Michael Owen, the boy striker England never let grow up

Michael Owen

Photo: David Seow / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 14, 1979 Chester
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award

Most of England still pictures Michael Owen as a teenager in a white shirt, collecting the ball in his own half against Argentina and running until there was nobody left to beat. That boy has never aged in the national memory, and the man has spent his adult life negotiating with him: a striker whose best seasons were over at an age when most forwards are only starting theirs, a Liverpool hero who later wore Manchester United’s number seven, a racehorse breeder who has now let a camera crew into his kitchen. Harry Kane has just taken the last title that teenager still held, the one that made Owen the most recent Englishman to win the Ballon d’Or, and Owen cheered him on.

The talent arrived early and in public. Owen grew up just across the Welsh border in Hawarden, the fourth child of Terry Owen, a former Chester City and Everton forward. In the Deeside schools team he broke a scoring record that had belonged to Ian Rush. Liverpool’s youth chief Steve Heighway wrote to the family personally, the boy was sent to the Football Association’s school of excellence at Lilleshall in his early teens, and he still found time for ten GCSEs.

He signed professional terms at Anfield on his 17th birthday, in December 1996, a Chester boy born on 14 December 1979. Roy Evans gave him a Premier League debut the following May and he scored in it, becoming the club’s youngest ever goalscorer. With Robbie Fowler injured, Owen led the line in 1997–98 and shared the Golden Boot in his first full season, then shared it again the next. He was voted the PFA Young Player of the Year, and by February 1998 he had become the youngest England international of the century.

The World Cup in France made him a global name inside a fortnight. He scored off the bench against Romania, and in the round of 16 at Saint-Étienne he took a pass near halfway, went past José Chamot and Roberto Ayala and shot past Carlos Roa. England went out on penalties, but the goal was the image of the tournament for English viewers, and that December he was named BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

The peak came under Gérard Houllier. In 2000–01 Liverpool won the UEFA Cup, the League Cup and the FA Cup, and in the FA Cup final in Cardiff Owen scored twice in the closing minutes to turn a 1–0 defeat against Arsenal into a 2–1 win. That September he scored a hat-trick in England’s 5–1 victory over Germany in Munich, and in December he won the Ballon d’Or. He left Liverpool with 158 goals in 297 appearances.

The body was already sending invoices. A hamstring tore at Leeds in April 1999 and never fully settled. Owen let his contract run down and joined Real Madrid‘s Galácticos for £8 million in 2004, scoring 13 La Liga goals largely from the bench; when Madrid turned down Liverpool’s bid to bring him home, he went to Newcastle United for a club-record £16.8 million. He broke a metatarsal within months, then tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee 51 seconds into England’s group game against Sweden at the 2006 World Cup. He later admitted that the injuries that followed all traced back to that night.

The story most often told about him is that of a wasted genius who ended up a mercenary, and it is half wrong. The move that hurt most came in 2009, when, after Newcastle’s relegation, Alex Ferguson called “out of the blue” and Owen joined Manchester United on a pay-as-you-play deal, taking the number seven shirt Cristiano Ronaldo had just vacated. He scored a sixth-minute stoppage-time winner in a 4–3 derby against Manchester City, and in 2010–11 he collected the league winner’s medal Liverpool never gave him, his first in 15 seasons as a professional. Many Liverpool supporters have never forgiven the move. His autobiography, Reboot, published in 2019, made things worse: around its release he said he regretted joining Newcastle and that he had hated the last six or seven years of his career, which prompted Alan Shearer to reply, “Yes Michael, we thought that also, whilst on £120k a week.” Yet the record sits awkwardly with the caricature. Owen scored 40 goals in 89 games for England, was the first England player to score at four consecutive major tournaments, and is one of the few players with 150 Premier League goals. His candour about the decline is rarer than the decline itself.

He retired after one injury-hit season at Stoke City, leaving the pitch against Southampton in May 2013 to a standing ovation from both ends. The second career had been under way for years. Owen breeds and owns thoroughbreds at Manor House Stables in Cheshire, where he bred Brown Panther, a Royal Ascot winner in 2011 and winner of the Dubai Gold Cup in 2015. On television he works as a pundit for TNT Sports and Amazon Prime Video. He married Louise Bonsall, whom he met at primary school, in 2005; they have four children. In January 2024 he revealed that their son James had been diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a degenerative eye condition, at the age of eight, and their eldest daughter Gemma finished second on Love Island in 2022.

This year has kept him in the news more than any since he stopped playing. After England lost their World Cup semi-final 2–1 to Argentina in Atlanta in July, he attacked Thomas Tuchel for sending on defenders at 1–0 up, insisting “we are a better team than Argentina.” On 28 August Prime Video released Meet the Owens in the UK and Ireland, a six-part docuseries from Whisper that follows a year at the Cheshire yard: Gemma training as a jockey with Glorious Goodwood as the goal, Emily trying to become the first Owen to go to university. Before this autumn’s Ballon d’Or vote he said his heart was with Kane, and in October Kane became the first English winner since Owen. On the night, a television interviewer asked Owen what his best Ballon d’Or finish had been. He had to explain that he had won it.

That exchange is the whole paradox in a sentence. The trophy record has passed to someone else, the boy from Saint-Étienne has not, and Owen, now an owner-breeder, a broadcaster and the lead of his family’s documentary, keeps having to remind people that the teenager and the man are the same person.

Tags: sports, athletes, footballers, Real Madrid, Harry Kane, Ballon d'Or, Liverpool FC, Alan Shearer, Michael Owen

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