlie,” said Steve Nicol, who played alongside him for Liverpool and Scotland. “Apart from the fact he was a superb, brilliant footballer.”
The great Diego Maradona agrees, recently naming Souness in this magazine as one of the two best British players of his generation (see FFT 301). The other was Bryan Robson, whose nickname was ‘Captain Fantastic’. Both were inspirational skippers but the Liverpool midfielder’s exploits – and medal haul – push him above his Manchester United counterpart.
Souness has brought his combative nature to punditry. He is as likely to dive in two-footed in a Sky studio as he was out on the pitch. His forthright criticism of Paul Pogba last season was entertaining, but anyone who thinks this is a case of a bitter ex-professional lashing out at a flamboyant young star is mistaken. The analysis is based on cold, hard, football logic.
“I don’t think his lifestyle is the problem,” he tells FFT. “Pogba has got exceptional physical attributes. It’s a classic case of too much too soon. United made a big mistake letting Zlatan Ibrahimovic leave, as he had high standards. Players listen to people who have been there and done it. Ibrahimovic worked hard and set a great example. I don’t think Pogba will ever fulfil his potential.”
The Scot has no issues with the 26-year-old’s off-the-pitch activities. After all, he’s hardly one to preach.
“I was a wee bit flash in the way I dressed and the cars I drove,” he says. “But you can get away with it when you’re doing the business.
“I learnt at Liverpool that there was a time to enjoy life and a time to work. We had fun – there was nothing we missed out on.”
FROM NEW BOY TO KING PIN
His nickname was born after boss Bob Paisley lambasted his players in the wake of a poor performance in the late 1970s. “A bunch of playboys and Champagne Charlies,” fumed the Liverpool manager. The moniker stuck.
Souness, like most of his team-mates, was a regular fixture in Merseyside’s clubland and regularly spotted around town. It helped keep him grounded.
“I actually lived in Liverpool when I played – most of the side were up in Southport or on the Wirral,” he continues. “People were never slow to give an opinion if things weren’t going well. The modern player doesn’t get a chance to mix with the people of the city. Agents and press officers protect them.”
Born in Edinburgh, Souness began his career at Tottenham in 1968, but after a stint in the North American Soccer League with Montreal Olympique, he moved to Middlesbrough four years later. He earned a reputation for being a man with a delicate touch, pinpoint passing range and nasty streak, and all three attributes attracted Paisley in 1978.
“Most midfields are made up of a buzzer, a cruncher and a spreader,” said the Liverpool gaffer after paying a club-record £350,000 to bring Souness to Anfield. “This boy is all three.”
“I was 23 when I went to Liverpool,” he says. “I relished it – I loved being challenged every day in training and working with players who moved quicker and thought quicker.”
It was here that Souness started forming the attitudes that would later define his career as a player, a manager and a pundit.
“It was brutal,” he says. “My first game was at West Bromwich Albion. None of the staff had said anything to me, so in the dressing room I asked Bob how he wanted me to play. He said, ‘Fuck off, we’ve paid all this money for you and you’re asking how to play?’”
Anfield’s Boot Room brains trust were harsh taskmasters, and Paisley and his lieutenants – Joe Fagan, Ronnie Moran and Reuben Bennett – were savage.
“Joe used to say, ‘We’ve told you once, told you twice, we won’t tell you again. You’ll be on your way out the door’. You had to learn fast.”
The Boot Room’s impossibly high standards had a huge impact on Souness. “Ronnie was the single biggest influence on my career,” he says. “He was the moaner-in-chief. His attitude was, ‘Yeah you’re good, but not as good as the players we’ve had in the past’. Him and Joe would be talking about next season within 10 minutes of the final whistle of the last game. As soon as you won a trophy, they stopped caring about it. It was straight on to the next. If there was only one trophy for the pre-season team photograph, it was a disaster for them.”
CHAMPAGNE CHARLIE
While Souness wore the captain’s armband – between 1981 and 1984 – the team won at least two trophies every season, culminating with the European Cup in Rome.
Champagne Charlie enjoyed flaunting the success, too. Even the relentlessly downbeat Paisley embraced his skipper’s ostentatious
“A dressing room full of footballers is like a pack of wolves. They smell blood. There’s an animal instinct at work. They hunt the ball down like a pack, get it and then want to show off. And Souness was an alpha male.” Craig Johnston Liverpool 1981-88
image. “Graeme tosses up before kick-off with a gold-plated credit card,” said the manager.
