I’d lock myself away at home and binge drink for days to try to forget the rage and pain
Wayne Rooney bares his soul in his most revealing interview yet
WAYNE ROONEY scored more goals for England and for Manchester United than any other player. For a short time, in his youth, it felt as if he could be anything he wanted to be; a rival to Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. At Euro 2004, he played like a force of nature and it seemed that a door was opening to a time when England could be kings. But even then, there was a shadow over him. There was always a shadow.
Rooney, England’s most gifted player since Paul Gascoigne, has never talked about the anger and the pain that ran through so much of his playing career and made him react to scoring some of his greatest goals as if they were acts of revenge against an unseen enemy. There was anger in his celebrations as well as his disappointments and it is only in recent years that that anger has ebbed away.
Even a casual observer of his career could see it ate at him; that it ruled him on the pitch; that it led him into misadventures off the pitch; that he was persecuted by it but that he needed it to function as a superstar footballer. Everyone who watched him play knew that the rage was there but this is the first time he has explained it. Maybe it is because he has finally exorcised it that he is ready to talk about its source and what fuelled it.
It is no coincidence that the opening scene of ‘Rooney’, the documentary about his life and career that is released this week, looks like an homage to Raging Bull as Rooney, his face hidden by a hood, thuds punch after punch into a heavy bag that hangs in the garage of his home in Cheshire.
The rage he felt was rage against a machine that took a kid out of the rough, tough, hurly burly of life in a deprived area of Liverpool, abandoned him in the spotlight at the age of 16, mocked him for the way he chewed gum on the television, satirised his accent, derided his appearance, patronised him and still expected him to cope.
It is a rage against people like Jonathan Ross, the chat-show host, who delighted in inanity and casual cruelty and who characterised Rooney and his parents as sub-humans. It is a rage against the media, who highlighted his off-the-field misdemeanours. It is a rage that made him lock himself away for days on end when he was at United, drinking himself into oblivion so he could forget.
Rooney, 36, has reached a point in his life where he is winning new admirers every day with the job he is doing as the manager of Derby County and where it feels to him as if it is a relief to talk about the anger that once threatened to consume him. Conditioned by his background to bottle things up; to refuse to show vulnerability; to let the pressure build up until he blew, he has reached a point where he has let go of the rage and the pain.
He has seen therapists, although never for a prolonged period of time. When former England manager Steve McClaren introduced psychologist Bill Beswick to the squad and suggested they have sessions with him, Rooney erupted with anger because he thought it was a ruse to get him some help. ‘That’s where I was at that point,’ he says. To listen to him as he sits in a room high in a London skyscraper, and to understand that what he was going through for much of his career as the best English player of his generation was more of an ordeal than anything else, sometimes feels uncomfortable.
Maybe that is why when Rooney talks about the end of his playing career, there is little regret in his words. It is only now, as a father, as a husband, as a manager, later in his life, that he is finding peace.
‘We grew up in a council estate in Croxteth,’ says Rooney, ‘and when my grandad died, I spent a lot of time in my nan’s house on Armill Road. I was almost living with my nan. My mum was looking after me and my two brothers. I know now that we were hard work. There was a lot of negativity in terms of my mum getting frustrated with us as kids, messing around all the time, smashing things in the house and my nan lived in the same road, a few houses down.
‘She died just before I made my debut for Everton in 2002. I was really close to her. I was devastated when she died. She was a big character. When she died, it was a big loss to all the family. She would always buy football kits for me. Loads of the family would spend the day at my nan’s and then, of a night, when everybody had gone, I would go back over to my nan’s and sit up late with her. I used to watch Prisoner Cell Block H with her all the time.
‘My mum and dad never had a lot of money at all. It was difficult growing up there. I was always getting into fights and arguments in that area. To go from that to having to deal with becoming a Premier League player at 16 and an international player was something I wasn’t prepared for. I had never
even thought about the other side of being a football player. I wasn’t prepared for that part of life.
‘It took a long time for me to get used to that and figure out how to deal with it. It was like being thrown in somewhere where you are just not comfortable. That was tough for me. I had made a lot of mistakes when I was younger, some in the press and some not in the press, whether that’s fighting or whatever.
For me to deal with that, deal with stuff that was in the newspapers, deal with the manager at the time, deal with family at the time, was very difficult.
