Michael Owen has a lot of “haters”; and gave them a lot of ammunition. Photo: Nigel French/PA
God, oh boy, we had some fun with Michael Owen. Fourteen years have passed since his memorable helicopter flight over Dubai, during which he delivered such charismatic nuggets as: “Oil actually accounts for only six percent of national income.” Owen and the city are still trying to recover. Sure, both remain prosperous, but neither will ever become cool.
This seems to be the main problem for Owen's increasingly vocal critics. There's an overused word for people like them who focus on who they don't like and ruthlessly take the mickey rather than ignore it: haters. Owen has a lot of them, and he's given them plenty of ammunition.
His public email address uses the unintentionally funny domain name themicaelowen.com, which when visited is a temporary page for the hosting company. Last year, he promoted a number of NFTs and boldly declared on Twitter that they “will be the first in the world that cannot lose their original value.” The Advertising Standards Authority objected and the tweet was removed. Two years ago, he posed in jeans and a personalized denim jacket in collaboration with a Thai clothing company. Paul Scholes commented under the photo on Instagram with two derogatory words: Shakin' Stevens.
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There's a self-serving thread running through it all: double denim, NFTs, Dubai support. Perhaps such work is needed now that Owen is being used more sparingly as a football pundit. He still has to maintain the lifestyle of an elite footballer and business interests in the rarely cheap field of motor racing.
But lately it's not just Owen's work that has been ridiculed, but also his perceived personality. Again, there's plenty to do here. In a clip from a 1999 video that refuses to die, Neville Southall chided him for excessively celebrating goals against a teenage goalkeeper: “Well done, he's 13.” (Watch the video below)
In the last couple of weeks alone, Owen has been ridiculed for a harmless story about throwing apples in a trash can as a child, a more bizarre story about throwing a dart at someone's leg, and an admittedly embarrassing misunderstanding about a classic Beenie Man Ballroom “Who Am I?” , in which Owen mistook the chorus of “Sim simma” for “Chim Chim Cher-ee” from Mary Poppins. At least it suggests he added the film to the list of eight films he claimed to have watched in 2014; another thing he got torn apart for, like he killed and ate several of the cast members from The Muppet Christmas Carol.
Why is he so despised? There is certainly a certain edginess to his character, and he is the type of person who views the phrase “new money” as a blessing rather than an insult. This is partly due to the fact that he is a rarity, an elite footballer without factions.
He upset Liverpool, the team that created him, by moving to Manchester United when there were no better options. Newcastle fans were also unhappy with the striker and his numerous injuries. During Owen's youth, visitors to Liverpool's training ground noticed that he was always more interested in reading the Racing Post than the daily football pages, which in the eyes of some people was unforgivable sporting polyamory.
However, there's a growing sense of Owen as a hapless Partridge-esque figure – a cringe god chronically unable to determine when a guileless moment can be cut for social media. This gives insults to him a tinge of cruelty. In his defense, he's not the first absurdly talented teenager to suddenly find fame and emerge from the experience as a bit of a strange guy.
Finally, he seems to be a more natural presence on television as the host of Mic&'s Match Officials #39;d Up, a completely calming aid to his confident yet tough delivery. Perhaps he deserves more recognition for a career that has won him the Ballon d'Or. This is something that David Beckham, for example, has never achieved. There is no sense of an impending Netflix series in which we learn about the real Michael.
He will never have Beckham's brilliance, Jamie Carragher's club connections or Gary Neville's oratory skills. But Owen, at his peak, was a more impressive player than all three. It’s a shame to forget about this and turn him into a figure of hatred, especially when there are many more odious personalities in football.
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