The first time he led the team to the title, in 1981-82, he accepted the delicate, cherished championship trophy nicknamed ‘The Lady’ as if it was a meaningless trinket. He brandished it one-handed in front of the Kop end and then casually threw the priceless artefact to Ronnie Whelan. Anfield gasped. This was his team, his stadium, his trophy.
In that era the Liverpool squad was ruled by the Scottish trio of Souness, Kenny Dalglish and Alan Hansen. “It was a harsh, harsh dressing room,” admits Souness.
Johnston puts it in much starker terms. “The Scots set the tone,” said the Australian. “They decided what was funny, what was acceptable, who played well and who played badly. They were like strict schoolmasters. They understood how you had to behave if you were a group of men who wanted to win things.”
There was no place for shirkers at Anfield. “They were warriors,” added Johnston. “There was a bit of a Braveheart culture about them. They were clansmen. If you were tired, not contributing or slacking, they didn’t want to know you. They kept everyone in line. They kept the rest professional. They were savage about getting the job done in the most direct way.”
If the captain was savage to his team-mates, opponents knew they had to be careful, too. Much-travelled former Leicester and England striker Frank Worthington claimed: “He’s the nastiest, most ruthless man in soccer. Don Revie’s bunch of assassins at Leeds were bad enough, but there’s a streak in Souness that puts him top of the list.”
Souness is unrepentant, though. “People like to see a physical challenge,” he says. “Look at the success of boxing and mixed martial arts. In those days, every team had two or three players who were willing to go down that road. You had to fight for the right to play, as every team had men who’d take you on.
“When I was 19 at Middlesbrough, we were up against Leeds. They had Billy Bremner and Johnny Giles. They were tough. I got involved with them and didn’t see Terry Yorath coming in from the side. He whacked me. I learnt a lot that afternoon.”
The challenge sparked a gladiatorial clash with Yorath at every subsequent meeting of the pair throughout their playing days. “We had some great battles together,” admits the Scot, relishing the memory. “He was the one I had most fun with.”
Yorath was brave.
YOU WOULDN’T LIKE HIM WHEN HE’S ANGRY
It was a mistake to cross Champagne Charlie. Those who did often ended up regretting it. The most notorious incident was in the 1984 European Cup semi-final first leg at home to
Dinamo Bucharest. Liverpool were leading 1-0 with 20 minutes to go, but the Romanian side were stubborn and awkward opponents. Their captain, midfielder Lica Movila, was particularly irritating and Souness – in the Cold War terms of the period – decided to go nuclear.
Nicol, who was watching on the substitutes’ bench, takes up the story.
“The ball got cleared from Dinamo’s penalty area and almost everyone followed it,” he said. “I was watching the middle and just saw a red blur, an arm swing and the Romanian go down. You couldn’t see it clearly but I’d seen enough. There was a punch. It was a beauty.”
The substitute knew the offender’s identity without a second’s thought. “It was a classic Souness moment,” said Nicol.
Movila’s jaw was broken. While the referee and Dinamo team-mates gathered around the stricken skipper, Souness was standing 30 yards away looking a picture of innocence. “It was the best punch I ever threw,” he says with pride in his voice.
As the players walked off, Movila was waiting pitchside. “He was standing at the mouth of the tunnel with a towel around his head and his face packed with ice,” remembers Souness. “There were two big fellas, one either side of him. They looked like cops and were scowling. It was all a bit of a laugh. Well, not for him...”
There was one problem, though: the second leg. A lynch mob was waiting in Romania two weeks later when Liverpool arrived to protect their 1-0 advantage.
Souness’ detractors will point to the sucker punch as his signature character reference, but they would be wrong. The semi-final second leg in Bucharest distilled Champagne Charlie’s personality to its essence.
The reception in the Romanian capital was hostile. “At the airport, people were screaming at us,” recalled Nicol. “It took us a little while to realise it was all about Souness.”
The chance to have some fun at the captain’s expense was too good to turn down.
“Once we’d twigged it was all about Charlie, that was it,” continued Nicol. “We got on the coach and were all pointing at him, directing the angry mob to where he was sitting so they could bang on the window. We were laughing and pointing. It went on for the whole trip.”
