The boy from Toxteth who became God
- A suffering city that ‘needed an icon’
- Barnes on age of individualism: ‘Robbie would always be a hero’
- McAteer: The damage of the Spice Boys tag
- Heskey: There was never any tension
- The second coming: ‘A masterstroke’
This is Football’s Cult Heroes, brought to you by Sky Sports. A new series telling the stories of the players that carried their clubs on their backs - on and off the pitch.
As Kenny Dalglish’s white Mercedes headed for Toxteth, the career of the teenage Everton fan sitting alongside him was only ever going one way.
Robbie Fowler grew up blue, but when red royalty - the King - pulled up at the bus stop outside Liverpool’s centre of excellence and offered him a lift home - he couldn’t refuse.
‘Anywhere here is good,’ the 14-year-old Fowler told Dalglish, still a little way from home. He hadn’t wanted Dalglish to go right outside his parents’ one-up-one-down.
Then Liverpool’s manager, Dalglish could not have foreseen the humble schoolboy he dropped off would surpass his own goalscoring achievements at the club. But he had a decent idea.
“They knew about what a talent he was – they wanted him to be at Liverpool, not at Everton,” Gareth Roberts, editor of The Anfield Wrap, tells Sky Sports News.
What they didn’t know was the character - the cheeky grin that the Kop would fall in love with, that they would worship.
“He was like a classic Scouse imp,” says Tony Evans, former football editor at The Times and lifelong Liverpool fan.
Here, told by the team-mates, journalists and fans that were there, Football’s Cult Heroes charts the rise of an “ordinary” boy with an “extraordinary” gift, the ‘Spice Boy’ tag that led to his Liverpool exit - and the second coming under Rafa Benitez.
This is the story of the boy from Toxteth who became God.
Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple.
"The city needed a hero, it needed an icon."
As the 1990s began, the city of Liverpool was suffering.
While Liverpool Football Club had just experienced two decades of unrivalled sporting riches, underneath the silverware the city had been falling apart.
There was industrial unrest and rising unemployment. A six-year-old Fowler had witnessed the events of the ‘81 Toxteth Riots on his own street.
Fowler witnessed the Toxteth riots as a child in 1981
Fowler witnessed the Toxteth riots as a child in 1981
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was accused of presiding over the region's decline.
“It was a poor place in the 80s and going into the 90s. The docks had closed down in the late 70s, early 80s, and a lot of industry had moved away,” says Tony Evans. “The government talked about managed decline at cabinet level, which was actually withdrawing resources from the area to essentially starve the people out because it was such a thorn in the side of the government.
“It was the post-Hillsborough era where, for the 90s, much of it we spent in a state of shock in a lot of ways because the impact of what happened in 1989 was still massive. We were running away from it in many ways. It never looked as if it would be resolved at that point.”
While the city mourned, Liverpool Football Club lost their grip on the English game as Arsenal, Leeds and Manchester United strengthened.
Dalglish, carrying the immense strain of Hillsborough, resigned in February 1991.
“The football club went into a spiral really from being the most dominant team in the country to being second rate in terms of the new Premier League,” says Evans. “The city needed a hero, it needed an icon.”
As things looked bleak, word of a local lad rising through the academy ranks was beginning to get out.
“I had a next-door neighbour who was a goalie and he’d played against Robbie in a match and Robbie had chipped him from the halfway line,” says Roberts.
“He was saying then that this lad is unbelievable, this lad is amazing, this lad can do anything on a football pitch and us as fans, we were desperate to see him out there and we couldn’t understand what felt like him being held back. If he can do that for the reserves, get him in the first team, let’s see him, let’s see him play.”
Liverpool fans wouldn’t have to wait long.
After top-scoring for the England under-18s as they won the 1993 European Championship, he got his first Liverpool goal in the League Cup first-leg tie away at Fulham in September that year.
But it was the second leg where the then 18-year-old Fowler made his mark. He scored all five goals in a 5-0 victory at Anfield.
“I remember the press were on it straight away,” says Roberts. “Why wouldn’t the press be on it? It’s a local lad come good – it’s very Roy of the Rovers. That’s absolutely dream stuff.”
Unfazed, Fowler quickly proved himself to the senior figures in the dressing room.
