The King and I

Claude Boli

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781471199165
• eBook ISBN: 9781471199172

Cantona the legend. Cantona the enigma. Cantona the King. Eric Cantona was at Manchester United for just five years, yet his legacy and influence endure. Over that period, he became the first foreigner to be voted best player by sports journalists, was crowned player of the century by the team's supporters, and voted the most emblematic player in the Premier League during its opening decade. The Frenchman fascinated both fans of the game and those who knew nothing about football – a hugely popular player who showed mercurial talent on the pitch, but one who remains almost unknown away from it. Claude Boli met Cantona at the very beginning of his playing career in France, when he was a teammate to Boli's brothers. They shared an apartment, passions for music, literature, art and, of course, football. In 1992 Cantona moved to Manchester, where Boli was studying at the university. They spent virtually all their free time together and Boli attended almost every match Cantona played at Old Trafford, rubbing shoulders with Alex Ferguson, Sir Bobby Charlton, George Best, David Beckham, Roy Keane and others. Boli was there for the aftermath of the infamous kung-fu kick and then the court hearing, to hear Cantona's thoughts on his fellow players, how the club was run, his relationship with the manager, his hopes and fears. They walked the streets of Manchester together, enjoyed 1990s music and culture together, even learnt the trumpet together and remain close friends to this day. In The King and I Boli gives us unparalleled insight into Cantona the footballer, Cantona the friend, and Cantona the man.

CHAPTER 1 Teenagers in Auxerre

As with the beginning of many a great friendship, my first encounter with Eric Cantona came about by chance. The memory makes me smile. It was 9 November 1981, and the football team my brothers Roger and Basile were playing for, CA (Club Athlétique) Romainville, had a match in the Championnat des Cadets (the Junior Championship). It was against l’Association de la Jeunesse Auxerroise, generally known as AJ Auxerre, whose team featured a 15-year-old Eric Cantona. The match was tight, intense, some of the play fabulous. Ultimately, Romainville won it by two goals to nil, with Roger scoring both goals – hence my smile. The yellow-and-blues of Romainville battled magnificently with the blue-and-whites from Auxerre. Yes, the first time I saw Eric, he was playing for a team that was wearing Manchester City’s colours. Life can bring all kinds of surprises…

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My name is Claude Boli. I come from the Ivory Coast, a former French colony, and at the age of nine I moved from Abidjan, the capital, to France to continue my education. According to the Boli family, academic success was the only way to climb the social ladder. My father and mother came from families that had no material assets: no land or money. Both of them lost their parents when they were babies, so I never knew my grandparents. Orphaned at such an early age, my parents had to work hard to escape the spectre of a miserable life, both starting work young and having several jobs. In due course my father opted to join the army, and my mother became a small market trader selling fabrics imported from Holland and England (including Manchester).

My father, Jean, who could hardly read and write, was a former ‘French Empire’ soldier who fought in the Second World War in France, where he was one of the African soldiers called tirailleurs sénégalais – Senegal was where these soldiers, infantrymen in the main, were initially recruited from. He was a keen sportsman and especially enjoyed boxing, which he learned in the army, and football, which was imported to Abidjan by French nationals in the 1930s and ’40s. For her part, my mother, Clémentine, married very young and never went to school. Her father had also been a soldier, who had fought with the French during the First World War.

When I arrived in France I lived with one of my elder sisters, Elisabeth, who had the difficult task of looking after the whole Boli family, which included my two footballing brothers, Basile and Roger, and me, the youngest member. Elisabeth was an executive secretary at the Ivory Coast embassy in Paris, and living with her was a big change for me compared to our extremely modest home life in Abidjan, where, for example, we didn’t have running water in the house and couldn’t eat meat every day. In Paris I discovered bathrooms, hot water, lifts, shoes that were my size, supermarkets, the Métro… We lived in a middle-class building in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, at the Porte des Lilas.

Like many kids born in Africa, and particularly in Ivory Coast, football was the main focus of our leisure time. My older brothers both wanted to take this passion for football further than just kicking a ball around in the streets, and so they joined a club not too far from the Porte des Lilas. That club was CA Romainville, which was located in the capital’s suburbs. Although the name might not be familiar to most fans, Romainville had a reputation as one of the best junior clubs in France and played in the French Championship at that level. This meant that Roger, Basile and their teammates came up against almost all the most promising players in France at that time, including playing France’s best club at that level: AJ Auxerre.