‘In my early years at Manchester United, probably until we had my first son, Kai, I locked myself away really. I never went out. There were times you’d get a couple of days off from football and I would actually lock myself away and just drink, to try to take all that away from my mind. People might know that I liked a drink at times or went out but there was a lot more to it than just that. It was what was going on in my head.
‘Now, people would be more empowered to speak about that kind of thing. Back then, in my head and with other players, there was no way I could go into the United dressing room and start saying “This is how I am feeling” because you just wouldn’t do it. Then you would end up suffering internally rather than letting your thoughts out.
‘Locking myself away made me forget some of the issues I was dealing with. It was like a binge. Normally, that’s with a group of lads but this was a self-binge, basically, which helps you forget things but, when you come out of it, you are going back to work and it is still there, so it was doing more damage than good.’
The former England skipper and his wife, Coleen, confronted his issues in the documentary, which will be released on Amazon Prime on Friday. Some predicted the film would be an airbrushed public relations exercise but it is far from that. In many places, it is disarmingly honest. It does not have the cool chic of the ‘Senna’ or ‘Diego Maradona’ documentaries but it would not have been true to its subject if it had.
Instead, it is unsparing and raw. There are moments when Rooney and his wife sit together and talk about the times he has embarrassed her with behaviour that she describes as ‘unacceptable’. She talks about his relationship with alcohol and her unease about the effect some of his friends have on him. He talks about the culture of fighting that he grew up with, the passions that ruled him and his gratitude he has come out the other side and shed so much of the anger he felt.
‘It was just a build-up of everything,’ says Rooney, ‘pressure of playing for your country, playing
I wasn’t prepared for that part of life... for becoming a Premier League player at 16
It was almost as if being right in my head took a bit away from my game
for Manchester United, the pressure of some of the stuff which came out in the newspapers about my personal life, just trying to deal with all that pressure which builds up. I was trying to figure out how to deal with it by myself. Growing up on a council estate, you would never actually go and speak to anyone. You would always find a way to deal with it yourself. It was trying to cope with it yourself rather than asking for help.
‘Early on in my career, I played with a lot more anger and picked up the odd red card. The anger was all the time when I was drinking, when I was having these moments. Still constantly in my head, I was raging. When I learned to control it, it took that away from me. It was almost as if being right in my head took a bit away from my game. Not being right in my head gave me that added unpredictability.
‘I was always angry and aggressive when I was growing up. That was obvious when I came into football. It was obvious I had some issues which I had to try and deal with and now, thankfully, I have them all under control. You are always taught to fight for what you want when you are growing up and take what you want. You never got given anything.
‘In some ways, that was good because it helped me play and a lot of the anger I felt was because I did things that enabled people to say things and write things about me that wasn’t really me but were isolated incidents I had got myself involved in. That was when I was drinking and hiding away. There
was a lot of anger and pain. When something happened, it was always involving drink. It’s never when I’m sober. That’s what I had to figure out: the places I go and the things I do. My relationship with drink now is fine. No problems. I still have a drink now and again. Not like I used to. Not like when I was playing. It’s well in control. It was never at a stage where I thought I was an alcoholic. If I saw a couple of days’ window, I thought “right, that’s a couple of days where I can go at it and try and forget things”. I would never be going into training drunk.
‘Part of the problem I have is that I do trust people. That was exactly my first message to the players here at Derby: “I will give you my trust but I need it back”. Once that trust is broken, it is very difficult to recover. Yeah, people want stuff off you but I take responsibility for that because some of the stuff I have done are my decisions and that’s me leaving myself open. I should have learned quicker than I did to adjust to that. Over the last 15 years, I haven’t had very many nights out. I might have had 10 nights out but the ones I have had... four or five of them have given people big exclusives.
‘In terms of therapy, I have spoken to a few different people. I have never done a period of time where I have done two years with someone and it has been ongoing. What I learned was I could feel it coming, like an explosion. I used to hold almost everything in and keep it to myself and it would build up. I would deny it but Coleen could see it coming every time. I would say “F*** it” and go out and make silly mistakes. I learned that, when I felt that coming, I needed to sit down and talk to someone. That calmed things down. I spoke to Coleen quite a few times, her mum and dad and my mum and dad. I only did that once when it got to a bad moment.
