|
Post by boppa74 on Jul 14, 2023 10:23:18 GMT
I tried to copy it all before all the pop-up bombardment. Hopefully caught it all!
Nick Powell: ‘The Manchester United wonderkid tag feels so pointless now’
By Daniel Taylor 6h ago “I believed I was the best 17 or 18-year-old in the country. But seeing what other people have done in their career, against what I have done, I find it laughable that the ‘wonderkid’ thing has stuck. The tag of wonderkid feels so pointless now.”
It is inevitable, sitting opposite Nick Powell and trying to get a better understanding of who he really is, that the conversation will gravitate towards Manchester United and the time in his career when he seemed to hold the keys to the football universe.
The man sitting here today will be 30 on his next birthday — older, wiser, with the first flecks of silver appearing above his ears and all sorts of parental duties waiting for him when he gets home to his three young daughters.
He is, in the parlance of the sport, a senior pro these days. And yet, in another sense, he is still defined by his time with United — his signing, at the age of 18, and being released, in his words, “like rubbish getting thrown out” — and some of the misconceptions that, until now, he has never properly tackled head-on.
We are sitting in an upstairs room at Stockport County’s training ground on a stretch of road, just off the M60 motorway, that will be familiar to many football people in this part of the country. Manchester City’s old training headquarters is next door. United’s is left at the crossroads. “Just across the fields,” says Powell, with his knowledge of the local geography.
And it is some story how Powell has chosen Stockport, one of League Two’s upwardly mobile clubs, when he could have made far more money elsewhere and had numerous offers from teams higher up the football ladder.
The background, he explains, is that one of his friends invited him to a Stockport game at Edgeley Park in December 2021. They lost 3-1 to Grimsby Town. But Powell liked what he saw.
“My friend knew the owner (Mark Stott) and said to me, ‘I can get you a conversation with the club, what do you think?’ My first thought, without being rude, was, ‘Hell, no.’ I’d just been player of the season in a Championship team. Stockport were in the Conference (the National League). I said, ‘We’ll see when they get in the Football League’.”
Eighteen months later, Powell is watching on television as Stockport lose a penalty shootout against Carlisle in the League Two play-off final. He has been released by Stoke City, two divisions above, and various offers are on the table.
Saudi Arabia has been mentioned, with all its financial incentives. Five clubs from the Championship have registered an interest. There are others in the U.S. and Australia. Wrexham, newly promoted to League Two, want to make him their poster-boy signing.
“By this stage, I’d been to watch Stockport a few times,” says Powell. “We used to get some food, watch the match. I enjoyed the League Two atmosphere. I met Mark a few times and it just resonated with me, in a strange way.
“It was an eye-opener to see the drop (in salary). I want to make as much money as I can before I retire.
“But there are other factors: location, happiness, family. I had conversations with a few managers, in different leagues, and it was one of those times when you just have a gut feeling about something. My mate messaged me to ask where I was thinking and I said: ‘You know what? I do kinda fancy Stockport.’ It just felt right.”
It isn’t your ordinary move but, then again, maybe Powell isn’t your ordinary footballer.
At the same time that he embarks on the next stage of his football career, he is also studying for the relevant exams to qualify for the company, Premier Wealth Solutions, run by his wife, Emmelia, a financial planner. In particular, he wants to help footballers look after their money.
“I’ve seen so many footballers, family men, lose a lot,” he says. “I watched my wife pass 11 exams over two years while taking care of three kids and dealing with the stress of me coming out of football, unemployed, with no playing contract. I thought, ‘If she can do that, why can’t I do it as a part-time thing on my days off from football?’”
He is, in other ways, a bit of an enigma, full of opinion and surprises.
On the pitch, Powell is known for his touch, his vision and his eye for the spectacular as an attacking midfielder with a goal every four games since leaving Old Trafford to make his career with Stoke and, before that, Wigan Athletic.
But he will also talk about a blog he has been writing — purely for his own interests — about how he uses mind games, body language and psychology to get an advantage over opponents. “I like to get an edge in a game,” he explains. “So, if I have to piss someone off, I will.”
Or just consider his response when he is asked whether he likes the football industry — not the sport, but the industry — after everything he has seen, good and bad, since his debut, aged 16, for Crewe Alexandra.
“Day to day, inside football, yes,” he says. “But the whole thing that comes with football, no. I find it horrendous.
“Inside the football bubble is one of the most toxic, horrendous industries. You get scrutinised by everyone. You’re not allowed to say anything because, if you do, you’re labelled ‘an idiot’ because you’re getting paid so much money.
“The politics are horrendous. Everything is about money. I find that ruins everything within football. But it (money) is also the biggest gain you get in football and a lot of people will say the benefits are quite nice.”