Souness handled the stormy situation with his usual aplomb.
“I was sitting there, and suddenly this fella came up to the window and his face was level with mine,” he says. “It must have made him about 7ft tall. He was making gestures like he was gouging out eyes.”
The Liverpool captain was always quick to turn the banter on his team-mates. “I looked around and then pointed at Alan Kennedy,” he adds. “Alan also had a moustache, curly hair and was about my size. He could easily have been mistaken for me if you didn’t know him. ‘That’s Souness!’ I was shouting at the giant, shaking my head and directing him towards Alan. ‘Not me, him!’”
The baiting continued at the hotel, with the entire Liverpool team pointing at the captain and enjoying his discomfort. There was no let up at the stadium, either.
“There were all these daft banners saying what they were going to do to me,” says the Scot. “Alan Hansen worked out that whenever the ball came to me in the warm-up, the crowd would boo, so everyone kept passing it to me. Every time it arrived at my feet, there was this crescendo of noise.” To aggravate home fans even more, Souness started stepping over and dummying the ball. “He was absolutely loving it,” said Kennedy. Before kick-off, the Romanians made their intentions abundantly clear.
“Their captain had played upfront at Anfield,” says Souness. “He was of a similar shape and size to me, and had curly hair as well. He was aggressive at the coin toss and then dropped deep to play in midfield. He pointed at me and then at himself, as if to say, ‘This is between us now’. I gave him the thumbs-up.”
There was only ever going to be one winner. Within 12 minutes, Souness fed a delicate ball
“MOST MIDFIELDS ARE MADE UP OF A BUZZER, A CRUNCHER AND A SPREADER – HE IS ALL THREE”
into the penalty area and Ian Rush effectively killed the tie. Liverpool won 2-1 on the night, and although the Scot’s socks were shredded by opposition studs, none of the Romanians landed any real blows.
“They were never going to get him,” smiled Kennedy. “He was far too clever for them.”
ROMAN HOLIDAY
The entire 1983-84 season was a masterpiece in leadership from Souness.
Liverpool won the League Cup – the skipper scoring the winner in the final against Everton – and league title, and capped the campaign by lifting the European Cup to secure a treble for the first time.
They had to do it the hard way, by beating Roma on penalties in their own backyard. It was Champagne Charlie’s final appearance in a Liverpool shirt and he dominated the game’s tempo throughout the 120 minutes. However, his finest moment came before kick-off. The Stadio Olimpico was a hostile place and home fans were in a frenzy.
“It was the most intimidating sight I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Hansen.
The team wandered out to inspect the pitch. They walked down to the 8,000 Liverpool fans at the north end of the ground, then began to head back to their dressing room. Souness was having none of that. Instead he ambled down to the feared Curva Sud where the Roma ultras were massed and confronted the angry crowd. “I wanted to test their rage,” he says.
“I took a picture of Charlie strolling along towards them without a care in the world,” said Johnston, a keen amateur photographer. “He looked like an Italian male model, full of style and arrogance.”
“It was a ‘fuck you’ moment,” says Souness. “It said, ‘We’ll take you on and your team’. I never felt we were going to come unstuck.”
Hoisting the European Cup was his last act as a Liverpool player after 358 appearances. He was soon back in Italy, spending two years at Sampdoria alongside England striker Trevor Francis. “In some ways it was a bit frustrating,” he says. Liverpool reached another European Cup final the following year and Souness had to watch events at Heysel unfold from Genoa.
“We’d play on Sundays and have a practice game against an amateur side on Thursdays,” he says. “We’d beat them 16-0 or something. I remember sitting there on the Wednesday, waiting to watch my mates play in Europe’s biggest match, thinking I should have been at a European Cup final. Instead I was turning out against a pub team the following night.”
The time in Italy made Souness reconsider his approach to fitness.
“It was a bit schoolboyish in some ways – too much tactics,” he admits. “But in terms of looking after yourself, it changed my thinking completely and I took that into management.”
He applied such knowledge after becoming Rangers player-manager in 1986. The spell at Ibrox was a huge success: the club won three league titles and four League Cups during his tenure. But arguably his greatest achievement in Scotland was breaking down the sectarian barriers by bringing in striker Mo Johnston, the first high-profile Catholic player to join Rangers. It was a groundbreaking act that still doesn’t receive the praise it deserves.
