Cantona: Maybe Beckham had a good argument on Qatar, but I can’t see one

“There is no salvation without the artist,” he later said.

Have it, football.

The swaggering French icon is now jointly curating an exhibition at the National Football Museum with an old friend-cum-artist. Titled From Moss Side to Marseille; The Art of Michael Browne and Eric Cantona it features ten Browne works commissioned by Cantona and featuring the likes of Diego Maradona, Muhammad Ali and Jesse Owens in neo-classical style.

Of course, Cantona is there too, as he was in 1997 when Browne painted The Art of the Game, in which the maverick posed for the Christ role in an update of the 15th-century The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca. Well, he was just back from his ban for kung-fu kicking a Crystal Palace fan.

Cantona, now 56, was one of the few truly important players of modern times because, as well as being brilliant, he dared to be different. The son of an artist, he would paint as a boy and was, unsurprisingly, drawn to expressionism.

In an interview with L’Equipe, he once said: “You can find something beautiful and cry simply because it is so beautiful. You can find emotion in the beauty of things, and to me, that’s love.”

It beat “the boy’s done well”.

In 2016 Browne was living in a homeless shelter when he heard Cantona was making an appearance at Manchester’s Lowry theatre.

He went along and was reunited in person after 19 years and occasional phone calls. Cantona, the winner of four Premier League titles with Manchester United and a First Division gong with Leeds, said he would fund Browne to paint some iconic sporting figures who fought for social equality.

“We were both into sport and politics,” Browne says, adding that each painting took between six and nine months to create.

“He gave me four initial names and a free rein. I did not say much about being homeless so it was so kind of him to pick up on the situation I was in. People like me, from Moss Side, often find it hard to get through the door.”

The theme of the exhibition is sporting figures who breached safe boundaries and Cantona wishes more modern stars would use their platform to speak out.

“Football has always been used by politics and I have always been interested in that,” he says. “When there was apartheid in South Africa people did not want to go and play there. Now it seems [to be] different. Now we cannot find one who wants to fight and the big institutions are not very involved in human rights. Instead of using their power, they are going where the money is.”

The Qatar World Cup is still festering in his memory, but first he goes back to 1958 and French internationals such as Rachid Mekhloufi leaving the country during the Algerian War of Independence.

“Mekhloufi could have played for France in the World Cup but he did what he thought was right. Football is very popular and very strong and we could use it to change something instead of being puppets of the politicians. The sportspeople in these paintings took a risk; some of them could have been killed. They were not just speaking in a newspaper,” he says.

How then did he feel about his old mucker David Beckham’s role as a Qatari ambassador?

“If he really believes he has to do that promotion for the right reasons - I don’t know what the right reasons are - that is OK. But if it is only for money, it’s completely different. You have to ask him why he did it. Maybe he has a good argument, but I can’t see one.”

Cantona believes the activism of subjects such as Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who made the Black Power salute on the Olympic podium in 1968, has been replaced by either apathy or quiet anger. He mentions the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United. Western intelligence reports have claimed the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, approved the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. That has been denied but “MBS” chairs the sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, which provided the takeover funds.

“One of the Saudi Arabian guys who bought Newcastle is allegedly involved in a journalist who was killed,” Cantona says. “Nobody cared.”

In Philippe Auclair’s wonderful book, Eric Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King, Cantona expressed his disappointment with the environment of football. Such remarks unleashed the inverted snobbery of sport, but Cantona was enduringly fascinating, both icon and iconoclast.

“I want to live in the madness of the creative artist,” he told France Football. “What interests me is suffering.”

It still does but if sport is art he believes Pep Guardiola is its grand master.

“I am not a fan of Man City, of course, but I love watching Man City and the way they play. I grew up with Johan Cruyff and he gave me this passion for creating. With Ajax and Holland, it was a revolution in football. Then he became a manager at Barcelona and he changed football again: Guardiola is the spiritual son of Johan Cryuff. We can see that. He has his own way, the way he enjoys it, the way people enjoy it.”

Inevitably, this takes us down the road to Old Trafford where he says he sympathises with fans.

“It’s difficult in England. Look how long Liverpool waited to win - 30 years. At United it was 26, at Leeds, when I was there, 18. You cannot win every time but it’s the way you play, the attitude. That is different. You can lose but you have to give your life for a club like Man Utd. It’s not only about football. Players come to Man Utd and they are great players but when they arrive and play together they are not as good as they were before. It depends on the manager, the atmosphere at the club, the personalities.”

He drifts back and says that in Sir Alex Ferguson’s pomp the club could have any player. Now, he says, they need to be shrewder.

“The best don’t want to go to Man Utd, they want to go to Man City or Real Madrid. They have to be more clever, like when [Mohamed] Salah and [Sadio] Mane went to Liverpool. They were not the greatest in the world, but they saw they could play together.”

Cantona was born in 1966, a great year for English football, and retired from playing in 1997. He has since appeared as an actor in films, notably Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric, which features a postman’s cannabis-induced hallucinations of the eponymous hero. Cantona duly compared Loach, famed for his studies of societal issues, to Ferguson.

Now he wonders if the soul of football has been lost for good.

“Everyone loves football but now it’s for the rich,” he says. “I hope it changes. It’s like Arsenal moving from Highbury - I think they lost the soul of Arsenal when they did that. If I lived in England now, I would support a second division team because that’s the real soul of football.”

He wants to take Browne’s exhibition around the world because he says they are great paintings incorporating history lessons. Indeed, the enormous canvas depicting Viv Anderson, a trailblazer for England, and Socrates, the Brazil captain who wrote “Democracia” on his headband, also features former president Jair Bolsonaro and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

“Michael is a great artist,” Cantona, who still paints but is now more a collector, says. “These stories need to be seen.”

(From Moss Side to Marseille opens Saturday, National Football Museum, Manchester. Tickets are available from nationalfootballmuseum.com)

- The Times

Originally published as Cantona: Maybe Beckham had a good argument on Qatar, but I can’t see one