Not long ago he was Stan the Man, England’s most expensive footballer and seemingly destined to become one of the greatest players of his era. Now, at 30, he should be at the peak of his game. Instead, Stan Collymore has retired after years of disappointment on the pitch and tales of depression and violence off it
Simon Hattenstone
I’m expecting Stan Collymore any second. Well, I think I’m expecting Collymore. People have warned me. You can’t rely on him. Tread carefully, don’t get on his wrong side, take a minder. His agent tells me, unnecessarily, that I’ll recognise Stan he’s a very, very big man. Collymore was an outstanding footballer fast, strong, skilful, it once seemed he could make anything happen when he put his mind to it. He should be one of the great British players of his era. Instead, he’s regarded as the biggest screw-up of his generation. Stan the Man became Bad Boy Stan, Stan the Vandal and now Stan the Loser. At 30, he should be peaking. Instead he has just retired. People have compared him with Paul Gascoigne, but at least Gascoigne got 50-plus caps for England.
The more appropriate comparison is with George Best. Like Best, Collymore was, and still is, beautiful, and like Best he had a very serious problem. With Best it was drink, with Collymore it was depression. He lost his energy, lost his will to win, hit out at the world, and most famously hit out at his celebrity girlfriend, Ulrika Jonsson. His career went into freefall.
Collymore arrives at the grand Birmingham hotel on the dot of 10.30am. He shakes hands. His hands are soft, small for his size. His legs are huge, and bend in all directions like a clay model. He says the night before he watched his first match in ages Liverpool vs Barcelona. “Not just since retirement, but in a long time. I wanted to watch the Liverpool game because obviously it’s a massive game, and I played for them …” He joined Liverpool for 8,5-million in 1995, the record British transfer fee at the time. In his first game, he scored a wonder goal. His first season was successful. By the second he was depressed and had fallen out with the management. Collymore always seemed to fall out with management. Does he miss football? “No, not really. I’m spending a lot more time with the family, my little boy and fiance. Tom’s five and into all sorts.”
Collymore and his partner, Estelle, have just moved into a new house in Cannock, a tiny working-class town in the Midlands where he has lived most of his life. His mum lives down the road, her parents live down the road, their best friends live down the road. He’s always been a bit of a home boy. There were angry stories emanating from Liverpool about how half-hearted he was because he never moved there. Why should he have uprooted, he says, when he was only an hour’s drive away? Collymore came up the hard way. Rejected after six months as an apprentice, he clawed his way back through Crystal Palace and Southend, before a 2-million transfer to Nottingham Forest. There, he scored at a phenomenal rate (45 goals in 78 games), and the fans loved him. But even then there were problems. When his fellow players appeared not to congratulate him for scoring a goal, it blew into a big story. “In the press you have your goodies and baddies, and I guess I’ve been portrayed as a baddie. On one or two occasions, I guess, rightly so, but I think there’s been a lot of real rubbish talked.” His decline was alarming. By the end, his was a great talent every club wanted rid of. Does he feel he threw it all away? “No,” he says adamantly. “As a kid I set myself three targets. To be a professional footballer, which I was for 10-12 years. To play for Aston Villa, the club I supported as a kid, and I did. How many kids who support a team actually get out and play for them? And I wanted to play for England. Again, I didn’t get 50 caps, but I got three and one was against Brazil.” How can you call that failure, he asks?
But, of course, you can, and most of us have done. A man of his ability winning three England caps. “I always find people who do criticise are middle-aged, pot-bellied, really scruffy hacks, and I think to myself: how on earth have you got the nerve?” I hold my belly in. He has a point, though. We do tend to judge success in absolutes. In writing his football obituary, many commentators suggested that ultimately Collymore didn’t love the game enough. He scorns the very notion. “It’s typical football manager spiel. There is not a person on this planet that loves playing football more than I do.” He criticises few of his colleagues by name, but he can never forgive Aston Villa manager John Gregory for the way he reacted to his depression.
He points to other problems with the game. The fact that so many young players get so much, so early, for instance. “Kids now, if they show promise at 16, are getting contracts for five years and at the end of those five years they could retire without having to achieve anything.”
