Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King Read online

  Once in the village of Les Caillols, the names on the mail boxes tell their own story. Hardly any of them sounds ‘French’. Italian, yes; Spanish, too. Every Marseillais has an ancestor who was once an exile, and the Cantonas were no exception. No French city is more truly cosmopolitan; the social division of the city does not prevent an easily carried elegance in the rapport between the communities. Only in London have I seen so many friends and lovers cutting across racial and ethnic distinctions. Marseillais we are first, French second – maybe. In a video he shot in 1995, shortly after the end of the eight-month ban which nearly precipitated his second and final retirement from the game, Éric Cantona chose to address the camera clad in a T-shirt on which can be read: ‘Fier d’être Marseillais’ – Proud to be a Marseillais. Alone among the conurbations that have doubled or trebled their size in the last fifty years because of the influx of North and Western African immigrants, Marseilles exudes the sense of vitality and youthful exuberance one would associate with cities where new lives can be made.

  As I walk along the dusty alleyways that arrow from the Grand-Rue, each of them leading to a modest house set in a clump of small trees, a lady – Madame Ferrero – calls from her doorstep. She’s seen me jotting a few words in my notebook, and I realize that I must look out of place. In Les Caillols, no one wears a suit when summer lingers so warmly in October. There is curiosity in her voice, but no abruptness. Am I looking for something? she asks. When I tell her I have come to see the place where Éric Cantona grew up, she points out to a hill in the distance. ‘You see that white house, there?’ It’s hard not to. It is already halfway up the mountain, pink and white against the green of the pines; gigantic compared to the modest dwellings in the village. ‘That is where they lived.’

  In fact the house is still theirs, even if they have now acquired another home in the Basses-Alpes, and Éric’s brother Joël has moved towards Notre-Dame de la Garde. The postcode tells us we haven’t quite left the great city; everything else, the plane trees, the monument to the dead of the Great War, the unpretentious church, the ground cleared to play boules or pétanque, all this speaks and smells of Provence. Marseilles is a peculiar city: its dozens of villages have been swallowed by the metropolis over time, but, once there, the air you breathe still carries the fragrances of the countryside. The Marseilles Éric Cantona grew up in had little if anything in common with the concrete jungle that gave some shade to Zinédine Zidane and his friends when they hit a football in the Castellane quartier. It is a ‘poisoned city’, where unemployment tops 50 per cent and firemen hesitate to answer a call, as they fear being stoned by feral youths. But if La Castellane speaks of a fractured city within a fractured country, Les Caillols sings with a Provençal accent. The breeze that freshens its few streets carries the scent of tomatoes gently simmering with garlic at lunchtime. What Zidane kept of his tough upbringing is a volatile, sometimes violent temperament. But Cantona’s rebelliousness flowed from a different source – certainly not from his own environment, which was loving and, in many ways, idyllic.

  According to Éric’s father, Albert, ‘this land didn’t cost much, because no one thought it would be possible to build a house on such rocky terrain’. After a long search, in 1954 or 1955 (depending on which member of the family is speaking) Albert’s mother Lucienne had found this site located on the border between the 11th and 12th arrondissements of Marseilles, all stones and weeds. This, she decided, is where the future home of the Cantonas would be built. Come the weekend, picnicking families would unfold their tablecloths on the slope to enjoy the magnificent view, as yet uncluttered by tower blocks – from there you could see the Garlaban mountains and the rugged outposts of Cassis, rising as if they were close enough to touch; on clear days, the first houses of Aubagne, St Marcel and La Vierge de la Garde could be glimpsed on the horizon. Later, when the young Éric walked onto the terrace, he could watch players kicking the ball some 500 yards away on the pitch of the Arsène-Minelli stadium, the home ground of his first club, Sports Olympiques (‘SO’) Caillolais.

  But view and price aside, this piece of land had little to commend itself. Local tradition had it that the German army used this promontory as a look-out in the last months of the Second World War; but if they had, no trace of their presence is left. All that Lucienne’s husband, Joseph (a stonemason by trade), could find as shelter when he embarked on the huge task of building a house on the face of the hill was a small cave, covering a bare nine square metres, which the couple protected from the elements with a curtain in winter. Contrary to legend, Éric himself never lived the life of a troglodyte, but his teenage father most certainly did. Nicknamed ‘la chambrette’, the cave survived the erection of the family home, a memento of the hardship Joseph and Lucienne had to overcome.