During this period, Roger and Basile were contacted by representatives of several clubs – FC Nantes, FC Sochaux-Montbéliard, Paris Saint-Germain and others. But in the end they decided to sign with Auxerre, partly because the town was comparatively close to Paris, lying about 150 kilometres away to the south-east. But the main reason my two brothers signed for Auxerre was the presence of one particular person: Guy Roux, a former player for the club who had taken over as player-manager in 1961 when they were in the Burgundy and Central Area regional league, four levels below France’s top division. In 1980, with Roux still at the helm, Auxerre had been promoted to Ligue 1, joining France’s biggest teams.

A major factor in that rise through the divisions was the strength of Auxerre’s academy and junior teams. They had players from all over France – from Paris, like my brothers, from Marseille, from Nîmes, from Strasbourg. It was heartbreaking for Eric Cantona to leave his family in southern France and travel a thousand kilometres to the north, to a small town where it was much colder and the character of the people quite different from the Latin temperament in Marseille. What’s more, Auxerre had a population of around 35,000-40,000, nothing like the big city environment that Eric was used to as a kid.

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AJ Auxerre was created in 1905, an important date in France because it was the year the state and the church were split apart from each other under the terms of the Loi de la Laicité. It was what was known in France as un club de patronage, that patronage coming from local Catholics, which also explains why the ground is called Le Stade de l’Abbé Deschamps, because he was the priest who founded AJ Auxerre as a sports club, initially embracing all kinds of activities in addition to football, including gymnastics and tennis.

There was definitely a sense of Catholic rigour within the club when Eric was playing there. Before the training centre was set up, the young players used to live in an establishment called Le Patronage, the name offering another reminder of its roots. The club was a bit like a YMCA or even the Catholic clubs established in England, often known as lads’ clubs, where the approach to the youngsters was quite Victorian in manner, although not as strict: there were no punishments or sermons and church attendance wasn’t compulsory. The people who ran it viewed sport not only as a way of bringing young people together, but also as a means of moralising. There was very much a social side to it, just as there was in some clubs in England, such as Manchester City, which had similar beginnings as Gorton AFC, and Birmingham City, clubs that emerged thanks to the church or to men linked closely to the church.

Auxerre was also remarkably well placed from a geographical perspective. There was no other club nearby that played in the first division. The towns that were relatively close – Bourges, Troyes, Dijon, Orléans – didn’t have a team in the first division, and so within Burgundy and the Centre region all the attention was concentrated on that little club that had been forged by Guy Roux.

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It was Roux who managed to convince my brothers that it would be the best club for them. It wasn’t too difficult a task, as AJ Auxerre had established an excellent reputation for helping young players blossom. So at the end of the summer of 1982 my two brothers moved to Burgundy and into the accommodation at Auxerre’s training centre.

I stayed in Paris and carried on going to the local lycée. I used to go down to Burgundy quite often to see them and would see Eric Cantona when I did, but we only used to say ‘Bonjour’ to each other. Gradually, though, my personal circumstances in the capital became more difficult and the environment I was living in was deteriorating. Finding myself a long way from the discipline my parents would have imposed, I was hanging around in neighbourhoods that weren’t suitable for a kid of my age. I became a bit of a lout. Realising how bad things were getting, my two brothers decided, with the full agreement of my sister, that I should join them in Auxerre.

Like many of the footballers who had made the pilgrimage to Burgundy hoping that Guy Roux’s magical ability to bring through young players would rub off on them, when I arrived in Auxerre I was rather overwhelmed by the culture shock. Everything seemed tiny and the pace of life was very slow. In Paris I could travel quickly from one arrondissement to another using the Métro, and the shops weren’t concentrated in one place. In Auxerre, everything you needed was in the town centre. If you wanted to be seen, you had to go to the town centre. The heart of the town, and its greatest pride, was AJ Auxerre. The club’s success meant a huge amount to this small town in the Yonne. For many Auxerrois, the highlight of the week was the Saturday night football match at the Stade de l’Abbé Deschamps on Route de Vaux. Those who played for AJ Auxerre were local stars. For me, an urbanite, this was totally new. As I settled into life in Auxerre, I found myself enveloped in the atmosphere of a country town, with its rites, its habits, its charms.

Best known for the local wines, and particularly Chablis, Auxerre had also become renowned as a conveyor belt of French footballing talent, with an organisational set-up that was well in advance of its rivals at that time and probably among the best in Europe.

