Women and fast cars were my downfall ... now I have seen the light
WHEN the wheels came off Christian Nade’s Hearts career, there was no shortage of spares to call on. A three-year stay in Edinburgh was conspicuous for excess and self-indulgence. Women, parties, holidays with complete strangers, good food, junk food and cars. Most of all, cars.
‘I had an Audi Q7, a Lamborghini, an Aston Martin, a Cadillac, a Lincoln and a Merc,’ he tells Sportsmail, running out of fingers on his left hand. ‘I had six cars. My mum was so mad at me over that.’
The bills — like the cars — were outrageous. Nade is back in the SPFL Premiership with Hamilton just months after he defaulted on £98,000 worth of outstanding finance on the Cadillac and Lamborghini.
‘Towards the end at Hearts I had a moment where I thought, “woah, maybe I went too far’’,’ he admits now. ‘With the cars and with other things.’
The ‘other things’ were numerous. Some were material. Others, he explains, of a more personal nature.
‘There are players who cannot have sex before a game because it affects their performance. Some must abstain for 24 hours before a game and I am this kind of player. I know I should. And I knew that back at Hearts as well. But I didn’t care. I did it anyway.’
The surprise here is that people always thought his hunger for food exceeded his appetite for the fairer sex.
Yet the figure sitting before Sportsmail in the Hamilton media room is lithe and muscled; a figure far removed from his popular image. Once compared to a ‘fat student’ by former Hearts manager Csaba Laszlo, Nade is exasperated by outdated stereotypes and painfully self-conscious. Unusually, he admits that the j i bes of supporters upset him deeply.
‘The trouble is that sometimes I want to know what fans think. I really shouldn’t, but I do.
‘My brother showed me some stuff from a Dundee message board once. I was driving at the time. I nearly crashed.
‘Fans were saying the body vest and my shirt were far too tight. They were saying, “you’re slow, you’re fat”. It was difficult.
‘ I had this moment where I thought this has to change’.’
He employed a personal trainer, acquired a six-pack and asked God to hold his towel.
When a man rediscovers his faith it rarely happens in the fleshpots of Thailand. But a two-year spell in the Far East was a critical stop-off in an improbable tour of the world’s footballing outposts. Sheffield United and an unseemly end at Hearts were followed by spells in Cyprus, Methil, Dundee and Kirkcaldy. Songkhram marked his epiphany. The moment when he realised his soul had l eft the building.
‘Nothing is real in Thailand,’ ponders Nade with a shake of the head. ‘I didn’t like the women there. It wasn’t for me.
‘I didn’t want to see anybody. I was living with two team-mates in a condo and for two-and-ahalf years I didn’t go out. That’s when I started to return to religion and pray.’
He had always believed in God in a loose, non-practising way. In Thailand his prayers began to fixate on a return to Scotland. He had l eft Sheffield in 2010 and signed f or Hearts with one hand while holding his nose with the other. It had ended badly. But t hat, he concedes now, owed more to a bad attitude than the standard of Scottish football.
‘I deeply regret how I was when I was younger,’ he admits. ‘I invited too many people into my life I shouldn’t have.
‘I was not professional enough. I didn’t take the football seriously. I should be a much better player than I am and would have been if I had worked harder.
‘It was worst when I signed for Hearts. I should have l eft for Crystal Palace after six months but Hearts wouldn’t let me go. I should just have walked. But I got more angry and I didn’t play how I should have.
‘I liked Edinburgh, but I came from an English Premier League club to the Scottish Premier League. I was a big player with a big reputation when I was 21 or 22.
‘But I didn’t take Hearts seriously. I started to party. I don’t drink or smoke or do things like that, but I would fly back to Paris after games and party i n nightclubs until morning with a bottle of water in my hand.’ Oddly, for a self confessed playboy, alcohol was never his bag. Nor drugs and narcotics. ‘Women were my thing,’ he grins ruefully. ‘But back then I wasn’t a guy any woman would want to be in a relationship with.’ Asked what it was that made him bad news for the maidens of Edinburgh, he is blunt on his failings.
