Graeme Le Saux: Chelsea had no duty of care – it was banter in the worst way

When Graeme Le Saux recalls the traits of his young self that saw him called an oddity in the 1980s Chelsea dressing room and ultimately targeted for the worst kind of terrace abuse, they seem absurdly mild, viewed 35 years on.

In 1987, aged 19, he was like the kind of student many of his peers were – wearing jeans with holes, and spending summers travelling around Europe. Indeed, it was one of those trips that led his team-mates to invent the taunt – and falsehood – that Le Saux was gay. A relentless goading that spread to the terraces and made Le Saux’s life hell. Although for all that he never walked away from a game that felt completely out of step with the person he was and the life he lived.

Now 56, it is telling that the conversation always returns to that strange episode in what was a very successful career. Le Saux covered it all in an excellent 2007 autobiography, Left Field, and his post playing career has been full of interesting roles. He is an analyst for the US network NBC’s Premier League coverage. He spent nine years on various boards at the Football Association including the one that appointed Sir Gareth Southgate as England manager. He was also on the board at Real Mallorca – now well-established as a Liga club. In recent months Le Saux has moved into football’s data revolution, co-founding the AI company, Machine Football.

“There is much more of an acceptance now in football of the individual rather than just one size fits all,” says Le Saux over lunch. “That is a big shift. The cultural change about how players see themselves within the group. I looked at someone like Héctor Bellerín at Arsenal who had his own unique look and was interested in things outside football. That individualism was celebrated. The potential risk is that the individual need is more important than the collective and how you break that as a coach.”

‘Chelsea was all about banter in the worst possible way’

Le Saux is the last ex-pro likely to chastise the new generation. We wonder what life would have been like for him had social media existed in the 1980s and 1990s. A talented teenager from Jersey, he encountered a hostile group of senior players at Chelsea. There was so little thought given to young players’ welfare that Le Saux was put in a rented room in Burnt Oak, north London, which required a commute to training of two trains and two buses.

Le Saux looks back at it now with amused incredulity. There is no bitterness at being presented with a choice between conforming or fighting, and he is proud he chose the latter. When he was 13, his mother Daphne died, and the news had come out of nowhere for Le Saux, playing in a tournament in France when she passed away. He recalls being stupefied with grief when his father told him. Daphne had previously recovered from breast cancer, and Le Saux’s parents had kept from him the news that she was now suffering again.

“I can comfortably say that the environment I went into at Chelsea was incredibly tough and very debilitating in many ways,” he says. “If I hadn’t been through what I went through as a youngster and my mum dying I may not have been able to survive. I always had that sporting anger and I was very competitive. That was in me. Stepping into Harlington [Chelsea’s then training ground] there was no duty of care. It was all about banter in the worst possible way. They talked about ‘resilience’ which was an excuse to abuse people. They said: ‘Oh, we are toughening you up.’

“To an extent, football was a hostile environment. The hooliganism, the abuse that was coming from the terraces. It was much more visceral back then. You could understand the logic and people didn’t challenge it. I fought it and, luckily for me, I came through the other side but at a cost. I definitely played with fear when I was young. I found it much harder to really enjoy the game.”

Fowler incident led to homophobic abuse

He sensed some of his team-mates felt the same way but felt they had no option but to conform. One of them, Andy Townsend, once picked up the copy of The Guardian that Le Saux was reading and joked that “there was no sport in it”, prefacing more derision. “I knew Andy was bright and clever,” Le Saux says, “and was a very important person in the dressing room. I suppose I felt more disappointed because he was better than that, and he has proven that wasn’t him then, but it was who he was in the dressing room.”

Townsend’s insight and easy-going style has made him a successful pundit and the two bump into each other occasionally. There are no issues and none with Robbie Fowler any more. It was his infamous goading of Le Saux on the pitch in 1999 that contributed to the intense homophobic abuse. Le Saux appreciates the fact that Fowler did eventually apologise, albeit not directly, in an interview in 2014.

“It’s fine because that’s all you ever want,” Le Saux. “I have been the wrong side of stuff. I have always owned my mistakes and accepted that. I so nearly hurt Danny Mills in a horrendous challenge. There were a lot of reasons why that was the result but, at that point, it was a bad challenge. I wrote to him and said that, no matter what we think of each other, that was out of order. He was respectful of the fact that I said I shouldn’t have done that. Still didn’t stop us going at each other next game – but that’s fine as well.”

It does not take us long to conclude that, social media aside, Le Saux would be much better suited to coming through now, rather than in the late 1980s, as a dynamic, fast left-back. And not just for the wages on offer. His skill set of pace and technique allied with a distance runner’s stamina would have been prized in the hard-pressing game of the current era. “The nature of football now is to learn and develop,” he says. “Overall, the culture of the game would have been better for me. It would have made me a better player.”

He recalls that he was never properly coached. Indeed it was the detail that the late great Terry Venables went into when first Le Saux made the England squad that astonished him. At last, here was a manager who told him things that improved his game. He missed Euro 96 with injury but Venables, as with many players of Le Saux’s era, made a huge impression.

‘I’m proud I maintained who I was’

His varied post-playing career has led him to establish Machine Football with Chris Perry, a tech entrepreneur who has a long experience of building tech companies. Machine Football uses AI to develop a bespoke analysis for the datasets of 2,000 teams’ performances across the world. Among its many functions is the categorisation of players and clubs according to style and approach and ensuring the fit of one to the other is right. It is the new frontier of football and Le Saux is passionate about the benefits it will bring to clubs and also to young players, who can be developed to greater effect at loan clubs that better suit their style.

Many of the game’s mysteries are being broken down by the leaps forward in data analysis, but with Le Saux one gets a whole life perspective too. He was subjected to the kind of abuse that few have experienced and survived on his own terms, with a Premier League winner’s medal at Blackburn Rovers, 36 England caps, and a balanced view on the game.

“I am proud that I maintained who I was throughout,” Le Saux says. “I had built up enough identity growing up that I managed to have that resilience to stand up for who I was. [Back in the 1980s] I said: ‘I am not going to read The Sun like everyone else and you can carry on taking the p--- out of me for that.’ I wasn’t trying to build an image. Being true to myself was fundamental and I was able to keep my performances up for long enough to break through.”

It would be wrong to say that it was all struggle, and there are many happy memories – especially from his second spell at Chelsea where he returned in 1997. Le Saux was man of the match in his final game for the club in May 2003, that critical defeat of Liverpool. It secured Champions League qualification, saved the club from financial oblivion and possibly even persuaded Roman Abramovich to buy Chelsea that summer.

His memories are of the ramshackle Harlington facility of that Chelsea era and team-mates who could have a laugh without having to destroy one another. “It was so bad [at Harlington] that we once got robbed while we were training. They took money and clothes and Robbie [Di Matteo’s] watch for winning the Swiss league. We used to joke that Franco [Zola] wore some terrible clothes. Anyway, afterwards I did say to him that at least the thieves had decent taste. They didn’t take anything of Franco’s. In fact, they left him fifty quid to get some new gear.”