Even Andy Carroll’s pidgin French is spoken with an immediately discernible Geordie twang.
“Bonjour!” he says, smiling, as he bounds across the room. The Athletic had started with a tentative “Bonjour”, unsure how to address a Gateshead lad who is transitioning into an adopted Girondin. “It has to be ‘bonjour!’, of course,” he says.
This greeting provides an obvious starting point. Carroll is into his 13th month in France and on to his second French club, so how are his linguistic skills?
“I don’t speak French,” he says. “I just repeat what other people say and try to learn through that. I’m learning, but very slowly. Word by word.”
He pauses and grins. “Pamplemousse,” he chuckles. “That’s one of my favourite French words.” The French for grapefruit may not seem immediately relevant, yet its oddity fits perfectly with the general peculiarity of all this.
“I had lessons last season with two other lads but I found it really hard,” Carroll says. “Really, I should speak French being here, I know I should. And I did do French at school, but I didn’t really take it seriously. To be honest, I didn’t think I was ever going to live here.”
And that is precisely why The Athletic wants to interview Carroll, because here is Bordeaux, here is the fourth tier of French football, here is a man actually spending more than he is earning.
This 45-minute conversation is not a potted history of Carroll’s entire career — although there are reflections — but an attempt to explain how and why a human wrecking ball of a centre-forward who once commanded a British record transfer fee is here.
“If you’d told a younger me that I’d end up in France,” Carroll says, “I definitely wouldn’t have pictured myself being here, that’s for sure.” He is not the only one.
When Carroll returned to Newcastle United in 2019 aged 30, he fully intended to finish his career on Tyneside.
“I’d always wanted to go back and, once I did, I thought, ‘This is me now, I’ll be here until I’m 35 and that’ll be me done’,” he says. “I was gutted when I didn’t get another contract (in the summer of 2021), or even a phone call. At that point, I thought: ‘Do I just call it here? Do I finish playing now?’.”
Why then, at 35, is he still playing, at a much lower level and in a different country, and with the hope of doing so until he is 40?
“A lot of people fall out of love with the game and that’s where I found myself after Newcastle. But when I signed for Reading (in November 2021), I realised retirement is not what I wanted,” Carroll says. “I was just like: ‘No, why am I even thinking that? That’s completely not what I want.’ I want to play, I want to enjoy football, and I still do. I’ve got plenty of time to sit at home with my feet up.”
Yet he could still be doing that in England. Former team-mates have messaged Carroll, questioning why he is in south-western France, given that they are adamant he could “still play at a good level back home”.
Instead, he is at France’s crisis club.
After years of financial mismanagement, Bordeaux, France’s six-times champions, most recently in 2009, and who faced Newcastle in the Europa League in 2012-13, were relegated from Ligue 1 in 2022. Then, this summer, Bordeaux were automatically demoted two divisions to Group B of Championnat National 2.
The Chateau du Haillan at Bordeaux’s training complex perfectly encapsulates their fall. Everywhere there are reminders — photographs, murals and keepsakes — of this club’s proud heritage, with an entire wall dedicated to their European-level destinations.
Yet this grand building is completely deserted and it is neglected.
On the short walk across from the training centre, Carroll, shielded from the lashing rain by an umbrella, stops to sign an autograph for a solitary young fan. He takes a seat on a dusty red-velvet armchair in the Castle Room of the Chateau, which houses the club’s untended wooden bar.
Everything about this feels incongruous. Does he agree?
“I didn’t expect to be here,” he says. “But I’ve been through ups and downs and I’ve come out the other side. It’s still playing football, just in a different country and a different league, but it’s still basically the same. It’s just the love of playing football and that’s exactly what I want.”
Again, why France?
“I was ready to challenge myself somewhere else and thought, ‘Get me abroad’,” he says, recalling his decision to leave Reading in August 2023. “I had a few good options in England — but I was like: ‘My time in England’s come to an end. I’m satisfied with what I’ve done. I want to challenge myself somewhere else.’
“I wanted to throw myself into a different way of life and I hadn’t really had the opportunity to go abroad earlier in my career. I’d just reached a point in my life where I thought, ‘I really want to go’.”
John Williams, Amiens’ sporting director, discovered Carroll was available via TransferRoom, football’s digital marketplace.
“It was just what I needed,” says Carroll, who scored four goals in 35 games before leaving second-tier Amiens in the summer. “I absolutely loved it. The first few weeks were hard, not knowing the language, but I felt refreshed.”
