ZedVlog

They were the bizarre stories which, even years after they first played out, make you ask the question: did that really happen?

From the Madagascan league game that ended 149-0 to a Chelsea goalkeeper refusing to leave the pitch and the craze for footballers ‘curing’ themselves with horse placenta, The Athletic will recall some of the most bizarre stories in recent football history.

To launch it, Oliver Kay relives the strange tale of how an interview about reincarnation and ‘karma’ for the disabled brought down an England manager.

Glenn Hoddle was a wonderful footballer, a stylish, two-footed, cerebral, creative midfielder of the type the English game has rarely produced before or since.

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Tottenham Hotspur fans of a certain age still look back at him through misty eyes. Arsene Wenger, who managed him at Monaco in the late 1980s, once described him as “the most skilful player I have ever worked with”.

Hoddle was also regarded as a deep thinker. About tactics and systems, certainly, which held him in good stead when he became a manager at Swindon Town and then Chelsea before moving on to the England job at just 38. But also about spirituality, which, ultimately, saw him talk his way out of the job he regarded as the best in the country.

There was a time, early in his England tenure, when Hoddle’s more eccentric traits — the way he would touch his players above the heart in the hope of transmitting positive energy, his use of a faith healer, Eileen Drewery, whom he brought into the camp, urging his players to embrace her powers — were portrayed as a sign of his enlightenment.

But by early 1999, one anticlimactic World Cup campaign and two and a half years into the job, he and his methods had come to be seen in a less flattering light.

It was partly with a view to changing the narrative around Hoddle’s England, after a stuttering start to their Euro 2000 qualifying campaign, that the FA planned a charm offensive in early 1999, arranging a series of media interviews ahead of a friendly against France at Wembley.

The way it transpired, Hoddle forgot the charm and made comments that many people found highly offensive.

An interview was scheduled with The Times of London, whose football reporter, Matt Dickinson, was told Hoddle would call him on the morning of Thursday, January 28.

Dickinson wanted to ask him about the need to regain momentum and public belief, lost since the World Cup, and about Alan Shearer, who had gone 11 games without scoring in the Premier League. But there was another issue that intrigued him.

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A manager’s spiritual beliefs would not, in normal circumstances, be a matter of public interest, but Hoddle’s had been brought into the open by his use of a faith healer and his insistence that the one mistake he had made at the World Cup was not taking Drewery with him to France, whether to cure his players’ aching bodies or cluttered minds.

He had touched on reincarnation in an interview with the BBC the previous May, saying that all the world’s ills had been caused by what we have done “either individually or as a group of souls”.

GO DEEPER

My game in my words. By Glenn Hoddle

Drewery, faith healing, reincarnation. A theme crystallised in Dickinson’s mind: Glenn Hoddle, England manager, a man of faith. He would try to get Hoddle talking about his faith in himself, in his players, whether they and the public still had faith in him and, underpinning it all, his own personal faith.

The FA told Dickinson to wait by his phone on the morning of Thursday, January 28, but the appointed hour passed and the call didn’t come. Dickinson says he had almost given up and was coming out of the shower by the time Hoddle called, leaving him to scramble for a notepad.

“We started on some straight up-and-down about how things were going, why the France game was important, why he was confident he was still on the right track and still had the players on board,” Dickinson recalls.

“And when I asked him about his beliefs, I half-expected him to close it down. But I mentioned what he had said in that BBC interview and he said that, yes, he had talked about it before and had nothing to hide. Once he was on that subject, I didn’t have to encourage him. There was something almost… evangelical about the way he talked about it.”

“My beliefs have evolved in the last eight or nine years that the spirit has to come back again,” Hoddle told him. “That is nothing new; that has been around for thousands of years. You have to come back to learn and face some of the things you have done, good and bad. There are too many injustices around.

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“You and I have been physically given two hands and two legs and half-decent brains. Some people have not been born like that for a reason. The karma is working from another lifetime. I have nothing to hide about that.”

Was Hoddle really suggesting people born with disabilities were victims of karma? “It’s not only people with disabilities,” came the response. “What you sow, you have to reap. You have to look at things that happened in your life and ask why. It comes around.”

By the time the conversation ended, Dickinson’s head was in a spin. “I remember turning to my wife and saying, ‘Well, that was weird’,” he says. “On a journalistic level, I was surprised he had been so offensive and clumsy. But I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’ve got the scoop’ and I certainly wasn’t imagining it would be as big as it became.”

