A short history of Gareth

A personal recollection of time spent with the former England boss.

This is a deleted chapter from my football “memoir” Square Peg, Round Ball. It feels right to publish it today, given the news that Gareth Southgate is to be knighted. I’m indifferent to the honours system, but I am more than prepared to make an exception in the case of Gareth Southgate, perhaps the most complete man I ever met in the line of my work. The story starts in the late 1990s. I was just starting out as a football reporter with Sky Sports.

Weirdly, Doug Ellis once invited me on a fishing weekend.

He didn’t really mean it, obviously. The invitation was just a crumb of largesse from a man who tended to banquet on largesse. The Aston Villa supremo belonged to that generation of old white football club chairmen who thought that the best way of winning hearts and minds was to turn up at a golf club in a Bentley and bark instructions at people behind the bar while simultaneously telling everyone within a three mile radius how he wouldn’t have signed Marco Van Basten if they’d paid him. Anyway, it was probably all for the best that he didn’t really mean the invitation, because I had nothing fishy to wear and no idea how to fish for fish.

Yet, although the great package holiday baron of Sutton Coldfield often came across as a man in a carvery with a lot to say and a decent bottle of Sauvignon Blanc on the go, it wasn’t all bluster. In fact one thing he said stuck in my memory, during an amusingly self-serving afternoon in which he kindly allowed us to film him at the offices of a local newspaper that he owned. He stopped by a photocopier, and expounded.

The conversation had turned to the live and contentious issue of the sudden inflation of players’ wages. This was at around about the time that Roy Keane signed a contract at Old Trafford that paid him £50,000 a week, which sounded at the time like it might be enough money to run the NHS and still have something left over for space exploration. Ellis had run a fiscally very tight ship at Aston Villa, despite becoming the first director of a football club officially to be paid a salary, and was not given to acts of spontaneous generosity. Yet, he recognized the worth of a man when he saw it.

‘Take Gareth,’ he told me. Gareth Southgate was his club captain, and a regular England international at the time. ‘Now, there’s an impressive man. He’ll never want for anything, you know. He’s a millionaire, made for life. I’ve never met a player more intelligent than Gareth; a very smart man. He’ll go a long way in the game, after he’s finished playing. A long way.’