Listening to Steven Caulker has made me think twice about how we judge footballers
Steven Caulker was face down on the floor of a Dublin hotel room, drunk, when he received the call telling him Liverpool were about to sign him.
That’s the headline some might take from his fascinating, at times harrowing, 90-minute podcast with the guys from Undr the Cosh, which was released this week, but it’s not the one I took from it.
Tales of drinking and gambling, womanising and drug-taking and dressing-room fights, have helped podcasts such as UTC flourish in recent years - aided, I’m sure, by the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and people’s desire for audio accompaniment on walks, runs and in the gym. Week after week, thousands eagerly await the latest episode, ready to listen to another footballer talk about their career and, more often than not, try to explain where it all went wrong.
In Caulker’s case, the ups and downs are remarkable, even by UTC’s standards. At 18 he was playing in Tottenham’s first team and at 20 he was representing Team GB at the London Olympics. He scored on his senior England debut that same year and was valued at close to £20 million by Spurs. Liverpool, under Brendan Rodgers, were among those who tried to sign him.
Five years later, however, he was out of work. Released by Queens Park Rangers the day before his 26th birthday, Caulker’s career, and his life, had spiralled to such an extent that was forced to ring around clubs himself asking for a trial, an opportunity, a way back into the game. Only one, Scottish Premiership strugglers Dundee, were willing to provide it.
He’s 31 now, and playing with Wigan Athletic in the Championship having signed a short-term contract in January. His previous four years were spent in Turkey, where he turned out for Alanyaspor, Gaziantep and Fatih Karagümrük. He’s got some stories to tell about those days, trust me.
Liverpool fans, of course, will remember Caulker for that short and far from glorious loan spell at Anfield in 2016. In it, he made four appearances totalling around 94 minutes, and is best remembered for being Jürgen Klopp’s emergency centre-forward, sent on late to try and rescue games against Arsenal, Manchester United and Norwich City.
Caulker, unsurprisingly, does not reflect upon his time on Merseyside with particular fondness, and does not have especially good things to say about Klopp either. His spell ended early, after he refused to play for the U23s against Southampton, the team with whom he had spent the first half of that 2015-16 season. “I couldn’t do it,” he says. “I just couldn’t.”
His story, though, got me thinking. About how we as fans, and indeed journalists, judge footballers. About the things we say and the things we write, the impact they can have and about the way we forget about the person when we talk about the player.
Caulker, by his own admission, made mistakes in his career. He’s no angel, but boy has he faced some demons too. He has been to rehab for both gambling and alcohol addiction - one remarkable story he tells is of marking Alexis Sánchez at QPR, having blown £250,000 in five London casinos the previous night - and claims to have been blackmailed on “seven or eight” occasions after getting himself into drunken scrapes. Blackouts, he says, were a weekly occurrence. His wages, at one point as much as £60,000 per week, came nowhere near covering his excesses, or to healing his pain.
“Living in the madness,” he calls it. Trying to perform and deliver professionally while everything else around him descended into chaos. Some managers saw it - Rodgers, during a loan spell at Swansea, was among the first - but plenty were oblivious or, worse, chose to ignore it. Ronald Koeman’s response, upon being told by Caulker of his drink and gambling issues at Southampton, was to point at the training pitch and tell him to get his head down.
And that seems to be a pretty standard approach, from the stories I’ve heard. I’ve listened to dozens of Undr the Cosh episodes, read and listened to countless other interviews with players, and though it shouldn’t, it genuinely amazes me to hear how many go through similar things - depression, addiction, anxiety, mental health issues - and how little clubs and managers seem to care, how little is done to genuinely try to tackle such problems. As Jon Parkin, one of the UTC co-hosts, points out; “if a manager is picking a team on a Saturday and he’s under pressure, is he really going to pick the guy who’s been to see him on Thursday and told him he’s struggling?”
He probably isn’t, is he? And it got me thinking about how many players, how many people, are keeping issues such as Caulker’s to themselves, fearful of what the reaction will be, both professionally and on a personal level, if they were to open up.
I think of myself at this point, and some of the spells I’ve been through as a journalist, as a person. I think of the way I’ve reacted to criticism, both outwardly and inwardly, and how it’s made me feel when I’m having a shit day, or even a good day, and someone tells me I’m in FSG’s pocket or that the 7/10 I gave to Player X proves I’m clueless. It’s broken me, on more than one occasion.
Then I think about those 7/10s, those 4/10s, and some of the things I’ve written and said about players and managers. ‘What on earth were they thinking?’ I’ve wondered out loud, on a podcast or in an article, and the truth is that I have no idea. Nor should I. It’s none of my f***ing business really, is it?
I wrote about Caulker, by the way, when I was at the Liverpool ECHO. “Has anyone seen Steven Caulker?” read the headline on a piece from April 2016, which spoke of the “mystery” behind the Reds’ January loan signing.
I remember Liverpool’s media team being a bit disappointed with that piece and thinking that was strange. Seven years on, it makes a lot more sense.
Listening to the man himself explain the “mystery” I wrote about, I’m embarrassed. He was dealing with all kinds at the time, and there I am adding to his problems, inviting no end of criticism and snide comments his way. He talks about the media in his podcast, and unsurprisingly he’s not particularly positive about us.
I don’t blame him. The job of a journalist is to know, and the brutal truth is I’ve known, really known, far too little about far too much I’ve written down the years. I accept that. And while there is never, I can promise, malice in an article, a headline, a tweet or a Facebook post, too often there is too little thought for the person involved, and the impact even one negative comment, one mean tweet, one reminder of failure or despair or what they could have won can have on someone’s psyche.
I’ll be making sure that changes in the future, trust me. Hearing Caulker’s story, and the experiences of someone like Ryan Corrigan, whose story I told on here a few weeks back, is a sobering reminder that while it may feel like it sometimes, football really isn’t the be-all and end-all, and those who play it are just like anyone else, human beings with feelings and fears, egos and emotions and insecurities.
Time to show a little more respect, I think. A little more patience and a little more compassion. They may spend their life in the limelight, but none of us really know what happens to footballers when the whistle blows, when the fans go home, when the doors close and the curtains are drawn.
It doesn’t hurt to be reminded of that from time to time.
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