Although he’s all of 30, much the same could be said of him. Collymore is such a complicated creature. The vulnerable small-town boy mixed in with the super-ego run wild. It’s strange to hear him talking about the erosion of standards like a grand old man of the game. It can sound hypocritical after all, he benefited as much as anyone from the mad money, and he was not exactly famous for knowing his place. But it does make a confused sort of sense. He wanted figures to look up to, and when he didn’t find them, he lost it. He says the way football is run is shambolic. “You have to have no qualifications whatsoever to be a football manager. At Liverpool, I said what other industry would buy an asset for 8,5-million and not know how to utilise it properly, and I got absolutely slaughtered for saying that.” Managing talented, vulnerable kids requires a sophisticated mind, he says. Dodgy managers, ropey decisions, bad press, a mercenary football culture: Collymore has suffered from all of them. But in the end it was his character, or his illness, that did for him. Most footballers grew up with dads who patted them on the back whenever they succeeded, growled at them when they failed. Collymore was brought up by his mum who told him to play for pleasure. He talks about his time at Crystal Palace as a youngster, when all the seasoned pros relentlessly mocked his brummie monotone. They all seemed so hard. “I think you get hurt because when you play football as a kid, all the teams you play in, they’re all mates. I worked in a completely non-jealous, 100% productive environment as a young footballer.” He says he had no idea that the dressing room would be so hostile. “It can be so bitchy, a player walks out of the dressing room, and it’s ‘he’s a fucking tosser, he is’, or ‘he’s a wanker, he is’, and he comes back in the dressing room and it’s ‘all right, mate, all right, brilliant’.” You wonder whether this 2m bruiser was too sensitive for professional football. He says whenever people meet him for the first time, they are surprised. What do they expect him to be like? “I suppose … ignorant, unintelligent, ultra- aggressive, greedy, all of those things.” It was at Aston Villa in 1999, after a 7-million transfer, that Collymore first announced he was depressed. His career at Liverpool had fizzled out. At Villa, it never really took off. In June 1998 he was involved in a shocking public assault on his then celebrity girlfriend, Ulrika Jonsson. He punched her in the face in a public bar.
What made it worse was that it came a couple of months after Ulrika had cheered after Collymore had been cleared in court of assaulting the mother of his child. There were other stories. The papers dragged up the time he was cleared of assaulting two men in Cannock. The tabloids claimed he was a serial abuser. Collymore apologised straight after the incident, said it was unforgivable. In every interview he has given since then he has apologised. He also claims that, despite the allegations, he has never hit another woman. One of the most disturbing stories reported an alleged attack on his girlfriend, Estelle, in which he allegedly knocked her unconscious after finding her chatting to another man in their flat. “Yes, Estelle. Estelle really wanted to go the full distance against the Sun.” Estelle is now his fiance. So why didn’t he sue? “Your first reaction is, right, I’m going to take them to court and say, you come and prove this. Then you’ve got two years going through the courts, whereas in two weeks the story’s probably gone. Then in two years it will be there for all to see again. Our families are very close. We know the reality of the situation. They’re in the wrong, we’re in the right. We’re close, we’ve been together for six years, we’ve got a baby on the way, we’ve moved into a new home, we’re very happy, so why rock the boat for ourselves, just to give them another weeks’ worth of news two years down the line?” He never used to be so phlegmatic. He says he used to be desperate to avenge himself, however petty the accusation. Even when a radio commentator criticised him. “I always wanted to react to it, phone the radio stations, and talk to the geezer and say ‘you’re talking absolute bollocks here’. Now I just let them have their say.” He had a breakdown in 1999. Doctors told him that it had been three years in the making. He realised, in retrospect, that even during those giddy times at Liverpool, he had felt terrible. “It was like an ongoing joke with one mate. He said, ‘You’re playing for one of the biggest clubs in the world, you’ve just scored two goals, you’ve got people dripping off you, and you look the most miserable man I’ve ever seen.’ And I didn’t have an answer. If my leg had been hanging off, I could say, well, my leg’s hanging off, but I didn’t have a clue what it was.” Collymore spent three weeks in the Priory, followed by a few months as a day patient. John Gregory told him to pull his socks up. “He said, ‘My idea of someone who’s depressed is the woman living on the 20th floor flat with 10 kids.’ Yeah, that may well be the case. But just as the Queen can get cancer like the bloke who sweeps the road, so a footballer can get depression.”