Powell is not the first footballer to be tipped for great things at Old Trafford and fall short of expectations. He is, however, perhaps the most misunderstood.
And he cares.
One conversation lingers in his memory from the days at United when he seemed to have the world at his feet. “I remember Rio Ferdinand saying to me, ‘Don’t be happy getting here, be happy staying here.’ It didn’t hit me until I left what he meant by that.”
Powell in 2012 (Photo: Phil Cole/Getty Images) It’s May 2012. Crewe are playing at home to Aldershot and, in the main stand at Gresty Road, Sir Alex Ferguson is making a personal visit to run his eye over the tall, elegant midfielder wearing the home team’s No 25 shirt.
Powell’s first involvement sees him loft an expertly delivered pass into the centre-forward’s path. In the next attack, the 18-year-old wins a header. Soon afterwards, there is a turn of pace to get away from his marker.
With five minutes gone, Ferguson has seen enough. He turns to his assistant, Mick Phelan: “He’s a player, Mick, he’s a player.” The next morning, United’s manager rings Crewe to find out the price.
Powell had a separate offer from Arsenal and, on reflection, it is tempting to think he might have opted for London had he known Ferguson intended to retire a year later.
“I was a massive Arsene Wenger fan, so I was torn between Arsenal and United,” he says. “Growing up, Wengerball was perfection. They might not have won as much as United but, when they did, that was how I envisioned football — perfection, lovely to watch.
“It was a tough decision until I met Fergie. I don’t get taken aback when I meet ‘heroes’ because I see it as a job. But it was meeting Fergie that made up my mind.”
By the time the deal was announced, Powell had scored a stunning goal at Wembley to help Crewe win promotion in the League Two playoffs. Life was good. He was the youngest player in Crewe’s team and, all these years on, he can laugh about the fact he turned up for the biggest game of his life without any boots.
“I had to wear Robin van Persie’s boots,” he says. “On the day before the play-off final, we trained at Arsenal’s training ground. I still remember Arsenal’s kit man saying to me, ‘Why the fuck haven’t you brought any boots? That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard.’ He let me borrow Van Persie’s because it was Arsenal’s off-season. Though he made sure I gave them back.”
Everton were also keen. David Moyes tried his best to make a case for the Merseyside club. But it was a losing battle and Powell was so swept along by the euphoria of moving to Manchester that — typical teenager — it passed him by that he ought to put in a call to the Everton manager. He regretted that a year later when Moyes pitched up at Old Trafford as Ferguson’s successor.
“In my first year with Fergie, I got to play a few games,” says Powell. “Just being involved with the first team, listening to him, feeling wanted by him, was enough for me to think, ‘Right, that’s a good start.’
“Then, in March, it was decided I had to have an operation. They had found a non-malignant tumour at the bottom of my spine and I was told it was better to take it out because it could be problematic going forward.
“It was coming towards the end of the season. We were going to win the league and in those days you needed 10 appearances to get a medal.
“There were 12 games left and I needed eight appearances. I’d have taken a minute each game just to get a medal. So I went into his (Ferguson’s) office and said, ‘I don’t think I should have the operation just yet’. But no, we agreed I’d have the operation.
“That was me finished for the season and, when I woke up in my hospital bed, breaking news: Alex Ferguson has retired. After that, it just went downhill.”
Powell tells the story about how, without their manager of the previous 26 years, standards immediately started to drop; even just the little things. The younger players, he says, were instructed to wear black boots while Ferguson was in charge. As soon as Ferguson had gone, they started turning up in different fluorescent colours.
His own career began to drift. “When I came back from my operation, I hadn’t moved for six weeks. Phil Neville was the new first-team coach and I was passing the ball out to the wingers for them to cross it in. I couldn’t pass this ball. I knew I was doing crap. He pulled me aside and started going, ‘You’ve got to be miles better than that if you want to play for Man United.’
“I was thinking, ‘No shit!’ I was coming back from injury, not having really played for a year, still not feeling like a Man United player. Little things like that annoyed me, got my back up. I didn’t need to be told. It was just a coach being a coach — and I’ve nothing against Phil — but that pissed me off a bit.
“I knew I wasn’t going to play the following season and I’d already had a year of not playing regularly. I wasn’t doing that again. So I went to Moyes and suggested I should go on loan.’ He said, ‘I think that will be perfect for you’.”
Powell moved to Wigan, then in the Championship. He was happy to be playing again, but it was not what he had imagined for himself. “Going on loan,” he says, “feels like failure.”
The following year, a similar arrangement was made with Leicester City. But it was cut short just after Christmas. One report stated that Leicester had sent him back early because of poor timekeeping and attitude issues. It wasn’t true — but the damage, reputation-wise, was considerable.
“There was only one time I was late,” he says. “We were away at Newcastle. I overslept and missed dinner. Other than that, there wasn’t a single incident.