But then he spoke to his sports editor, then the news editor and then the editor of the whole newspaper. “It became fairly obvious fairly quickly that this was going to escalate.”

In his recent book, Playmaker: My Life and the Love of Football, Hoddle said he had “misgivings” about the direction the interview took, but not about his answers.

He did not believe he needed to alert David Davies, the FA’s acting chief executive, and he thought no more of it until he took a call on the Friday evening, warning him his comments were going to be front-page news.

At that point, he said, he was “astonished and appalled” by the idea that he had said people born with disabilities were being punished for sins from a previous life. “It couldn’t have been further from the truth,” he said.

Davies and his wife were hosting a dinner party at home — Coventry City chairman Bryan Richardson and Sky Sports presenter Richard Keys had just arrived with their respective wives — when he took a call from Hoddle saying there was a problem.

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In his book, FA Confidential, Davies says Hoddle claimed to have been “misinterpreted” and then that he thought he had been speaking “off the record”. He issued a statement before the night was out, calling the story “scandalous and disgraceful” and suggesting there must be some kind of hidden agenda. He also stressed that his “support and care for disabled people is well known”.

Dickinson recalls being taken aback when, arriving at his local newsagent the next morning, he saw that his story was not only on the front of The Times but had been widely picked up after the first edition of the paper dropped — and was now on almost every other front page. One tabloid front page called the England manager “Mad Hod”.

The FA went into damage-limitation mode, setting up interviews with the BBC and Sky Sports in which Hoddle gave his side of the story: misquoted, misconstrued, misrepresented.

Hoddle, undeterred, travelled to Coventry, where he was checking on several Liverpool players ahead of the France game. That sense of “business as usual” was reinforced by a conversation with Liverpool director Noel White, chairman of the FA’s international committee, who appeared to share his view that it would “blow over”.

But White, according to Davies, “didn’t seem to understand the urgency of it” at a time when the “tide of revulsion” at Hoddle’s comments was rising.

Looking back through the archives, it is clear to see what Davies meant by the “tide of revulsion”.

This was before the social media age, where controversies can quickly snowball. But the weight of public opinion was already threatening to bring Hoddle down. Eighty-four per cent of respondents to a television phone-in poll said he should be sacked or resign as England manager.

Freda Murray, chairperson of the Disabled Supporters Association, called Hoddle’s comments “disgusting”, while Bob Price, chairman of the British Paralympic Association, said his beliefs could cause “considerable psychological and emotional hurt”.

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Education minister David Blunkett, who had been blind since birth, said: “Glenn’s logic means I must have been a fairly disastrous football coach in a previous life.”

Some felt Hoddle was being harshly criticised, with the former Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev David Jenkins, expressing sadness that people have “jumped down his throat in this way.”

Hoddle was insisting he had been stitched up. In one interview, he insisted: “I didn’t say those things.” In another, with the Daily Mirror, he admitted he had not been misquoted but he had been misrepresented and that it was “taken out of context”.

Dickinson was getting plenty of flak, too. A couple of his fellow journalists that were close to Hoddle gave him the cold shoulder or worse. For a time, as Hoddle’s denials shaped the media narrative, the journalist felt “like someone’s job is on the line here. He’s pushing back and he’s the England manager, so what if it’s my job rather than his?”

He was summoned by Peter Stothard, the editor of The Times, who wanted to be sure of the validity of the quotes if the newspaper was to stand firm. “We went through my notebook, line by line, reading my shorthand notes of what he (Hoddle) had said,” Dickinson recalls.

The editor was reassured, but the Hoddle counter-offensive continued.

And then a recording emerged, in The Observer, of unpublished content from that BBC interview the previous year.

“I think we make mistakes when we are down here (on earth) and our spirit has to come back and learn,” he had told Radio 5 Live’s Sportsweek programme. “That’s why there is an injustice in the world — why there are certain people born into the world with terrible physical problems and why there’s a family who has got everything right, physically and mentally.”

That was a serious blow to Hoddle’s claims to have been misquoted, misrepresented or caught off guard. But the hammer blow came the following day when Prime Minister Tony Blair, appearing on the ITV show This Morning, was asked whether Hoddle should lose his job.