‘In Sheffield I wanted to work hard with my team-mates so they
would not look down on me. When I came to Hearts, I was the opposite. Instead of me looking up to the other players, I became big-headed and looked down on my team-mates.
‘I didn’t think Scottish football was s***, exactly. But it was lower than where I came from in English football. That killed me.’
His response was to embark on the kind of reckless, devil-maycare expenditure and hedonism usually seen in a Kardashian.
‘Cars, women, food, travelling,’ he lists. ‘I would go on holiday with people I didn’t even know.
‘I would get my friends and rent a villa in Miami and say, “look, the house has eight bedrooms”. My close friends only filled four. So we invited strangers to make up the numbers.’
The tolerance of friends was borne partly of self-interest. The strangers invited were young, usually obliging, women.
‘ Women, men, everyone,’ he clarifies quickly.
Yet t he open- door poli c y extended only so far. When the last-minute invites to Miami were going out, he omitted to ask his own relatives.
‘A lot of my family turned their backs on me because of my lifestyle,’ he admits.
He has healed some of the rifts, but not all. His brother and sister are regular guests and his formidable mother, Madeleine, who kicked him out for wearing fake ear-rings as a teenager, always forgives in the end.
‘It’s always been OK with my mum because I told her the right things. It’s more uncles and aunts who like to talk still.’
There were others with whom Nade has also failed to see eye to eye, his Hearts career ending five years ago when he took a punch at his Hearts team-mate Ian Black.
‘Listen, I did punch him, I don’t deny it. But I missed. It wasn’t a proper punch. But Hearts changed their attitude to me after that.’
He had signed a new two-year deal on less money, but claims he was asked to lower his wages further still as punishment.
The leaking of the story to the media also prompted a full and frank exchange of views with former Hearts boss Jim Jefferies.
‘I was really mad about it,’ said Nade. ‘No one outside the dressing room should have heard about it, but it was all over the papers.
‘I had already agreed to sign for a lower salary with better bonuses. But when the Blackie incident happened, they tried to make it lower still. I said, “No, that’s a joke.’”
He had no legal recourse because neither he nor his agent could produce copies of the recently signed contract. He left Hearts and embarked on a period of deep soul searching.
‘I spent two or three months in
A lot of my family turned their backs on me because of my lifestyle
London j ust walking, walking, walking myself.
‘People have always had the wrong idea about me. I am quite shy and quiet. I care what people think. I really do care. That’s why I decided to change how I lived.’
He moved to Cyprus, then Thailand. Where the temptations of Bangkok might once have been ruinous, they now ushered in a period of sombre self-analysis and spiritual reflection.
‘I felt my career had gone wrong. But I knew I would come back to Scotland. I prayed and prayed for it. And everything I prayed for happened and I thought, “Oh, God is helping.”’
An old friend, former East Fife coach Willie Aitchison, asked if he would swap the Land of Smiles for the kingdom of linoleum tiles.
The move was not a success. Gary Naysmith came in and Nade was deemed surplus to requirements.
‘I was close to giving up. But when God has something in store for you, nothing can change it.’
He secured a trial with Dundee, spent six months at Dens Park, t hen had a se a s on in t he Championship at Raith Rovers, scoring a winning goal against Rangers at Ibrox. All the while he prayed at the legendary Zion Praise Centre manned by Pastor Joe Nwokoye and Pastor Marvin Andrews, once of Rangers, for a return to the top level of Scottish football.
‘I knew I would be back in the Premiership at s ome point. Definitely.
‘Why? Because I am so confident. People mistake that for arrogance but it’s not.’
He admits his prayers are greedy. His faith absolute. He does not hope — but knows — he will return to the upper levels of English football.
‘There is no doubt. It will happen. I will. Right now I am at the level where I should be. But I am just so confident in myself. You cannot expect people to have confidence in you if you have none in yourself.
‘But if I work harder with the facilities here and the coaches and staff, I will be a better player and I will be back to my best.
‘And if that doesn’t get me to the English Premiership, it will be the Championship.
‘I think I am going to surprise people. I know it. I just know.’