  It’s true that hardship had long been a companion of the Cantonas. Joseph’s roots were in Sardinia, whose odd language, with its ghostly remnants of Phoenician and Etruscan, was still spoken at home when he grew up on the Boulevard Oddo, the first port of call for transalpine immigrants. To his own parents, Marseilles had been what the New World represented for the Italians who could save enough to pay for their passage overseas. Money was hard to come by; when winter came, with no electricity, proper heating or running water, Lucienne had to cook pasta in melted snow; but her husband’s energy and the fierceness of her determination overcame shortcomings like these and, slowly, a house rose from the dust. This was followed by a second one, built on top of the original to accommodate Albert’s young family.

  Albert was nicknamed ‘Le Blond’ (‘the Fair One’), not because of the colour of his hair, but because of his eye for the ladies. He had fallen in love with Eléonore (‘Léonor’) Raurich, the handsome daughter of Catalan refugees named Pedro and Paquita. Poverty and exile looked over her side of the family too, with a measure of tragedy. In 1938, Pedro, a republican partisan, had suffered a serious injury to his liver while fighting the Franquist forces in Catalunya. He sought medical help across the Pyrenees, only to be caught by the Vichy police two years later and sent to a detention camp set up for the ‘undesirables’ of the collaborationist regime. Upon his release, after a forced stay in the town of St Priest in the Ardèche, the passionate anti-fascist finally settled in Marseilles – accompanied by the much younger Paquita. Pedro would never see his parents again. With such a background, which combined fidelity to one’s own and almost constant displacement to an inextricable degree, is it surprising that Éric understood the attraction of nomadism better than most?

  In 1966, with already her four-year-old son Jean-Marie to care for, Eléonore (a seamstress by trade), was about to have a second child. Their house was nowhere near ready to be lived in but, contrary to the legend that would have Albert taking the family to Paris (where he had found a job as a psychiatric nurse), it was in Marseilles that she gave birth to Éric Daniel Pierre Cantona on 24 May. A third son, Joël, would follow in October 1967, completing the family. Work had now sufficiently progressed for all of them to occupy the home that Joseph built, though it was by no means finished. The three boys would jump over heaps of concrete bricks and bags of cement until they became teenagers. Their house, as if carried on the shoulders of the grandparents’ home, cut a striking silhouette on the hill. Like the family who lived in it, the house was different, which enhanced the status of the boys and their parents in the small community of Les Caillols.

  A singular presence on the rocks, surrounded by dark trees, the seat of the clan spoke for the values it shared: hard work, stubbornness, pride, and reliance on each other. The Cantonas were by no means outcasts; their diverse origins held nothing exotic for the neighbours for whom, as we’ve seen, settling in Marseilles was still part of living memory. Nevertheless, it took time for ‘outsiders’ to gain their confidence and be invited to the huge table where three generations of Cantonas sat, always eating together, laughing at the ceaseless jokes cracked by Albert. As Éric’s brother Joël recalled to one journalist, ‘These Sar
dinian and Catalan roots, adapted to Marseilles, [had] created an unusual mix. Our parents had a strong personality, which everyone respected, as my father was a natural leader. So, yes, there was [a sense of] honour, but also the typical warmth of Mediterranean families.’ Despite Albert’s strong sense of discipline, there was also mayhem, more often than not involving Éric. The little boy ‘loved playing, but loved to win above everything else’, Jean-Marie told L’Équipe Magazine in 2007, thinking of one incident when, having been beaten twice in a row at table tennis (which the brothers somehow managed to play in the attic which doubled up as a painting studio for Albert), the younger Cantona, beside himself with fury, managed to jump on the table with such force that it broke in two. And ‘ping-pong’ mattered little to Éric compared to football, of course.

  Éric’s father, Albert, had been a decent goalkeeper himself, not quite good enough to cut it in one of the better clubs of the area, but sufficient to become the coach of his three sons. The situation of the house made playing with a proper ball quite a tricky exercise; the patio offered a bit of space, but a misdirected kick easily sent the ball rolling all the way down the hill, where it would be fetched and brought back by a grumbling neighbour. The brothers were so caught up in their game that they’d crumple old newspapers into the semblance of a sphere to carry on playing, rather than run down the slope themselves. Other matches were played at night, in their bedrooms. The legs of a wardrobe became goalposts, and rolled-up socks were close enough in shape to the real thing to kick and argue about.

