Michael Owen doesn’t exist

“I don’t know what to believe any more,” she said, her voice catching on a suppressed sob. “Everything we thought was true, everything we thought happened … it’s all up in the air.”

Jayne Flossingham has been a Liverpool fan for forty-three years. She was also, until the Wednesday before last, in charge of day-to-day operations for the website of Manchester United striker Michael Owen, and believes herself to possess the largest collection of Owen memorabilia in the world. Pride of place on her mantelpiece is a signed photo of herself and Owen, taken on the pitch at Anfield. She grins widely into the camera, while Owen displays that peculiar half-smile, half-furrowed brow that will be familiar to students of the substitutes’ bench at Old Trafford.
“Obviously, him signing for the Mancs was a blow. But by then I was as much a fan of Owen as I was of Liverpool, so I could accept it. And it would be unusual for a footballer to turn them down. But this … this is something else.”

It is not just Jayne that has been upset, distressed, and discombobulated by the relevations that Michael Owen does not exist, and has indeed never existed. In the weeks that have followed the initial revelations, shock has given way to rising anger that such a hoax could be perpetrated for so long, and with such apparent disregard for the feelings of the fans.

“To be honest, it was his Twitter account that tipped me off.”

Since he broke the story last week, freelance journalist Alvin Canute has been under protection; we speak in an undisclosed location, while a man who resembles a minotaur wearing a very expensive suit guards the door.

“Like all football journalists, I was following him in the hope that he might say something misguided or unwise, which I could then spin out into a piece. ‘Outrage after Joey Barton insults the Mayor of Honolulu’, that kind of thing. Standard practice. But with Owen: nothing.

“Homely family pictures, risible caption competitions, middle-of-the-road opinions about only the safest of footballing matters … it was just too boring. It felt wrong. So I did a little digging and, well, everyone knows what I found.”

What Canute found was that Owen was a long-term project of a group of anarcho-syndicalist Dutch performance artists calling themselves “The Why”. In his explosive series of pieces for the Morning Star — which are attracting attention from the Pulitzer jury — he revealed how the part of Owen was at various times played by a number of actors, including several well-known British soap stars and at least one Oscar nominee; how his entire Newcastle career was an illusion maintained by a complex arrangement of mirrors, projectors, and spotlamps; and how *that* goal against Argentina was scored by a heavily made-up ballet student named Clarissa.

“It looks like that was the reason Hoddle was so reluctant to play him. Eileen Drury told him that Owen’s aura was surprisingly feminine, and he interpreted this as evidence that he’d been homosexual in a past life.”

The fallout has been brutal and confusing. Manchester United are in the early stages of legal action against Newcastle, Liverpool, Real Madrid and themselves. The Madrid club, meanwhile, claim that Johan Cruyff was briefly associated with The Why in the 1970s, and are demanding that Barcelona be docked points. A number of internal enquiries are underway and various notable former players have called for Owen’s career to be struck from the record books. One notable dissenting voice is the Telegraph’s Henry Winter who, somewhat at odds with the prevailing mood, has stated he believes the imaginary player still has a role to play for the national team.

“While it appears to be the case that Owen may not and may never have existed, the fact remains that he is an experienced non-entity with a consistent record of fictional goal-scoring at the very highest level. In the last few minutes of injury time, who better to not come off the bench he was never on in the first place? And even if he doesn’t exist, he’s a better option than Andy Carroll.”

However, new information emerging this week suggests that Owen — or perhaps we should say “Owen” — may have been merely the fraudulent tip of a gigantic iceberg of lies. Suspicions were aroused when, following the publication of Canute’s revelations, fully a third of all Premier League footballers developed minor ailments ruling them out of the weekend’s fixtures. A video purporting to show Newcastle’s Shola Ameobi literally running through Bolton Wanderer’s defender Paul Robinson is circulating online, while the Guardian yesterday published a number of still shots of Sergio Agüero with advertising hoardings clearly visible through his skin.

Certainly, Canute believes there is much more to come.

“When I spoke to the leaders of The Why, they strongly suggested that they were personally responsible for up to ten Premier League players. In particular, they stated that just as Owen was an attempt to see just how boring an individual could command public interest, simply by virtue of being able to kick a football in the right place sometimes, so they conceived of Dirk Kuyt as a deliberate parody of English footballing virtues. They set out to create a super-committed footballer without any actual talent whatsoever — a creature of pure heart — and see if he could make it in the Premier League. Apparently they had the idea when a friend spilled a bowl of noodles onto a picture of Iain Dowie.”

Neither Liverpool or Kuyt’s own people were prepared to comment on the claims, though Kuyt did cancel a planned charity appearance last weekend and has withdrawn from training citing a troubled knee. However, support for Owen and any other players exposed as fictional has come from academia. Doctor Calamity Flan, Professor of Retro-Degenerative Semiomancy at the University of Warwick, told the BBC last week:

“Whether or not Michael Owen exists is not the point. Football has for years been simply an extension of the entertainment industry: a carefully maintained haze of intrigue and outrage sustained by competing and contradictory fictions. Imagined entities clash for trophies of assumed importance; mutually-accepted lies dance to an artificial tune. Life is a quotation, said Borges, but he would have added, had he only followed the Premier League: football is a joke without a punchline, started but never finished, mattering only to those that choose to adhere to its fundamental untruths as gospel.”

Flan’s words are of little consolation to Owen’s former clubs, all of whom have paid vast sums of money to a player that never existed; attempts are being made to recover the wages and endorsements. It appear that much of the money has been re-distributed to a charity that organises screenings of comedy films for orphaned children, and the Premier League’s biggest beasts are taking legal advice on the best way of taking John Candy from babies.

Perhaps more importantly, Flan’s words are of little comfort to Jayne Flossingham, who finds herself with a house crammed with mementoes of a man that never was, and left to reflect on a life devoted to a footballer that appears to have been nothing more than a cruel joke. And worryingly for all of us that care about this great game, there appear to be many more jokes out there on the pitch. Millions and millions of us, all duped by our own gullibility, and the inadequacies of our clubs and governing bodies, into caring about nothing more than the idea, the suggestion, or the parody of a hero.