“The real issue was that Nigel Pearson (the manager) was picking other players. And that’s life, it happens. I wanted to go back to United and they (Leicester) wanted me to go back. It was a mutual ‘thank you but no thank you.’
“That doesn’t bother me because, even though it counts as a fail, you shake hands and walk away. There’s no nastiness. But then somebody put it out that it was because of poor timekeeping, apparently, and me being an idiot.”
Stories started to circulate that he was disillusioned with football, a maverick who was hard to understand or control. Nor did it help that, after a bright start at Wigan, there was a drink-drive conviction and a falling-out behind the scenes that led to the player, who had just turned 20, being removed from the team.
Powell will admit he has made mistakes. He says there are “loads” of regrets and that he is acutely aware of the common allegation that, beneath all his talent, he has lacked dedication and not cared enough about the sport.
But the truth, he says, is more complex.
“My biggest issue was I was such a perfectionist for football — how I saw it and how I played it,” he says. “If something prohibited me from playing the game the way I wanted, whether it be injuries or not being picked, it would annoy me to the point that I’d get angry with football.
“People see that as ‘he doesn’t like football’ or ‘he doesn’t care.’ It’s more the opposite. It’s me being angry and upset that I can’t do what I want to do.
“Growing up, I had always played a certain way. When it doesn’t go how I think it’s going to go, I feel like it’s making me look bad and it annoys the life out of me.”
To understand this properly, perhaps it is worth remembering just how exceptionally talented Powell was for his age. At 18, he had won a clean sweep of Crewe’s end-of-season awards. He was the golden boy, signing for United for £6million ($8.7m in today’s exchange rates) and scoring on his Premier League debut at Old Trafford.
What he had never experienced before was failure — or what he deemed as failure — and that, more than anything, was where he struggled.
“It’s hard when everything goes right for you and, all of a sudden, there’s a prolonged period of it not going right.
“Even playing for United’s under-21s aggravated me because it felt like a step back from being in a League Two first team. That was my hardest time at United. I wanted to play football and I didn’t feel under-21s football was football. I couldn’t get my round around it.”
Powell scoring on his Premier League debut (Photo: Alex Livesey/Getty Images) One story from his first spell at Wigan, on loan from Manchester United, offers another insight into his personality as a younger man.
Powell had quickly integrated into the side. The crowd liked him. His team-mates did, too. Wigan reached the Championship play-offs and Powell, with 12 goals from midfield, was a big part of it.
Then, towards the end of the season, the manager, Uwe Rosler, started to experiment with him as a striker.
“I started getting frustrated,” says Powell. “We had a game against Leeds. We won 1-0 but I came in pissed off because, in my head, I had played terribly. I’m happy to win, happy for the team. I did my job and you might have thought I’d played well.
“But it comes back to what I was saying about how I like to play a certain way and it annoys me like hell when I’m stopped from doing it.
“We had a falling-out. It wasn’t malicious and Uwe tried to sign me the next year. Our relationship wasn’t broken and, if we met each other now, we’d talk and get on fine. But I ended up training alone and didn’t play in the play-offs.”
Ferguson had backed Powell to take over from Paul Scholes as United’s midfield maestro. In his 2014 autobiography, United’s manager describes the teenager as “an absolute certainty to be in the England team one day.”
“Yes,” says Powell, when asked whether he thought the same. “But there’s mental strength that goes with that. I don’t think I was mentally strong enough at that time.
“I’d gone to a club where there were people who had won seven titles. They were born winners, whereas I had grown up playing football for the fun of it. If I felt like I was the best on the pitch at a young age, that was good enough for me. I never cared about winning; winning wasn’t the point.
“My mindset was different to what I’ve seen born winners do. I was a bit petulant. If I wasn’t playing, I’d get angry about it.”
Patrice Evra, United’s former left-back, is not so generous in his own autobiography. “He (Powell) didn’t integrate, wasn’t part of the group and you had no idea what he was thinking as he looked through you,” writes the Frenchman. “He was only a young lad, but you’re not too young to be judged at United.”
What Evra misses, perhaps, is that the player in question was feeling lost.
“I get on with most people,” says Powell. “I got on with Patrice. It was purely that I didn’t feel like I was a United player and that was grinding away at me.
“I found it hard to believe I should be there. ‘I don’t want to do this,’ I’d think. ‘I didn’t come to Man United not to play.’ And yes, it did segregate me a bit because I was thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ That was probably my biggest issue.
“I’d go home and try to forget it all. That’s part of the reason why people get the perception I didn’t care. I didn’t want to bring it home because it would annoy me even more. So I’d play Call of Duty, PlayStation, things like that, just to forget about the fact I was not playing football.”
In three years, Powell played nine games for United’s first-team: six under Ferguson, zero for Moyes and three with Louis van Gaal.
