How did a World Cup star end up homeless on streets of London?
Extraordinary tale of Welsh footballer Paul James
PAUL JAMES holds out his woolly red hat and the man in the suit drops three coins into its depths before disappearing inside Embankment Station. A boy in a vampire costume hurries past and pulls a mock-scary face at the first Welshman to play at a World Cup since 1958. Another man shoots off to buy him a coffee from the nearby Starbucks.
Many catch the eye of the man smiling at them from under the chequered blanket only to snap their heads back and march on. Others hurry past without a glance towards the man who shared an international pitch with Glenn Hoddle and Gary Lineker and marked France’s Michel Platini in Mexico 86.
James is one of Wales’ — and Canada’s — most decorated footballers. He was born in Cardiff and grew up on his parents’ farm before the family moved to Toronto in 1980. Six years later he started all three of Canada’s group games in their first World Cup. In 1984, he lost on penalties to Brazil in the Olympic quarterfinals. He played 47 times for his country. As a coach, he helped Canada women’s Under 20s to a CONCACAF title and the men’s Under 20s to the World Cup.
His face hangs on the ‘wall of fame’ at Whitchurch High School, the Cardiff state school famed for churning out international athletes, alongside Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas, former Lions captain Sam Warburton and Wales captain Gareth Bale.
He has been unemployed for the past 13 years and without a permanent home for six. He returned to the UK from Canada just before the pandemic, angry at his treatment across the pond. He believes, with fury and resolve, that he faced discrimination in Canada for his historic use of crack cocaine.
UNTIL a few months ago, when he found shelter at a hostel near Holborn, in a room recently also occupied by two mice, he slept on scraps of cardboard at Charing Cross or Westminster Cathedral. Before that, he was on the bitter streets in Toronto.
We meet outside Embankment, one of the places around the capital where James often sits and awaits the kindness of others. Sometimes there, sometimes at Piccadilly or the Strand. He doesn’t call it begging — he calls it fundraising.
‘If you want to know what the look of utter contempt and disgust looks like, do this,’ says James. ‘But if you want to see moments of amazing kindness, do this as well.’
What is it he raises funds for? ‘To be independent,’ he says. ‘To regain a semblance of normality. To be able to wear my own clothes and shoes and not second-hand ones. To not have to fundraise to purchase my own items. To regain independence from the metaphorical prison condemned as an innocent for 13 lost years, not by the UK to whom I feel indebted, but Canada as a nation. To find and rekindle the passion, enthusiasm, and positivity I once had. And, on top of everything, to find an avenue to connect with people.’
James often gives his email address to those who stop to talk, asks them to Google his name. Few, he says, ever email him. He hopes this interview might change that.
He is a passionate speaker, with a magnetic, manic quality about him. One moment he quotes Shakespeare or Jordan Peterson or Bruce Lee. The next, he leaps off the bench to re-enact the paranoid terror that follows smoking crack cocaine or scurries back and forth to demonstrate how Bale’s lack of pressing held Wales back at the World Cup.
So how did this decorated World Cup international, an Olympian, a successful coach and three-time inductee into the Canada Soccer hall of fame, with a football MBA from the University of Liverpool end up on the streets of London?
A simple strand runs through his remarkable life: the stigma endured for using crack cocaine.
He smoked cocaine for the first time in 1998 and developed, as James urges everyone to describe it, a ‘substance use’ issue. ‘I couldn’t connect with anyone, to find an intimate partner in my life. Substance, and overwork, replaced that.’ The stigma, he says, envelopes how society views drugs.
‘I don’t think you should call anyone a drug addict, a crack addict, a junkie,’ he says. ‘The words conjure up irrationality and a series of labels which view those exposed as: criminal, scary, irrational, unreliable, to be avoided, diseased, loser, dirty, lazy, scum, non-employable. Can you see how disgusting that language is? How do you ever recover from being labelled a homeless crack addict? You don’t.’
James is certain he lost his job as head football coach at York University in Toronto, where he led their men’s side to a national championship, due to discrimination against his drug use. He says he was forced
to resign. York deny those accusations.
James has contacted former team-mates and colleagues since moving back to the UK. He says the jeans he wears were donated by Chris Ramsey, the QPR technical director who was England’s Under-20s coach at the time James led their Canadian counterparts.
One shivering night sleeping in Victoria, his former team-mate Paul Peschisolido, husband of West Ham vicechair Karren Brady, took him a blanket and some food. Peschisolido recently brought him some new trainers and a coat for James’s 59th birthday. He carries most of his belongings in a black sports bag, his blankets, his clothes, his small iPad with a broken screen. He used to own a smartphone but it was stolen out of his sleeping bag while he slept at Charing Cross. Someone stole his shoes when he slept on the streets of Toronto.
AFTER his hours of fundraising, he will walk back to the hostel. He donates a portion of his collection to the other homeless people he passes on the way. For this interview, his only request was that The Mail on Sunday make a donation to London homeless charities.
James does not want you to feel sorry for him. He’d rather you feel angry. But, more than anything, he hopes it makes you think, makes you consider how society treats its most vulnerable and how a World Cup footballer ended up here.
‘My football career was everything,’ he says. ‘I should not have lost a day’s work. If I was to end my life tomorrow, which I won’t, people would understand. Because it’s been a f ***** g brutality.’
Our conversations, he says, barely scratch the surface. There’s hundreds of emails he’s sent to the likes of Gianni Infantino and Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada. There’s the legal documents, some 200-pages long, sent to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario and to Canada’s Supreme Court. There’s the website he started called ‘Confronting the Stigma of Drug Addiction’. There’s his 2012 ebook memoir entitled Cracked Open.
Only then, he says, will anyone truly understand the depths of the discrimination and the anger. Only then, will they understand why he’ll never stop fighting.
How do you ever recover from being labelled a homeless crack addict or junkie? You don’t