Guy Roux had established a scouting system that reached into every French region, and enabled them to spot and then court the best young players across the country. Not a single young prospect slipped beneath the radar of Roux and his scouts. Their first-team players came from every corner of France: north, south, east and west. Guy Roux was more than a coach for his players. He was their mentor, and for some certainly a father figure. He was completely dedicated to these young players, a number of whom in some cases had left their families at the age of thirteen or fourteen in order to try to become professional footballers. Some managed it, but the majority failed to take the big step up to this level. It was very hard for kids of that age to leave their parents and travel hundreds of kilometres to Auxerre and then find themselves competing for places in the team with the best young players in France.

Eric had made the long trip from the south, from Marseille and the SO Caillolais club that had produced several other big names, most notably Jean Tigana, and would later produce Christophe Galtier, who would go on to become a successful manager at Saint-Etienne and, more recently, LOSC Lille, France’s Ligue 1 champions in 2020/21.

In 1982 Auxerre won the Coupe Gambardella, which features the best under-18 teams in France. Eric was an important member of the under-18 team at that time and a very good player, but he didn’t stand out as extraordinary. There were other players in the team who looked as if they were going to make more of an impact on the game than him. Yes, he was good, but he wasn’t shaping up to be in the class of Diego Maradona, Pelé or Lionel Messi, who were exceptional when they were teenagers. He was maturing much more steadily, a bit like Zinedine Zidane did, or Michel Platini. By the time they were twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, they were recognised as being among the world’s best, but not when they were in their mid-teenage years.

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I started to get to know Eric a bit better early in 1983. Right from the off there was a special something between us: a smile to start with, a look of mutual regard, a degree of complicity. In short, we clicked. As we began to talk more, we realised we both loved Ajax of Amsterdam and the Dutch national team that featured Johan Cruyff and Johan Neeskens in the 1974 World Cup. We liked the Brazil team of the 1970s too that featured Pelé, Tostao and Jairzinho. We also talked about and revered Garrincha and other Brazilian players from the previous era, and the likes of Sócrates and Zico from the 1980s, players that personified the kind of beautiful football we both appreciated.

Music was another pillar of our friendship. We listened to lots of different types of music, from the Doors to the French singer-songwriter Christophe to jazz, and also lots of British music as well. We loved the new stuff from Britain – groups like Eurythmics, Simple Minds, Orchestral Manœuvres in the Dark, Tears for Fears, Talk Talk – but also other musical genres – Supertramp and Dire Straits, for instance. One group we both particularly liked was Genesis, and especially the vocalist, Peter Gabriel. We were big fans of the guitarist Carlos Santana too. Talking about these passions for Holland, Brazil and music brought us closer together, and made us realise we had a lot in common, that we enjoyed many of the same things.

That we became very good friends was down to one incident, though. Like all of the other members of the academy team, Eric lived in the accommodation provided for young players. After he’d been at Auxerre for a couple of seasons, Eric decided for reasons that weren’t all that clear that he wanted to leave the training centre where the fifteen or so academy players were based. His mood had changed, and he wanted to live away from the other players. So he went to see Guy Roux, who was the head of the academy as well as the first-team coach. Eric told him that he would like to move out on his own – remember, this is a 17-year-old kid. Guy Roux wasn’t happy, but he’d got to know Eric well, and so he decided to help him find an apartment. As a result, Eric become one of the first players, if not the first, to leave the training centre where my two brothers and the rest of the young players lived.

He got his own place, and the next time I saw him he said, ‘Would you like to share the apartment with me?’ That was when our joint story really began. I found out later that he’d already been to see Basile and politely asked if he could find out if his little brother would share with him. We were both very young. Eric was seventeen and I was just fifteen. Initially we were only together in the flat at weekends, because I was a boarder at a school in Avallon, a small town about 50 kilometres from Auxerre. I would board there during the week and return to Auxerre every weekend, and the two of us would then spend a good deal of that time together.

We lived in two different places in Auxerre. The first was in what in France they call the ZAC, the zone d’activité commerciale: a small district just outside the town centre where a lot of workers lived. It was a pretty basic apartment, a small place with two bedrooms, what in France is known as an HLM, in other words a council-owned property. It was quite rare to see youngsters like the two of us living there, unless they were young couples who had just set up home together. It was almost unheard of to find two teenage boys sharing a place in that part of town. It was pretty close to the training centre, however, and Eric would travel there and back on a motorbike, sometimes with me as his passenger. It was a pretty simple life. The second place we shared was a two-room apartment that had the advantage of being nearer to the Stade de l’Abbé Deschamps. We were close to the River Yonne and a beautiful park, the Parc de l’Arbre Sec.