Collymore tells me of a Sun leader dedicated to him. “It said the Sun says to all Aston Villa’s brilliant fans kick this fool out out of football; how can he be depressed when he’s earning x amount? “And that’s the national news- paper that’s purporting to represent a fair chunk of British views. Again, I think it’s that white, middle-aged, hard-core football mentality.” What does he mean? Well, he says, look at how alcoholism is treated in football. “Ninety-nine percent of football managers are white, working-class blokes. They grew up with football and alcohol. You can be an alcoholic and get sent to prison and be welcomed back for your strength of character in English football. “But if you suffer from an illness that millions suffer from, one of the only illnesses in which people take their own lives, you’re called spineless and weak.” And yet, he says, he’d walk out on the streets and strangers would tap him on the shoulder, commiserate and say, “my Nan had that, or my sister had depression”.
What did he actually feel like? “With me it was very physical. I was drained. My body and mind was like a flat battery. I had nothing left. “Couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t get motivated. People think any kind of mental distress straitjacket and you’re loony and you’re talking crap, the Black Adder thing, two pencils up your nose, and you’re talking wibble. But I was just very tired mentally. The brain wasn’t fresh enough to make the body do all those real things with conviction or motivation.” The night before he went to hospital, he told Estelle he couldn’t go on. Was he thinking of killing himself? “Well, not really in terms of going to jump under a tube …” He trails off.
In hospital, he was treated with antidepressants and psychotherapy. I ask him if he met loads of celebrities at the Priory, and he says that’s a misconception. “A lot of the referrals there are [National Health Service] ones. People think of it as a celebrity hangout, but it’s a psychiatric hospital.
“In a nutshell, there’s a depression unit, eating disorders unit and addictions unit. People think you go in there saying, ‘Oh, poor me’, while eating grapes and caviar. Believe me, it’s not like that at all.” By the time he left hospital he had re-evaluated his life. He was upbeat,
determined not to be too hard on himself, or others, again. But his football went down the pan.
By the end, he says, he had fallen out of love with football and fallen back in love with life. He wanted to be with Estelle and Tom, and his mates from Cannock.
“I heard Tony Adams say the other day that he’s not had the time through his football commitments to always be with his kids. At what price? What price?” It sounds such a clear-cut decision, but it wasn’t. Who knows what priority family would have had if he’d been preparing for Liverpool’s match against Barcelona? Although he had eased up on himself, he admits: “I was thinking, shit, I should still be at Liverpool, not at Bradford or Oviedo or whatever”.
But he was also thinking that perhaps he had never really fitted into the world of football. Collymore wasn’t particularly academic at school (four O-levels without trying) but he was bright and inquisitive. As a grown-up footballer, he liked reading the broadsheets and watching Newsnight, and he didn’t get much change from his colleagues.
He calls himself a Blairite, streaked with a few old Labour priorities. “I’d like to see some degree of national control over the utilities. We need more balance between the private and public sector.” He says his values come from Cannock. “I’ve always said I don’t mind paying whatever tax as long as you can see there’s genuine tangible benefits to people; not people who want to sit around doing bugger all, all day, but people who genuinely can’t get out of the poverty trap: for schools, for social services.” Most successful footballers aren’t interested in politics, he says, because it is irrelevant to their lives. “Like I say, football is a cocoon. Everything is done for you. This is ball-signing day, and you have your lunch ready after training, and you forget there’s a whole world out there.”
Collymore doesn’t rule out a comeback, but nor does he plan one. He says there are so many things to do, none of them involving playing football. First, there’s the election. He’d love to canvas in Cannock, tell people how important it is to vote. He could be a great asset to the Labour party, but he must know they would regard him as a liability. There have been stories suggesting he’s off to Hollywood to be the new Vinnie Jones. Collymore laughs. “I told a Spanish paper, tongue in cheek, that I wanted to be the first black James Bond.” No, he doesn’t want to act. But he has started up a television production company, which he hopes will make light entertainment programmes and documentaries. “Real documentaries, none of this reality TV where they make a celebrity of someone just dragged in off the street.” He says one of the advantages of owning the production company is that he can control the product. Again, he knows that owning the production company may be the only way of fulfilling an ambition of presenting on television. His history will follow him around for a long time yet.
He says he’s already been approached a couple of times for TV work, but an offer has never quite materialised. “I know there’ll be obstacles. There’s the perception, and the Ulrika Jonsson thing.” He pauses, frustrated. With the world? With himself? It’s hard to tell. “It was three years ago. Yes it was something that happened … it was five seconds of my life three years ago. Am I going to have to talk about this every time? Believe it or not, I’ve got a hell of a lot more to talk about.” As he leaves, I notice his nails for the first time. They are bitten to the quick.