On Friday, February 24 2017, four of us went to the London Palladium to watch An Evening with Eric Cantona. We’d long decided to put him on the cover by this point, and despite negative reviews from an earlier show in Bournemouth, what we witnessed over the next couple of hours fully vindicated the decision. If Cantona was only an exceptional footballer, it’s unlikely that we’d have gone to town in the way we have. You can sit on YouTube all day and be reminded of that. You can endlessly replay the heart-stopping goals, the pornographic flicks and the milligram-perfect weight of his passing until you are breathlessly engorged.
Yet Cantona wouldn’t have been the player he was without being the man he is. And as much as we collectively remain in thrall to his footballing genius, it is his principles as a man that render him, in the eyes of all but the most myopic of fans, as someone who truly transcends club loyalties.
In 1865, Karl Marx answered a series of questions that formed what were known as Confessions in Victorian England. In a man he admired strength, his idea of happiness was to fight, he detested servility, and his idea of misery was to submit. His hero? Spartacus. And although we are not suggesting for a minute that Cantona has the historical importance of a revolutionary socialist who railed against capitalism and its exploitation of labour, or even a Thracian gladiator who stuck the boot into the Roman Republic, his refusal to yield and his desire to fight for what he believes in set him apart. Show me a man who doesn’t admire rebelliousness, and I’ll show you a Tory. Eric had the bollocks to be one and to fuck the consequences at the same time.