While it was a little peculiar for two adolescents to be living like that, one of the things about football at that level is that players join the set-up when they’re very young and become quite mature pretty quickly. Without their parents close at hand they have to become responsible for themselves and their actions, and figure out how to get by. It’s a hard life, and not normal at all for a kid of thirteen, fourteen or fifteen. It’s a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, you’re a footballer who is still only hoping to turn professional; on the other, you’re already effectively living the life of a professional footballer. The bottom line is, you have to behave like an adult.

Although I wasn’t a footballer myself, because I was very close to several promising players I stuck to the same regime as them, or at least I tried to. I attempted to make that switch from child to adult. Being with Eric made this easier. Our relationship was based on an extremely simple approach to life. I used to do the cooking, and Eric really liked the food I dished up, which was based on the meals I’d seen being prepared when I was a kid back in Ivory Coast. My usual meal, called maffé, was a stew made with peanut sauce that was served with rice.

Eric was privileged, I suppose you could say. He was already doing things in his own way and not following the routine laid down for the other players. But I don’t want to give the wrong idea. We were two kids living what was really quite an innocent life. At the same time, we had to behave responsibly. Although Eric hadn’t yet signed a full professional contract with AJ Auxerre, he still lived in a disciplined manner. We didn’t have any alcohol in the flat, for instance. There was no hint of the lad culture that was the norm among young English players at that time. We were quite serious, by which I mean we were comparatively mature, not that we were straitlaced. Our life was very much organised around our passion for culture, as well as football, of course. Those were the things that really mattered to us, that stimulated and excited us.

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What I remember more than anything about that time is the match days. At that time, Eric was playing for Auxerre’s reserves in the third division. I’d attend most of the home games, and every time the B-team was playing away I used to listen to the game on the radio. It was a bit like being in the 1950s, listening in on my little transistor radio, just as I had back in the Ivory Coast. When we went to the stadium to watch a football match, we would take our transistor radios and listen to the enthusiastic commentary while we watched the game. I can remember being very happy when I heard that my brothers and Eric had played well or scored, which they generally did.

If AJ Auxerre had been playing away, Eric would usually get back to our apartment very late in the evening, towards midnight or even half-past. I’d always have a meal waiting for him and he’d tell me how the game had gone. He didn’t talk a great deal about it, but he’d pick out the most significant moments. Beyond that he wouldn’t go into much detail, and quickly forgot what had happened – he was always looking ahead to the next game rather than dwelling on the last one.

At that time Eric really liked Olympique de Marseille, but also some Italian players, such as Giancarlo Antognoni and Paolo Rossi, and the Argentinian genius Diego Maradona. He used to talk about his parents and family a lot, about his life growing up in Marseille. His father worked as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, and his younger brother Joël was also on the road to becoming a professional footballer as a member of the academy set-up at Olympique de Marseille. I would be captivated by his stories about his home city, because Marseille was multicultural, and also where my father had arrived in France during the Second World War, which gave it real resonance for me.

Eric was very close to my two older brothers, but over time the two of us become closer still, despite our difference in age, which was quite significant given we were still so young. Our bond did stem, of course, from our mutual love of football, but there were other aspects to it as well beyond the sporting – literature, painting and, above all, music were the cement in our relationship, were at the very heart of it. We were also both just naturally very curious about things.

Early on, Eric told me about his passion for African art and for African masks. Their mystical nature really fascinated him. He also talked to me about his desire to travel in Africa – not the Africa that tourists see, but the enchanted and unreal side of the continent. He loved talking about it, finding out all he could, exchanging ideas. He wanted to meet people who lived in little villages, people who knew about the plants in their local countryside, people who handed down their culture in the stories they told, and the memories that we in turn passed on.

Eric loved painting, and would devote every Sunday to it. His...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: Teenagers in Auxerre
• Chapter 2: Two ‘Frenchies’ in Manchester
• Chapter 3: Past and Present
• Chapter 4: Saturday is Match Day
• Chapter 5: In the Family Stand
• Chapter 6: Inside the Dressing Room
• Chapter 7: The Man from Govan
• Chapter 8: How the Euro Stars Changed the Premier League
• Chapter 9: New Manchester United, New Manchester
• Chapter 10: ‘We Are the Nineties’
• Chapter 11: Kiss and Tell
• Chapter 12: Allez les Bleus!
• Chapter 13: Back from Selhurst Park
• Chapter 14: Eight Months and One Life
• Chapter 15: The King is Back
• Chapter 16: Iconic Footballer
• Chapter 17: Au Revoir
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright