Cult Ballers@thecultballers
The streets remember: Chris Waddle. 🏴
He worked in a sausage factory. Failed trials at three clubs. Eventually signed for £1,000.
Before the 1990 World Cup, Uri Geller told him "the higher you go, the harder you fall."
Most people outside France have forgotten how good he actually was.
Magic Chris.
He grew up in Gateshead supporting Sunderland. Worked in a sausage and meat pie factory while playing amateur football at clubs like Whitehouse SC, Mount Pleasant SC, Pelaw SC, Leam Lane SC and Tow Law Town, before failing trials at Sunderland, Coventry City and Newcastle United.
Eventually Newcastle took a chance on him for £1,000.
By 1989 he was the third most expensive footballer on earth.
Born in Felling, Tyne and Wear, Waddle was not your archetypal English winger. He didn't run straight. He didn't cross early. He dropped a shoulder and dangled a leg over the ball mid-dribble. A move that was eventually taught alongside the Cruyff Turn in the Coerver Soccer School curriculum.
In a team of grafters he was an artist, which made him beloved and occasionally misused in equal measure.
At Newcastle he formed an attacking trio with Kevin Keegan and Peter Beardsley. At Spurs he became one of the best wingers in England.
In 1987 he and his Spurs teammate Glenn Hoddle recorded "Diamond Lights" together, a synth-pop song that reached number 12 in the UK Singles Chart and landed them a performance on Top of the Pops. The comment immediately after the song was as iconic as the performance itself: "Not a bad song. Not a good song either."
In 1989, Olympique Marseille paid £4.5 million for him, the third highest transfer fee in history at the time. Waddle's French at the time of signing extended to "Bonjour," "Au Revoir," and counting to ten.
He combated homesickness by watching Paul Daniels VHS tapes. Within months the Marseille fans had named him Magic Chris and were treating him like a god.
Thierry Henry grew up supporting Marseille. Years later he said: "What he was doing with that team was a standard I'd never seen before. He could dribble around a player without touching the ball. In Marseille, he is a king, a legend, a god, however you want to call it."
In 1998, Marseille fans voted him the second greatest player in the club's history, behind only Jean-Pierre Papin, his own former teammate.
The England career tells a different story. Bobby Robson knew what he had. At Italia '90, Waddle was one of England's best players throughout the tournament. Before it started, he and the squad had a chance meeting with Uri Geller and Michael Jackson. Geller's parting words to Waddle were: "The higher you go, the harder you fall."
Semi-final. West Germany. Turin. Waddle hit the post in extra time. Then penalties. He stepped up last. The ball went over the bar and into the Turin night sky. England out.
Less than twelve months later, Marseille reached the European Cup final against Red Star Belgrade. It went to penalties. Waddle, still carrying Turin with him, refused to take one. Marseille lost.
After Italia '90, Graham Taylor replaced Bobby Robson as England manager. While Waddle was playing the finest football of his life in France, Taylor consistently ignored him, deciding his style didn't fit the long-ball system he was trying to impose. Waddle won his last England cap in October 1991. He was 30, at his absolute peak, and never played for his country again.
He came back to England in 1992. Sheffield Wednesday. Voted Football Writers' Footballer of the Year in 1993. Reached two domestic cup finals that season, losing both to Arsenal. Always close, never there.
He kept playing until he was 40, at clubs like Worksop Town and Stocksbridge Park Steels, not because he had to but because he loved it.
Tonight England play Norway in the quarter-final. One of the finest England players of the 1980s and 1990s was a sausage factory worker from Gateshead who learned his French from a phrase book and became a legend in the south of France.
The streets remember Magic Chris.