“Robbie isn’t a particularly eye-catching player, you aren’t looking at someone who is 6ft 4in, good in the air, or very quick or skilful,” says John Barnes, one of the title winners of the 80s still at Liverpool then.
“But what you saw in training is that he would put the ball in the back of the net.
“A lot of people couldn’t understand how – he just had the knack of being in the right place at the right time. Left foot, right foot, tap-ins, 30-yarders, headers. He was just a fantastic finisher.
“It really did surprise us how quickly he hit the ground running. Because a young boy coming into an experienced team, you thought he would be overawed, but he wasn’t. He was a cheeky-chappy from Toxteth who really believed in himself.”
Eighteen goals during his debut campaign brought that "cheeky-chappy" national attention in an era before media training was commonplace.
Fowler, barely 19, would later write in his autobiography little changed ‘except that when I went down the chippy and got me special fried rice, it would be wrapped in a newspaper that had my picture all over it’.
“We had a game of footie with our mates and then went to the chippy, we just weren’t doing it for Liverpool,” says Roberts. “He was so ordinary in that respect, but extraordinary as a footballer.”
Fowler’s status as one of the country’s elite finishers was confirmed in the 94/95 campaign.
He destroyed George Graham’s famous Arsenal back-five with the fastest hat-trick the Premier League had seen. It would be a record that would stand for over 20 years - Sadio Mane eclipsing it in 2015.
“Robbie was just as cool as ice,” says Roberts. “He never cared who he was against, didn’t think too much about it, didn’t think too much about the defenders he was up against, he didn’t even think too much about the context of the match – where it was, when it was, what moment it was – just bang goal, bang goal, bang goal, bang goal. Over and over again.”
Fowler was becoming “a beacon on the pitch as well as off it”, according to Evans.
“You looked at him and thought this fella can lead us back to where we should be,” he says.
“The fact that he was Scouse made it even better. You saw one of the best strikers that England had produced, well we’d take issue with that and say he’s not English - he’s Scouse, he only played for England.”
By the end of the 95/96 season Fowler had scored 67 goals in 110 games and won back-to-back PFA Young Player of the Year awards.
He wasn’t just a cult hero, he was ‘God’.
“At first we took issue with it a little bit because Dalglish was God, some people called him the King, but he was above that,” says Evans. “Robbie got the nickname, but he just had that … he could do things that were almost supernatural.
“No one could believe what they were seeing. There must be more, something divine about him, something other-worldly. To see him do that, no wonder he got the nickname.”
For Barnes, it represented a sea change in the English game.
“I think that is when the individual aspect of football came to the fore,” he says. “Whereby fans appreciated individuals more than the team.
“Robbie would always be a hero of the team, even when the team were finishing third or fourth or not doing particularly well.”
"The Liverpool boys were never Spice Boys"
Football was changing, but so was everything else around it.
An explosion of culture in the mid-90s saw entertainment industries overlap more and more.
The hooliganism tag that had blighted football over the past two decades had dissipated. Football was in vogue once again - and everyone wanted a piece.
“Football went from a drinking culture to actually like a superstar culture,” says former Liverpool player Jason McAteer. “We were treated like Hollywood actors. We were looked upon as these superstars. We were on telly doing adverts, we were in magazines a lot more, we were on boxes of cornflakes. We were becoming household names.”
Fowler was one of those making that crossover. But his meteoric rise on and off the pitch wasn't without its issues.
Unfounded speculation of a romance between Fowler and Spice Girls member Emma Bunton led to him and a core group of his team-mates being labelled as ‘Spice Boys'.
McAteer was one of them.
“I think it’s a very detrimental term,” he says. “I don’t find it an affectionate term at all. I don’t see it bearing any relevance on who we actually were.”
The image of the Liverpool players was compounded as rivals Manchester United began to exert their dominance on the Premier League, winning their third title in four years by the summer of ‘96.
“We trained as hard as anybody else, we gave it everything,” says McAteer. “But we fell short to a really young Man United team - the Class of '92 team had come through, Eric Cantona was brought in, very similar to us. But what they had, they had a different mentality. If you watch 95-96, we were arguably the best team in the league in terms of watching football, expansive football, free-flowing - goals.”
