1) Gabriel Batistuta
Of all the players who seemed to play football with a passion and joie de vivre, Batistuta seemed among the most passionate and joiest de vivrest. Those lusty shots, those screaming celebrations, those goals. But, it seems, he wasn’t especially keen on football. “I do not like football, it is just my profession,” he once said in an interview with Argentinian TV.
The man who helped Batistuta write his autobiography seemed to confirm this. “He is not like other players,” Alessandro Rialti told the Sunday Times in 1999. “Once he leaves the stadium, he doesn’t want football encroaching upon the rest of his life. When we were doing the book, he came to my office and for five full days he spoke about his family and his life in Argentina. But when it came to the football and his career, he switched off. ‘The records are there,’ he said. ‘You can look them up.’”
Indeed, he seemed to speak much more enthusiastically about a sport he took up late in his career: polo. “Every time I went back to Argentina on holidays, friends would invite me to play polo,” he told FourFourTwo. “I was curious to know whether I would be able to do it. I tried [it] out, and I ended up loving it. It’s a hobby, but I always try to improve my standard, because the better I play, the more fun I have.”
2) David Batty
When Blackburn had a reunion of their 1994-95 Premier League title-winning side in 2015, only one member of the squad didn’t turn up. Since retiring in 2004, Batty has broadly gone off grid, not keen to join in the traditional carousel of punditry and personal appearances. This is just a man happy to live his life, not let his career dominate his existence.
The extent to which Batty actively disliked football is perhaps exaggerated by his absence from the game. In this interview with The City Talking he says a few times how much he loved certain aspects of football, but every now and then reminders of a man who kept the game in perspective – too much perspective, if anything – pop up. Like this description of international football: “When you make your debut for England, at the very beginning, it’s the pinnacle of your career … and then it just becomes normal. Yeah, you play in the World Cup, but it’s still just another game in a different country.”
So perhaps this was closer to a healthy detachment. “I was always a home bird, so I’d go play and then I just loved getting home,” he said. “That never changed. At the World Cup, as soon as we got in the changing rooms after the shootout, I was looking forward to getting home and seeing my kids – so football didn’t matter. I could detach. I’d give my all. And then that was me finished with football.”
3) Benoît Assou-Ekotto
It’s still strangely taboo for footballers to admit they’re just doing this for the money. Like various art forms, for some reason people still expect them to be driven by a higher purpose: because lots of people like playing football, and would like to be footballers, the idea that actual footballers should thus ignore the broader concerns of earning as good a living as they can is weirdly still common.
Assou-Ekotto wasn’t afraid of admitting his primary motivation, though. “If I play football with my friends back in France, I can love football,” he told the Guardian in 2010. “But if I come to England, where I knew nobody and I didn’t speak English … why did I come here? For a job. A career is only 10, 15 years. It’s only a job. Yes, it’s a good, good job and I don’t say that I hate football but it’s not my passion.
“You read the paper, it’s like a movie,” he continued. “Very bizarre … only in England. That’s why football is not my passion because when you are professional, the world of football is not good.”
4) Christian Vieri
At the 1998 World Cup, before Italy faced France in the quarter-finals, a group of French journalists asked Vieri who his childhood idol was. “Allan Border,” came the reply, to bemused faces. Vieri was born in Bologna but raised in Sydney, which is where Border – rather than Paolo Rossi, Bruno Conti or Toto Schillaci – became his idol, and cricket his first love. “To be honest I wasn’t very good at football,” he said. “I loved cricket and when I started making some big scores for my boys’ team, I dreamed of becoming the next Border.”
Quite a handy player in his youth, he might even have made a decent professional cricketer, but the practicalities of playing the game in Italy and, to be frank, the remuneration on offer made football a more viable option. “I would have loved to have been a cricketer,” he said in 2003. “I was telling a friend last week, I would stop playing now to play cricket if I could get the same contract. I was a bit of an all-rounder at school.”
Football’s arrogance is such that we assume everyone regards it as the absolute pinnacle, but this is a man who, in an ideal world, would simply rather be doing something else. Many can probably sympathise with that.
5) Espen Baardsen
People think football is fun because they remember having fun playing it as a kid. Or, they have fun in their Sunday league team, or at their weekly five-a-side. But, when you listen to the way some who have played professionally talk about it, the game sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.
People like Baardsen, for example, the former Spurs and Watford goalkeeper who retired aged 25 before going on to work as a fund manager. Speaking to the Observer in 2008, he said: “You wouldn’t think a person working in the city could say this, but I’m more relaxed, five kilos lighter, fitter and healthier than I was at the end of my football career. Football is stressful, try playing in front of 40,000 crazy football supporters who are happy or sad for their whole weekend depending on how you perform. Never mind all the people criticising you on TV.”
6) Gareth Bale
It might be stretching things a bit to say Bale doesn’t like football. Playing, he’s very much on board with: his keenness when it comes to international football, particularly in comparison to some previous high-profile Welsh players, is proof enough. When he’s not on the pitch though, he’s not so fussed. While players such as Jamie Carragher and Thierry Henry were famous for watching as many games as they could feasibly fit into their schedules, Bale would rather do other things with his time. “I don’t really watch much football,” he said to ESPN earlier this year. “I’d rather watch the golf to be honest.”