  ‘We could hear them talk all the time,’ Albert recalled. ‘“Did the ball cross the line? No, it didn’t!” We sometimes had to pick one of them up by the scruff of their neck to make the others stop.’ Stop – but not for long.

  The passion for football that ran through the three sons ran through the father as well. He could have punished the unruly children by preventing them from attending Olympique de Marseille (OM) games at the Stade-Vélodrome; in fact, he took them there himself, to watch Josip Skoblar (‘the Yugoslavian goal-machine’) and the Swedish winger Roger Magnusson, who produced some of the most ravishing football seen in Europe in the early seventies. On one of these early visits to Marseilles’ stadium, on 20 October 1972, Éric, perched on Albert’s shoulders, was one of 48,000 spectators who saw Ajax, the European champions, beat Marseille by two goals to one. The beauty of this Dutch exhibition struck the six-year-old boy to such an extent that, to this day, no other team (not even the Brazilians, ‘who pass the ball as if it were a gift’) has taken the place of Johann Cruyff’s in Cantona’s pantheon. Cruyff, ‘a real artist, a visionary’, inspired such a devotion to the Oranje in the young boy that when, in the autumn of 1981, France met the Netherlands for a crucial World Cup qualifier, he prayed for the defeat of his countrymen. France won 2–0. Marseillais first, footballer second, Frenchman a distant third.

  Around the time he conceived this violent passion for Ajax’s ‘total football’, at the age of six, Éric was old enough to sign his first registration form. Just as the elder Jean-Marie had done, and like Joël would do, he joined SO Caillolais, where he was asked to go in goal. This was a logical choice for Albert’s son, but did not hold much appeal for him, and was a waste of his prodigious gift. How prodigious that gift was soon became apparent. In any case, he’d had the good fortune to grow up almost next door to the very best football school Marseilles could provide.

  Sports Olympiques Caillolais was already an institution by the time Éric joined in 1972. Founded in 1939, a few months before France declared war on Germany, it had established itself as a feeder club nonpareil to the best teams in the Provence-Côte d’Azur region, including the ‘giants’ Olympique de Marseille and OGC Nice. Its youth teams regularly made mincemeat of what opposition other quartiers dared to enter in local competitions: the mass of cups and medals that greet the visitor to the club today bears witness to this enduring success. Its most famous product, until Cantona became ‘Canto’, had been Roger Jouve, a midfielder who was capped by France seven times in the seventies and won the national title with RC Strasbourg, having been the heartbeat of OGC Nice for thirteen seasons. The great Jean Tigana joined the club the same year as Éric, though he was his elder by more than ten years; and to this day, no fewer than eleven Caillolais have progressed through the club’s ranks to become professionals, an astonishing number considering the not-for-profit association’s lack of resources, and its complete reliance on the generosity of unpaid coaching and administrative staff. Cantona could not have wished for a better footballing education.

  One of his teammates at the time, who also sat with him at the desks of the local école communale, was Christophe Galtier, no mean player himself.1 Cantona did not take long to make an impression. Galtier recalled how his friend, having played just one game between the posts, insisted on joining the forward line. As was their habit, the cocky Caillolais had scored some fifteen goals without reply, and their new ’keeper hadn’t had as much as a touch of the ball. Football was not supposed to be that boring, something Éric articulated in loftier terms once he had retired from the game: ‘Even as a footballer, I was always being creative. I could never have played a defensive role because I would have been forced to destroy the other players’ creativity.’

  A few weeks after the massacre to which he had been a frustrated witness, the reluctant goalie got his way and was deployed upfield at a prestigious under-twelve tournament held in Cannes. Les Caillols won (naturally), Cantona earning the distinction of being voted the competition’s best player. The young Éric still put the gloves on from time to time, however, when his team was practising penalties on the rugged pitch, or when the three brothers (joined by Galtier) hit the ball in one of the club’s two car parks, a battered bus shelter having become the goal. Like Maradona and Platini, Cantona learnt the game ‘dribbling with tin cans in the street’; he would always feel that these impromptu kickabouts not only helped him refine his skill, and taught him how to exploit the most exiguous of spaces, but also represented a more noble, more authentic form of the game he loved. As he told a French journalist in 1993: ‘My luck is that I have kept the spirit of street football. In the street, when I was a minot [‘a lad’, in the patois of Marseilles], if a player had a red shirt, and I had it too, we played together, in the same team. There was no strategy, no tactics. Only improvisation. And pleasure. What I have kept from this time is pleasure, the uncertainty of the result, and spontaneity. Whatever else is said, in today’s football, despite everything, a player remains more spontaneous than artists who claim to be spontaneous themselves.’ Not everyone shared these convictions, as he was to discover later.