Barnes knew what it took to win league titles, and while a new celebrity culture was a fixture in football, he believes his Liverpool team-mates were unfairly labelled.
“As a senior player I was always trying to galvanise the players into thinking what is right for the team,” he says. “But, of course, football was different then.
“The Liverpool boys were never ‘Spice Boys’ – so that whole idea that they are ‘Spice Boys’ and they just want to win, look good and go out to clubs and stuff. That was never the situation.”
Spice Boys behaving badly continued to be a hot topic for the national press though.
Stories of boozing, fighting and romance were selling newspapers and the players were suddenly a market for the paparazzi.
Matching cream Armani suits at the 1996 FA Cup final - which Liverpool lost to Manchester United - and a team bus sponsored by London’s Emporium nightclub did little to change the narrative.
“We were quite accessible still back then,” says McAteer. “Nowadays you don’t see the footballers but back then we would venture into town and go to a restaurant, go for a night out, people would see us, we had lots of friends, we were young, there were no camera phones, no social media, not that we had anything to hide, but we felt very comfortable in our surroundings so we’d go out.
“But all of a sudden when you don’t win, that becomes a problem for people. It’s like ‘you shouldn’t be out’ or ‘you shouldn’t be doing this’.”
As the national press continued to keep watch Fowler used the spotlight to show his support for striking dockers in Liverpool in March 1997.
After scoring his final goal in a 3-0 victory in the European Cup Winners' Cup, he raised his shirt to reveal a 'dockers' slogan across his vest.
The incident, an act of solidarity with those on the picket line at Seaforth Dock, earned him a £900 fine from UEFA.
"It was a symbol of resistance - he was a symbol of resistance," says Evans.
"It was that Scouse thing - ‘we’ll take on the authorities, we’re not backing down’. Not only did he score, he took off this t-shirt which said 'I’m completely behind the dockers', and everyone on the Kop was completely behind the dockers as well. We were like ‘yeah, there’s the connection, we understand this, we understand what you’re about, you’re one of us’.
"When I think of him I think of the line from American Pie about Buddy Holly - the voice that came from you and me - well Robbie was the player that came from you and me - from the Kop. He was the embodiment of all we thought, all we felt. He didn’t care what the authorities thought, he was displaying his support for the dockers. He was the embodiment of the city and the embodiment of the resistance in that way."
Fowler delivered another 31 goals during the 96/97 campaign. It would be the last time he would hit such numbers in his career, though.
A serious knee injury in the Merseyside derby during the following season ruled him out of the 1998 World Cup in France.
That summer, while Fowler underwent his rehabilitation, Liverpool’s hierarchy proceeded to shake up their management structure.
One piece of silverware in six seasons - a League Cup in 1995 - was not enough.
In an unprecedented move, experienced Frenchman Gerard Houllier was appointed as a co-manager alongside Roy Evans. He assumed full management control midway through the 98/99 season following the resignation of Evans.
Known for being a disciplinarian, former school teacher Houllier wanted to bring a new professionalism to the Liverpool dressing room.
“Houllier didn’t take to Robbie’s character,” says Evans. “Robbie was a terrible one for pranks and jokes, being a bit of a ‘Jack the Lad’. Whereas Houllier came in, like [Arsene] Wenger at Arsenal, with a completely different view of how football should be, to how English football had developed, and was keen to make it much more professional.
“Robbie was in many ways a free spirit - bridled a little bit under that sort of management. So there was always going to be a clash of personalities. They were always going to be at loggerheads.”
McAteer adds: “When Gerard came in he’d already made his mind up on the back of the Spice Boys tag that we were more of a problem inside the club than what we were on the pitch and it wasn’t worth it. He wanted to rebuild with Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Danny Murphy and Michael Owen. It was very hard for a lot of us.”
With much of the focus now on teenage sensation Owen, Fowler’s 18 goals on his return from injury went relatively under the radar.
His 17th goal of that season would spark controversy though.
Persistent rumours of recreational drug-taking had angered Fowler and he wanted to set the record straight in his own way.
After dispatching the first of two goals in the Merseyside derby, Fowler dropped to his knees and sniffed the white line of the pitch.
