"The money you get in football means the parasites come'

The former West Ham, Chelsea and England footballer, a gifted maverick who always felt a man out of time, playing a game years ahead of most of his contemporaries, smiles when I ask how old he feels now: "Forty-four. I'm 44 [this Saturday].

- 

My wife will laugh if she reads this, but you emotionally mature quite quickly as a footballer."

Cole was a teenager from Camden, living on a council estate, when he was splashed across the front page of the Sunday People. The headline roared: “£5,000 A Week And He Is Just 16!”

As he notes in his new book, that inaccurate article made people think he “was spoilt, overpaid and had too much too soon. The truth was that I could have earned many multiples of that if my parents had manipulated the interest in me from every big club in England.”

Cole shakes his head. “That’s when I realised: ‘Oh, shit, things can change towards you.’ Even if you wake up the next day and feel the same, you notice different behaviour in people. I remember a moment at West Ham when I was 18 and I can still picture the fellow's face. He wore a black leather coat and he was screaming abuse at me at Upton Park. He was in his mid-40s and spit was coming out of his mouth. People don’t understand that footballers need a certain maturity to deal with that.”

He had been such a prodigy that, in 1994, Alex Ferguson called Cole’s adoptive father to say that he knew 13-year-old Joe was a Chelsea fan but would he like to be United’s mascot for the FA Cup final against Chelsea? George Cole asked his son if he really wanted to join United. When Joe said no, they turned down the offer.

George was jailed twice but he had an integrity which meant he and his wife, Susan, dealt firmly with unscrupulous agents. “I didn’t know how good I was because when I was eight I’d be playing with kids of 13,” Cole says. “But there’s an insidious financial element when it comes to children. My mum and dad got offered lots of cash and holidays but they had morals.

“My dad couldn’t read and he’d never signed a contract in his life. In his world, your word is your bond. In football that’s very rare. Anything which generates the money you get in football means the parasites come.”