“When I got the job, one of the questions I was asked was, ‘Would you sign a Catholic?’ Of course I would. Everyone raised their eyes. I tried to get Ray Houghton and John Collins but they didn’t happen. Mo deserves credit for his bravery. It needed doing.”
ON THE BENCH
Souness’ next move didn’t go quite as well. Liverpool came calling after his good friend Dalglish resigned unexpectedly in 1991.
“I was the right man at the wrong time,” he says. “You don’t get a job at a big club unless they’re in trouble, so I should have stayed at Rangers. There was only one club I was going to leave for, but I went at the wrong time. Ego got the better of me. I did no due diligence.
“Hillsborough tore the heart out of the team. I was the first manager since Bill Shankly who had to make wholesale changes. It used to be two or three new signings every summer to keep things ticking along.”
The ideas that Souness brought back from the continent were less well received at Anfield than Ibrox. “At Rangers it was easy to get the message across,” he says. “They bought into it. It was the opposite at Liverpool, a much harder sell, because they’d had 25 years of success.”
The new boss tried to transform the culture of the club, but met with resistance. Just over a year into the job, the Scot was diagnosed with heart problems and required surgery. At that point he made the worst mistake of his
“REVIE’S BUNCH OF ASSASSINS AT LEEDS WERE BAD ENOUGH, BUT THERE’S A STREAK In SOUNESS THAT PUTS HIM TOP OF THE LIST”
career: an ill-advised exclusive interview with The Sun, a newspaper reviled for its coverage of Hillsborough. It was published on the third anniversary of the disaster. “My biggest regret,” he admits. It soured his relationship with fans and affected his status as a club legend.
A parting of the ways became inevitable. “I was only 38 when I got the Liverpool job,” he says, reflecting on his time in the dugout. “I made too many changes too soon.”
A series of management jobs followed – at Galatasaray, Southampton, Torino, Benfica, Blackburn and Newcastle – but Souness was never able to replicate his success at Ibrox. In retrospect, he wonders if all the lessons he learnt from the Boot Room boys in his early days as a player on Merseyside held him back.
“I only ever went on one coaching course, after I was sacked at Newcastle,” he reveals. “I took one thing from it: ‘Revisit, revisit, revisit’. You’d get told twice at Liverpool. I didn’t have that quality of player and tried to use Liverpool rules. Some players need telling every week.
“It was an area I got wrong, because I wasn’t prepared to tell them over and over again. I’d tell them, show them, but they’d keep making the same mistakes. That was an issue for me. Top players don’t need to be told every week. Maybe I got it wrong.”
Even in his mid-60s, Souness still looks fit enough to get out on a pitch. He’d probably improve a number of Premier League sides.
“Would I like to play now? I’d like to play any time,” he smiles. “It goes too quickly. When you’re in the middle of it, you think it will keep going on forever.”
And the Scot has little patience with those who claim players of his era would struggle in today’s game.
“The great players would be great any time, whether they were from the ’50s or the ’80s,” he insists. “There’s only ever a handful of top men. That never changes. Those players could do it any time.”
Souness would have enjoyed playing for the modern Liverpool and Manchester City sides, and would relish the playing surfaces.
“The game’s changed in two ways,” he says. “The pitches were a real leveller when I played. Some of them were terrible. You try moving the ball and playing one- or two-touch football on those pitches. You needed great technique.”
Law changes have made things easier for flair players, too. “The rules are very different,” he adds. “When we were in the dressing room, we knew the opposition were saying, ‘Let’s put a few on their arses and try to knock them off their game’. Take May’s FA Cup final – Watford couldn’t take that approach to City. Try playing tippy-tappy football when someone’s trying to chop you in half...
“The question should be: ‘Who today could have played in our generation?’ The best could do it in any era, but the game’s full of kidders now and they wouldn’t have got away with it.”
Such punchy opinions litter his every punditry appearance, his disdain for players who don’t live up to his standards making great viewing. “I had zero training as a pundit,” he says. “As players we were told not to mix with the press, even though we’d often have drinking sessions with the local reporters on Sundays. Now I’ve crossed the fence, I think access is terrible. I’d like to see players put more back in and help the people who gave them the wealth.”
Souness is as watchable on the small screen as he was as a player. On the pitch or in the studio, Champagne Charlie has always been the alpha male.