Houllier tried his best to downplay the meaning of it, claiming Fowler was only recreating a Cameroonian grass-eating celebration taught to him by team-mate Rigobert Song.
The FA wasn’t convinced though and hit Fowler with a four-match ban.
“Robbie was tarnished with this brush of taking drugs and it was a real false accusation but for some reason it started sticking,” says McAteer.
“The more you deny it the more people think you’re actually doing it. It just hurt. It hurt him, it hurt us because we knew he wasn’t and it was just a real slur on his character. Frustration at the end of the day got the better of him.
“What he did that day, I can understand it, in front of the Everton fans. If Robbie went for a night out it would be in Liverpool. He never really went out of Liverpool if he went for a night out or for a meal. There’s a lot of Everton fans or Liverpool fans who are on a night out, they’re quick enough to make an assumption, he found it very frustrating, so he got his opportunity to do what he did. Does he regret it? I’m sure he probably did.”
Fowler received an additional two-match ban for a homophobic taunt made against Chelsea defender Graeme Le Saux. He was also issued with a £32,000 fine from the FA.
Following the incident, Fowler sent Le Saux a letter of apology and has since expressed regret and embarrassment over his actions.
"It just clicked straight away - it was just one of those matches that worked"
Once fully in control, Houllier started to put his own stamp on the squad and out went the likes of McAteer and David James, while Fowler’s best mate Steve McManaman left for Real Madrid.
A new strike force at Liverpool was next on the agenda. Young England striker Emile Heskey would arrive from Leicester for a club-record £11m in March 2000.
Houllier’s plan was to partner Owen with Heskey and get Liverpool competing for major domestic and European honours once again.
“Me and Michael, you’ve got to remember we played together when I was 18 and he was 16, so we’ve actually been playing together a lot longer, got to understand each other a lot quicker and it just clicked straight away - it was just one of those matches that worked,” says Heskey.
“But we had the relationship and going back we were playing for England under-18s, we’re playing France and Gerard Houllier was the manager. That’s how far back it went.”
Fowler remained vice-captain and continued to contribute. He scored 17 goals in all competitions as Liverpool enjoyed an historic 2000/01 season - winning the FA Cup, League Cup and UEFA Cup.
But speculation over Fowler’s future had started to grow as it became clear Houllier’s preferred partnership was Owen and Heskey.
“There was never any tension,” says Heskey. “We were all footballers that wanted to play and it’s not down to us who actually plays.
“You’ve got to remember we had a lot of games in the 2000/01 season - and we all played. I think Robbie started the League Cup final and scored, Michael the other two, and I was lucky enough to start all three.
“We got on very well in training. Off the pitch we never necessarily had a relationship where we were going round each other’s houses but it was a good relationship to be honest.”
Fowler’s frustration finally boiled over as the 01/02 season kicked off.
A training ground bust-up with assistant manager Phil Thompson saw Fowler left out of the squad for the Charity Shield match against Manchester United as well as their Premier League opener.
An increasingly strained relationship with Houllier was also no longer confined to the dressing room.
“It got to a stage where it was a bit grim if I am being honest,” says Roberts. “There was briefings going on and there were two sides to the story. I remember there being a line in the local press, which everyone felt that Houiller had something to do with, and it was along the lines of ‘Owen is world class, Fowler was world class’ and from what I heard Robbie wasn’t particularly happy about that line in the local paper, let’s just put it that way. He didn’t see eye-to-eye with him.”
Ambitious and free-spending Leeds United came in for Fowler in November 2001 and were willing to part with £11m to bring him to Elland Road.
With the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea on the horizon, Fowler was left with a tough choice: stick it out at Liverpool and risk his place in Sven Goran Eriksson’s England squad or depart the club he never envisaged leaving.
“You could see it coming, and you could see it coming for a long while, but it didn’t make the blow any easier,” says Evans. “It was easy to rationalise in some ways because of Michael Owen’s presence and because of the way the team was developing - it was developing in a very different style to what suited Robbie Fowler. But it didn’t make it any easier.
“You want players from the city playing for your team, you want players who understand what it means, you want players who connect to the fans. Michael Owen was never loved by the supporters, you could never imagine him wearing a ‘dockers’ t-shirt. So as fine a player as Michael Owen was, he never really connected with us, with the Kop. So when Robbie went it was a very big blow.”