‘And it could be anything: that you weren’t playing well; the pressure you put on yourself, which I always tried to hide. Sometimes I tried to hide it with over-confidence. Sometimes that’s to mask the pressure you feel. It could have been when I had done something wrong off the field and pressure builds and even going into the local shops, you want to hide from everyone. It is embarrassing.
‘I’d get a couple of days off and I wouldn’t want to be near anyone. I would sit in the house and for two days, I would just drink. Then on the third day, when I was back in training, I would have to dust myself down and put eye drops in and get through that week’s training. I was in a really bad place. Then I had to get through training, through games. It was constant for about three or four years in that initial period of being at United.
‘That was the heart of it. And it was arguably the best I played in that period. That was part of the problem because you are playing OK and you think you can get away with it and that had an impact on me at the back end of my time at Man United because you can’t do that as an athlete.’
Rooney talks about the anger in his documentary, too. Even one of the clips of him playing football in his childhood shows him being brutally taken out by another kid as he closes in on goal. In the footage of Euro 2004, there are images of him smashing into France defender Lilian Thuram in a challenge he accepts would earn him a red card in today’s football.
In another clip, Rooney discusses the metatarsal injury he sustained against Chelsea in April 2006 and says he blames himself for it. ‘I changed
my studs before the game,’ he says. ‘I put longer studs in because I wanted to hurt someone.’
There is footage of a clash between Rooney and John Terry that leaves Terry writhing in pain, his sock soaked in blood. ‘If Chelsea won a point, they won the league,’ says Rooney. ‘At that time, I couldn’t take it. The studs were legal. But they were bigger than what I would normally wear.’
He was injured later in the game when his boot twisted in the turf. In another clip, he says that when he finally got to the World Cup in Germany, he suffered a tear in his groin muscle at the end of his first training session in Baden-Baden but was so desperate to play that he did not tell anyone. He had a disappointing tournament and was sent off for a stamp on Ricardo Carvalho during England’s quarterfinal defeat by Portugal.
As for Jonathan Ross, Rooney is still stung by the way he mocked an image of him and his parents emerging from a dip in the ocean during a holiday to Cancun in 2003. ‘That’s the one thing that really p***ed me off,’ says Rooney. ‘Still, to this day, if I saw Jonathan Ross, I would speak to him and ask him why. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have spoken to him. I would have hit him. If you are having a go at me, no problem. I’m in the public eye. I get it. But not my parents. I felt that was really unfair.’
He looks back on it all with a degree of equanimity. Things are different. He has four sons and his two eldest boys, Kai and Klay, play for United’s young age group academy teams. One scene from ‘Rooney’ shows him playing Snakes and Ladders with third son, Kit, and refusing to let the six-year-old boy beat him.
‘If you want it, you have to be able to take it,’ he says. ‘I say to them, “if you can’t beat me now, you need to learn how to beat me. You need to learn how to get better”. And they get annoyed with it but that’s life. If I’m giving them things, nobody else is going to be giving them things in the outside world.’
He is not particularly looking forward to the premiere of the documentary at a Manchester cinema on Wednesday because he still distrusts the spotlight but he and Coleen will be there.
‘I wanted to speak about the good times and the bad times,’ he says. ‘What I have wanted for a long time is for people to actually know me as a person, not a football player. I wanted people to know me as a son and a dad and a husband. There have been mistakes in the past, which I have always held my hands up to. When people get to know me as a person, they see a different person, I think. It was tough for me to do it and for Coleen to do it. When tough moments have come up, we have spoken about them and figured
I could feel it coming, like an explosion. I kept it all in and it built up
I just wanted people to know me as a person, not a player
out how we’re going to get through it. The first thing you see is her forgiving some of the stuff I’ve done but then we’ve always been open about it and figured out what is best for us as a
family and we’ve taken that into the film.
‘My main concern about the documentary was that I’m quite a boring person.
I don’t live a life where I’m out constantly or a very excitable life. I have always kept myself to myself. The fame comes from the football, which I have never wanted but it comes. I go to work and I come home.
‘I have always had an image that I knew wasn’t me but I have put myself in that position with things I have done. I am different from that. It was nice to get some things out and off my chest. It is almost like speaking to a therapist where it was nice to get it out and know everyone will see that side of me.’
The transformation in him has encouraged those close to him, the way he is loving the challenge at Derby, the way so much of the anger has fallen away. This is a man who is working harder than ever but this is also a man who has finally found some peace.