Barney Ronaylooks at the many strands that make up Rio Ferdinand – from digital magazine editor to charity champion to professional footballer
RIO FERDINAND of Manchester United, England and Peckham, south London, isn’t – yet – the most famous British sportsperson of his generation. But, almost by stealth, he seems to have turned himself into perhaps the most interesting.
Having just about recovered from a calf injury, Ferdinand looks set to parade his usual elegant assurance in United’s defence in front of 200 million global TV viewers in tonight’s Champions League final against Barcelona.
Then, with the football season over, he might take a moment to toast the success of his new digital magazine, Number 5 (named after the editor-at-large’s shirt number at United), which, at the end of its first month, is already on its way to being the most widely read online magazine in the – admittedly brief – history of online magazines.
After which the summer recess should leave plenty of time to peruse his groaning portfolio of charity projects, which include a €340,000 Ugandan football academy, police-backed drives against knife and gun crime in the UK, Aids awareness in Sierra Leone and Cancer Research UK’s bowel cancer campaign.
Add to this the daily business of performing with such casual excellence as a footballer that he would probably be Britain’s sole pick in a world-XI-to-face-Mars scenario, and it’s a wonder the 30-year-old Ferdinand still has the energy to take calls from Michael Jackson and swap regular text messages with his friends 50 Cent and Mickey Rourke, both of whom are interviewed in Number 5’s first issue. The buddying-up of the King of Pop and the English Premier League’s top centre half, in particular, is one of the more bizarre happenings of recent seasons. All the more so because it was Jackson who made the first move, posting an urgent transatlantic call to the Number Five launch party and issuing a backstage invite to one of his London concerts (should any of them actually take place).
“It’s mind boggling,” Ferdinand said at the time. “Michael Jackson is one of the people I admired growing up. The Bad album would be one of my desert island discs.”
WHEN IT comes to this kind of sporting-celebrity crossover, right now Ferdinand is very much the coming man. The last two years have seen an inevitable falling off in ambient levels of Beckham hysteria. Wayne and Coleen have turned out to be a cosy rather than stellar couple. And all the while Ferdinand’s profile has continued to wax handsomely.
Although this August’s lavish wedding to long-term girlfriend Rebecca Ellison could yet turn out to be a kind of informal tabloid coronation for football’s new ace face, what makes Ferdinand so interesting is the sheer scale of his ambition.
Having grown up in one of the most deprived areas of south London, there is a grand – albeit occasionally rather over-eager – sense of street-level philanthropy at the heart of his vision of himself, a tail-wagging earnestness about doing good works. He has a foundation, a record label and a desire to style himself as a wealthy and successful role model. This is a man who wants to be recognised not just as a player, but as a playa.
For many he remains hard to like. The objections are familiar: too flash; too cocky; too full of himself. Even among some United supporters, there is a lurking adoration-shortfall, partly as a result of the 2005 contract renegotiations that led to some fans briefly booing their former record signing.
His interpretation of what it means to be not just a footballer but an incredibly famous and wealthy one has been a furiously scattergun affair. There have been high-profile blunders, most famously the missed drugs test in 2003: an obligation Ferdinand claims he simply “forgot”, instead going shopping for household items in Manchester city centre, and which brought an eight-month ban from the English Football Association.
Plus there have been the gaffes, notably lobbying against knife crime one week and celebrating his team scoring a goal by pretending to fire a rocket launcher into the crowd the next. And in the run-up to the 2006 World Cup, there was Rio’s World Cup Wind-Ups, a desperately ill-judged version of Candid Camera in which fellow England players were sniggeringly pranked by their team-mate.
Still, since the end of the 2006 World Cup, Ferdinand’s focus appears to have sharpened. This has coincided with the appearance in the Ferdinand firmament of Chris Nathaniel, a fast-rising entertainment industry agent who only last year was a surprise new entry in the Voice newspaper’s list of the 30 most influential black people in football. “It’s an American model that I’m implementing”, Nathaniel explains from his NVA Entertainment office in central London. “We’re taking talent and making that talent multi-faceted. Rio is so open to doing lots of different things; that’s one of the reasons we’ve had him working with the American music stars, people like P Diddy and Usher, making him more globally appealing to people who aren’t necessarily fans of football.”
NATHANIEL IS also up to speed on the more philanthropic aspects of the Ferdinand juggernaut. There is much talk about “giving back”. And apparently no concerns that this strain of righteousness, the sense of some ball-playing messiah at work, might be at the root of a certain lurking antipathy towards his man.
“Frankly, I don’t think Rio gets the credit he deserves,” Nathaniel says. “The fact is people that criticise him don’t actually know who he is. You find people just taking elements of what they choose to listen to and not knowing what the man is all about and what he does.”
These are sentiments echoed elsewhere, certainly among teachers at Oliver Goldsmith primary school in Peckham, who have privately praised Ferdinand’s support – including an unsolicited, beneath-the-radar appearance to talk to pupils – in the aftermath of the death of Damilola Taylor. The London borough of Southwark has already made him a freeman in recognition of “his continued good work in campaigning against drugs and helping young people in this area”.
So the question remains: why don’t we like this mercurial, magazine-editing, outstandingly athletic celebrity magnet footballer a little more? It’s a question Ferdinand ponders in his autobiography. “What do people want? Who is the Identikit footballer who is acceptable to the footballing public? The truth is, there isn’t one.”
FERDINAND, a mixed-race man from working-class roots in south London, is doing something original with his career and if that makes people feel uncomfortable, and cross even, it might be worth wondering why this should be.
The great flowering of Beckham’s pop celebrity brought much chin-stroking dissection in the broadsheet press, a Sam Taylor-Wood portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London and assorted Beckham-related university degree modules. Ferdinand is accused of getting above himself; of being not just thick (as Beckham is still often described) but arrogant and pushy.
The evidence suggests that Ferdinand is none of these things. His greatest crime is perhaps a natural exuberance, a goofiness that to a more sympathetic eye might be considered charming; and a confidence that can look like arrogance if you want it to.
“I love reading and will take on anyone in a debate about world events and modern history, ” he once wrote. “Want an argument about Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King? Bring it on. But I can also debate what’s happening on Big Brother and (the TV soap) EastEnders.”
And so, as Ferdinand goes from strength to strength as Premier League champion, Champions’ League finalist and digital mag overlord, perhaps it might be best if we all just went with it and let him have his moment – not just as England’s most prominent footballer, but as its most volcanically ambitious urban entertainment mogul.
Guardian Service