“If he said what he is reported to have said, in the way he is reported to have said it, then I think that was very wrong,” Blair said. “The only thing I say is that I think it’s important that we establish whether he really did say it. I think if he really said it in the way he is reported to have said it, it is very offensive and…”

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He was interrupted. “So he should go?”

The Prime Minister paused. “It’s difficult for him to stay in those circumstances, yes.”

That Monday evening, nearly 72 hours after the first edition of The Times dropped, five members of the FA hierarchy — acting chairman Geoff Thompson, Sheffield Wednesday chairman Dave Richards, Arsenal executive vice-chairman David Dein, White and Davies — held what was still being termed an “emergency meeting” at a London hotel. A sixth, Ipswich Town chairman David Sheepshanks, joined them on a conference call.

Even among a meeting of white, middle-aged men, two-thirds of them called David, there was some divergence of opinion. Davies’ recollection in his book is that “Glenn had supporters in the building, but too few”, such was the deep embarrassment and shock at the interview and the fallout.

Hoddle was ushered in to face the music. Remarkably, given the “untenable” feeling Davies describes, the manager was still offered a way back — a path to redemption, perhaps. He could stay on if he accepted certain conditions. These included a public apology and retraction of his comments, a commitment not to discuss non-football matters in public in future and, a real deal-breaker, getting rid of Drewery.

Hoddle did not accept, again insisting he had been misrepresented.

There was no decision that evening, but Hoddle knew the game was up. “I didn’t want to work for people who had shown themselves to be so feeble,” he recalled.

Very few people spoke up for Hoddle. The one newspaper that did was the Daily Mirror, whose editor, Piers Morgan, contacted Davies to tell him: “If you back Glenn, we will.” The next day it carried a leader article headlined “Honest Hod is worth one last chance”.

Another public ally was Hoddle’s 13-year-old daughter, Zara, who sent a hand-written letter to the BBC’s Ceefax service saying he was “very supportive of disabled people” and that this was “the most pathetic reason for someone to have maybe lost their job and to have so much hassle over”.

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Zara finished by saying she hoped “everything will be back to normal soon”.

It wasn’t. By mid-morning on Tuesday, the conversation had turned to managing Hoddle’s departure.

The parting of ways was going to be far from mutual — he felt extremely aggrieved — but ultimately he and his agent, Dennis Roach, accepted the terms of his departure, including a significant payout on his contract. And the FA would not describe him as being “sacked” even though, effectively, he had been.

That evening, Davies read out a statement during a press conference at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, just around the corner from FA headquarters. “With regret, the FA and Glenn Hoddle have agreed today to terminate Glenn’s contract,” he said, adding that “this was the right decision for English football” and that Hoddle’s position had become “untenable”.

As Davies issued his statement, he was interrupted by shouts of “we want Hoddle out” from a member of the public who had gatecrashed the press conference. He was wrestled to the floor and marched out of the room. Afterwards, the man told reporters he had a disabled family member and was appalled not just by Hoddle’s remarks, but by the time the FA had taken to deal with them.

Next up was Hoddle, who read out a short statement of his own. He accepted he had made “a serious error of judgment in an interview which caused misunderstanding and pain to a number of people. This was never my intention and for this, I apologise”.

Hoddle mentioned the support from family, friends and “media colleagues who have worked with me over the past few days to try to establish the truth”.

It was presumably one of those “media colleagues” who applauded Hoddle at the end of his statement. Nobody else joined in as the departing England manager was given a police escort — a stark, bleak ending to a tenure that had promised so much.

“People saw me as a kook,” Hoddle said in Playmaker. He stated the importance of an open mind, pointing out that other cultures have embraced the concept of reincarnation for thousands of years, and added: “It was only the western world that found the subject difficult. I encountered closed minds in 1999 and I lost a job I cherished.”

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Dickinson agrees there is sadness in that. He is uncomfortable with the idea that someone’s spiritual beliefs — or perhaps just the clumsy way he articulated them — cost them their job. “Who am I to decide what is the correct spirituality and what isn’t?” he says.

At the same time, he feels the views he heard Hoddle express, whether sincerely held or not, were offensive and hurtful. And nearly a quarter of a century on, Dickinson – now one of the most distinguished sports writers of his generation – felt slightly bemused, upon reading Playmaker, that Hoddle referenced him (never by name) as someone who was put on this earth to help him learn forgiveness.