At Leeds, 12 goals in 23 games ensured Fowler got his seat on the plane to Japan and South Korea - although he would once again play a bit-part role to the Owen and Heskey partnership at the finals.
A financial implosion at Leeds during the following campaign saw Fowler depart the club for Manchester City in a £6m deal.
Injuries disrupted his three-year spell in Manchester, but there were still some brief moments of joy.
He celebrated a goal in a memorable 3-1 derby victory over Manchester United with a five-finger salute in reference to Liverpool’s European Cup tally.
It would be Fowler’s last goal for City and foreshadowed a move that many did not expect, even Fowler himself.
“Rafa recognised that you need players that understand the club"
Money was tight at Liverpool in January 2006, so when manager Rafa Benitez was in need of a new striker, he had to get creative.
"He didn’t have a lot of money at the time and he was looking for value," says Evans. "He saw Robbie as being good value."
Call it moneyball, call it romance - Fowler didn't need any convincing, and neither did Manchester City.
Now 30, he returned to Anfield for free on a six-month deal.
"I feel like a kid waking up on Christmas morning every day now," said Fowler.
God was back.
“When he came back, it was brilliant,” says Evans. “Rafa recognised that you need players that understand the club. You need players who - their heart is in it, as well. It was a bit of a gamble and it was because there largely wasn’t a lot of cash available to him but it did make a lot of sense at the time.
“It was great to see him back in a Liverpool shirt, I think everyone appreciated - we didn’t expect the goalscoring heroics of seven or eight years before but we were just glad to have him back. There was a sense that he left too early, and just the feeling of completion.”
Roberts adds: “Even when he came back, and probably by his own admittance not in his greatest shape, lost a bit of pace and stuff like that, but we still had little moments where he put one away and you were like ‘there’s Robbie’.
“That was a masterstroke by Benitez at the time. It just lifted everyone again and there’s a lot for lifting people – the team, the fans, everything.
“He loves Liverpool and it’s always been so obvious that he loves Liverpool, the city, the club, everything. When he came back, he could have gone to other places, he could have gone abroad, he could have made more money but when there was a sniff of coming back to Liverpool, he was on it straight away.”
A fresh 12-month contract ensured it would be a long Anfield goodbye for Fowler.
It would remain very much a supporting role, with new arrivals Craig Bellamy and Dirk Kuyt now at the club and Benitez casting his eye towards the future.
His last appearance in red would come in the final match of the 06/07 Premier League campaign - a 2-2 draw against Charlton Athletic.
The remainder of Fowler’s playing career would take him to Australia and Thailand. While he never enjoyed the success that previous teams did at Liverpool - his 183 goals did cement him as one of the greatest goalscorers in the club’s history.
To date, he remains sixth on Liverpool’s all-time scoring list - but the boy from that Toxteth estate meant more than just goals to the fans.
“It’s everyone’s dream in this city – certainly from the Red half as a lad growing up – to play for the club,” says Roberts. “He got to do it and he did it very well and he scored some absolutely belting goals, held all kinds of records, lifted silverware, captained the club, all of these things. Yes, if he had more talent around him, maybe better managers at times and things like that, maybe he could have done more.”
Evans adds: “In some ways it’s a disappointment that he didn’t achieve as much as he should have. At a troubled time, he was a joy to watch, he made going the match worthwhile, you were excited every time the ball came near him and that really was his biggest gift. He energised the crowd, he made us feel that we could be successful again.
“If you look back on his career and judge it only by medals and success, I think that would be to misunderstand what he meant to the club and the city at a difficult time.”
This is Football’s Cult Heroes, brought to you by Sky Sports. Each week we bring you a new feature dedicated to a player that left an everlasting mark on the English game.
Still to come...
- Jurgen Klinsmann
- Eric Cantona
- Jay-Jay Okocha
- Dimitri Payet
- Kelly Smith
Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple.
Words by James Dale & Nick Lustig
Edited by James Dale
Graphics by Zem Clarke
Interviews by James Dale & Nick Lustig
Series created by Nick Lustig
Presented by Nik Hobbs
Produced by James Dale & Nick Lustig
Built with Shorthand