A loan spell was arranged at Hull City and, at the end of the 2015-16 season, United cut him free.
“I got injured and they gave me the choice of staying at Hull to do my rehab or going back to United. There was nothing to go back for. So I decided to stay at Hull and see my time out.
“My agent said, ‘It’s fine, you’re under the Bosman age (to leave on a free transfer), so they will probably give you another year and you’re guaranteed the same wage.’ Then, a couple of weeks later, I got a letter through the post saying I was being released.”
He was 22, finding out the hard way what a ruthless industry it can be. Yet there is no bitterness in his voice. “Because I was so low down the pecking order, it really was like rubbish getting thrown out,” he says. “It’s not nice, but that’s football.”
At the last count, the official announcement of Powell’s signing had drawn 1.1million views to Stockport’s Twitter page. To put that into perspective, a tweet from the club’s account would usually attract 20,000 views.
Powell has made it his business to find out about Stockport’s aspirations under Stott, the club’s popular and ambitious owner. The two men have spent hours talking. Simon Wilson, the director of football, has also made a big impression. Powell has signed a three-year contract, whereas some of the offers elsewhere were only 12-month deals.
Stockport, in turn, have taken on a man who should be a big player in League Two and also wants to be part of Stott’s community initiatives at a time when this resurgent club, in the National League North only four years ago, have already sold more than 6,000 season tickets and posted record shirt sales.
He does, however, need some better luck on the injury front. Powell spent four years at Stoke (where he left bottles of wine for numerous members of staff as a goodbye present) but, in his last two seasons, he has had to get over a leg break and damaged knee ligaments.
“We played Bournemouth a year and a half ago,” he says. “Me and (Jefferson) Lerma got involved in a bit of pushing. I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to try really hard to get into his mind now.’ He had the ball and I nicked it off him. So, in my head, I’m thinking ‘I’ve got him here.’ In the next challenge, we went in for a tackle and it broke my leg. I walked off thinking, ‘Fucking hell, he got the better of me there, didn’t he?’”
Powell training at Stockport (Photo: Stockport County) All of which brings us to his notes about the psychology of elite football, the mind games between rival players and why, in the heat of the battle, he will size up his opponents in all sorts of ways. Even, sometimes, his own colleagues.
“I remember one day I accidentally slipped and took out Scholesy on United’s training ground,” he says, and now he is laughing. “I’m saying to him, ‘I’m sorry, I slipped’ and everyone’s pissing themselves. The next time I get the ball, he just fucking nails me. Everybody was laughing. Brilliant, here we go.”
These battles are nothing new. What is intriguing is that Powell has put it in writing.
“I’m writing this piece on my phone,” he explains. “It’s about body language and mind games and how I perceive that to be an advantage in football. I find that’s the biggest way to get ahead: if you feel you have the upper hand on your opponent. You can do it in all sorts of ways.”
Any examples? “Just laughing at them,” he continues. “It’s a strange thing. I try to read people. If they look one way but pass the other way, I try to read it. And if I read the pass, then I will laugh at them. It makes them feel like I’m ahead of them.
“It’s like cat and mouse. If I can read a person’s mind through their body language or what I perceive they are going to do, I really enjoy it.
“If somebody goes through the back of me, I imagine they will feel they have won. It’s everyone’s preference how they do it. I like to do it by reading my opponent’s pass or chasing them down when they feel they are free. A lot of my team-mates hate it in training. But I find it fun.”
Despite his denials, it is tempting to think Powell must enjoy writing. He has also started an “aspiring adviser” column for Money Matters magazine and, again, it becomes a little easier to understand why the people who know him well say he is wired differently from your typical footballer.
“As a sportsperson, you have little control,” he writes in his debut column. “Your body and mentality play a big role, plus injuries, being in favour in a team, personal issues, and constant changes to your location or team dynamics. I often feel like I’m on a boat with no steering wheel and a broken paddle.”
What you won’t find is him explaining this in any detail on social media. He has not tweeted since August 2021 and that won’t change any time soon.
“I don’t like the way society is going with slander,” he explains. “Whatever you say, people are going to find fault. If a fan is going to abuse me for thinking I don’t care, that’s their prerogative. They are going out of their way to be angry, whereas I’m not going out of my way to piss them off.”
And, besides, there is a whole heap of evidence that the most eye-catching transfer in Stockport’s recent history, back in the league where he began a slightly unorthodox career, is his own harshest judge anyway.
“I feel like I can grade myself,” he says. “And yes, I fall way below what I wanted to do in my career. At the same time, I also feel I have had a good enough career to accept how it has gone wrong.
“No one will ever know, will they? Everyone will say I could have hit different heights. But you just have to accept where you are. I’m quite happy with what I’ve done and what I’ve made from football.”
|