  Albert didn’t mind Éric deserting the net. He knew enough of the game to realize what a special talent the second of his sons possessed. ‘It wasn’t necessary for my father to tell me I was good, I could see it in his eyes. It’s better if it’s not said but shown in other ways.’ Of the 200-plus matches Éric played wearing the blue and yellow of SO Caillolais, only a handful were lost. Nobody knows quite how many goals he scored. But, without giving in to the Marseillais penchant for embellishment, it must have been hundreds, and this when the bob-haired youth often played against much older opponents (‘at nine, he was already playing like a fifteen-year-old’ is a comment that I have often come across). The quality of his first touch, his assurance in front of the goal and, above all, the confidence he had in his mastery of the ball set him aside from what, even by Les Caillols’ high standards, was the best generation of footballers the club had ever seen. Yves Cicculo, a man whose life has been enmeshed with SOC for six decades, from playing in the youth team to assuming the presidency, has often commented on the ‘pride’, ‘the natural class and charisma’ of the little boy he first saw shortly after his sixth birthday: ‘That attitude is not for show – that is the real Cantona. He was one of those rare players you knew would become a pro. He made us dream even when he was a small boy. He didn’t need to be taught football
; football was innate in him.’

  His family did nothing to discourage Éric from feeling ‘special’; far from it. Albert provided extra coaching; words of advice too, as when he told his son after a rare defeat: ‘There is nothing more stupid than a footballer who pretends to be more indispensable to the game than the ball. Rather than run with the ball, make the ball do the work, give it and look quickly. Look before you receive the ball and then give it, and always remember that the ball goes quicker than you can carry it’ – words that Cantona claimed to remember verbatim when, in 1993, he dictated his somewhat eccentric (and factually unreliable) autobiography, Un Rêve modeste et fou2 (‘A Humble and Crazy Dream’). But Albert was not the only Cantona to position himself on the touch-line when Sunday came; in fact, the whole family gathered behind the railings. Éric’s paternal grandmother, Lucienne, was never seen without an umbrella; the story goes that she didn’t use it just to protect herself from the light of the sun, but also to accompany her diatribes against whoever had had the cheek to rough up her grandson.

  Whether because of jealousy, or out of genuine concern for the child’s well-being, not everyone took kindly to the Cantonas’ behaviour. In 1995, immediately after Cantona’s infamous assault on a thuggish fan at Crystal Palace, the Mail on Sunday dispatched a reporter to Marseilles with a clear brief: to find out whether there was a cloud of darkness over Cantona’s childhood, which might explain his life-long conflicts with authority and outbursts of violence. The journalist didn’t come home empty-handed. Jules Bartoli, who had been Éric’s coach in the under-11s team of Les Caillols, painted a picture of a child who was far too easily indulged by his parents, Albert in particular: ‘In French we say ‘chouchouter’ [‘pamper’] – he had special treatment and was obviously his father’s favourite. There were three sons, but the father seemed interested only in watching Éric. He was very systematic about it. Maybe Éric received too much attention from his parents.’ More interestingly, Bartoli is quoted as saying: ‘Éric did not know how to lose because his team simply never lost. In one season, he scored forty-two goals and the team didn’t suffer a single defeat. If he had learned how to lose, maybe he wouldn’t do so many stupid things now.’ It is tempting to add – ‘and he may not have scored so many goals either’. Yves Cicculo, usually so full of praise for his most famous player, concurred, up to a point: ‘If Éric had enjoyed a more normal adolescence, he might have had more serenity. But he started with our club at six and had left home by fifteen. Parents don’t think of the sacrifices their children must make. Some children crack straight away. Éric didn’t, but the experience may have destroyed his youth. It certainly changed his character.’ Perhaps there is an element of truth in these opinions, provided Cicculo’s ‘may’ is understood not as a figure of speech, but as a mark of genuine uncertainty. Whenever Cantona himself has spoken of his childhood, which he has often done, it has always been in nostalgic terms, as if the higgledy-piggledy house on the hill had been built in some Arcadia. This idealized vision was not exclusively his; the few who were allowed to enter the inner circle of the clan, like Christophe Galtier, have spoken of its ‘love, warmth and lack of hypocrisy’ with fondness and a deep sense of gratitude for having been accepted within it.