“Now, as then, there is a part of me that recognises the dangers of media/public lynch mobs and frets about cancel culture and the perils of forcing an orthodoxy of views,” he wrote in response to reading Hoddle’s version of events in Playmaker. “But seeing all sides would be easier, frankly, if Hoddle took responsibility.”

When former Manchester United and England defender Rio Ferdinand released his autobiography in 2014, shortly after the national team’s dismal failure at that year’s World Cup, he reflected on the serial underachievement of what Time magazine once memorably called the most disappointing team in world sport.

Ferdinand lauded Hoddle as “by far the best” of all the England managers he played under. “He had a crystal clear vision of how he wanted us to play and how to get there and I still think it was a tragedy for us when he was sacked for his religious beliefs,” he wrote in #2sides. “I don’t think we’ve ever recovered.”

It is irrefutable that England showed moments of promise under Hoddle: beating France and Italy to win the Tournoi de France in 1997; a valiant 0-0 draw away to Italy a few months later to secure World Cup qualification; even the way they performed with 10 men after David Beckham’s red card in 1998 against Argentina in the first knockout round in France, only to lose on penalties.

Hoddle wanted his team to play progressive football: fluent, possession-based, preferring a three-man central defence rather than the straight lines of 4-4-2 which had frustrated him during his playing career.

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And England certainly regressed under Keegan, Hoddle’s immediate successor, and continued to fall short of expectations under Sven-Goran Eriksson, whose air of continental sophistication did not preclude him from a devotion to 4-4-2. In that context, it was easy to lament the loss of a technically-minded English coach.

Hoddle has said similar, insisting he “had that vision that we could have gone on and won something”.

It is an appealing thought. But much of the optimism that greeted Hoddle’s appointment had faded by early 1999, the World Cup in France throwing up misgivings about his man-management.

He and Beckham didn’t see eye to eye, even before that red card against Argentina. Others, like Teddy Sheringham, went cold on him. The manager’s release of a World Cup diary (ghostwritten by Davies) had heightened certain tensions within the squad.

Performances and results after the World Cup were poor and Hoddle himself has suggested he fell victim to a mood that was nothing like so forgiving of his… eccentricities.

To an extent, Dickinson agrees. “I wrote at the time that it was as much a sacking of mood as a sacking of principle,” he says. “That was the nature of the FA at the time. They were far too easily governed by what was on the front page of The Sun or the Daily Mail or The Times.”

At 41, Hoddle was still young enough when he left the England job to manage at the highest level.

It didn’t work out that way.

He did well enough in his next job, at Southampton, to get the chance to manage Tottenham, the club he played for with distinction. But his return to White Hart Lane was an anti-climax, finishing ninth and 10th in the Premier League in his two full seasons in charge before being sacked the following autumn, with chairman Daniel Levy citing an “unacceptable lack of progress”.

He never managed in the Premier League again. His only other management job came in the Championship at Wolverhampton Wanderers, where he spent a season and a half but fell short of the play-off places on both occasions before resigning in the summer of 2006.

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There were plenty of job offers after that, but he invested his time in a football academy in Spain, coaching players released by professional clubs, and worked as a television pundit. He never managed again after the age of 49.

As for the notion that Hoddle’s departure was a “tragedy” for English football, Dickinson suggests Terry Venables, who took them to the semi-finals of Euro 96, was the far bigger loss to the national team — a smarter tactician, a more astute man-manager, more worldly and emotionally intelligent.

Indeed, in an interview in January 1999, just three weeks before Hoddle’s demise, Venables told The Independent “in the nicest, most supportive way” that he found it astonishing his successor had taken the England job at 38. “It’s likely in 10 years, he’ll think, ‘Christ, I wish I had waited’,” Venables said.

Prophetic indeed, but Hoddle always rejected the idea that the job had come too early. He felt he was ready for it and that he would be even better equipped — older, wiser — if it came around again.

It never did. Maybe in the next life — although, to recycle an old joke, it would seem a particularly harsh punishment for previous sins if someone were to come back as England manager for a second time.

Dickinson prefers a line written by the revered British sportswriter Simon Barnes at the time of the furore, which has been recalled as some of Hoddle’s more recent successors have fallen to their fate.

“It is a law of sport,” Barnes wrote. “Every person who takes on the job of England coach or manager ends up standing before the world exactly as he is.”

(Top photo: Ross Kinnaird/Allsport; design: Sean Reilly)

To read other pieces in our ‘Did That Really Happen?’ series, click on the links below

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