Carroll has no previous connection to Bordeaux, yet here he is.
“Here, I feel I can be me,” he says, recalling how Williams proposed Bordeaux, given he is acting as an advisor to them. “I am free, relaxed and I’m playing football.
“I wasn’t really playing at Amiens and I want to play as many games as I can before it all comes to an end. It’s not about the level, I just want to enjoy myself. Playing football is where I’m the happiest, so that’s exactly what I wanted. I spoke to the manager (Bruno Irles) and thought, ‘That’s for me’.”
Gone are the private jets of the Premier League. This month, he endured a six-hour bus journey to Saumur, laying down in the aisle to stretch his long body. But he is well suited to the 42,000-capacity Nouveau Stade de Bordeaux, at which the club are now permitted to play again following a temporary ban.
“My first game at the stadium, we had 10,000 in the fourth division. It’s incredible,” Carroll says. “When we played away, a six-hour journey, we had 2,000 fans. You can see it’s a massive club, regardless of what’s happened.”
Saudi Arabian clubs made overtures and there was tentative interest from England, so it still feels extraordinary that he chose France’s fourth division.
“I didn’t look for anything else and I didn’t ask,” Carroll says. “It was, ‘Just let me play football’. Once the manager told me I’d play, I thought I’d love it down here.”
Carroll — who admits to “wasting money” over the years on “stupid things”, including supercars, designer clothes and even a Bengal cat — is taking home a salary which is said to be extremely modest by professional football standards, and below his earning potential. Little wonder, then, that he is delighted by the less-than-€20 (£17/$22), 90-minute flights back to England.
“I’m actually spending more money to be at Bordeaux than I am earning, basically,” he says. “My rent is more than what I’m taking in. That’s before eating, driving, flying. It was the same at Reading, where my apartment was more than my wages. I don’t care about the money.”
Carroll is fortunate that finances are not a problem for him, but again it makes this scenario all the more bizarre.
“Obviously, it’s a massive club and it’s gone down the leagues, but hopefully the team that we’ve got can get back up as soon as possible,” he says. “When I looked at the project and the size of the club, all the things they’ve achieved and the fantastic stadium — it’s unbelievable.
“I thought, ‘I can play football at a massive club and enjoy my life’. And that’s what I’ve found.”
His happiness is critical to his decision-making.
“I really like that I can just walk down the street and be me. That’s what I wanted, what I needed.”
There is evident loathing of British tabloids. Stories about his divorce from Billi Mucklow and a reported new love interest have surfaced, but Carroll’s private life has been the source of media fascination throughout his career.
So did he crave being out of the spotlight?
“You’ve knocked the nail on the head there,” says Carroll. “There’s a lot of talk about me in the press, even to this day. It’s just constant. It was like: ‘Get me away from it all. Just let me go and enjoy my life, play football and be happy without opening the news and seeing something about me.’
“Everyone that knows me, who knows who I am… I’m just a happy person. I just love having a laugh, playing football, smiling. When you’re reading things and hearing things, and you’re going out in England and you’re getting all the s*** things said about you… It’s not fun. Not for me, my family or my friends.
“So I felt best off taking myself away from it and going and enjoying myself somewhere else, doing exactly what I could do at home but without the s***.”
But does he feel he has escaped?
“Yeah, 100 per cent,” he says. “Every time I go to England, the manager says, ‘Oh, front of the papers again’. I’ve been home three times and every time there’s a story in the paper. I cannot get away from it.
“Being over here, I could walk around in Amiens, I can walk down into Bordeaux, I can go to Paris, or Cannes, or anywhere I want. It’s relaxing, it’s peaceful. You can go for a coffee, a beer, for dinner, go shopping, and it’s just me being me.”
There is perhaps a naivety to Carroll when it comes to this. He did, after all, buy Rod Stewart’s former mansion while at West Ham and was notorious for his off-field antics during his first spell at Newcastle. Even so, he has not craved the coverage and it has become suffocating for him.
“I really don’t know why there’s always been this fascination with me,” he says. “It’s been in my life since I became a professional at 17. It is frustrating for a player when you’re trying to do your best and everyone’s trying to put you down around you.
“It is hard. You do go into dark places and think bad things. You really don’t want to, but it does shut you down and put you in a little hole.”
This was not the career trajectory anyone envisaged. Not when Carroll broke through at Newcastle aged 17, scored 26 goals across 2010, won promotion, earned nine England caps and became a £35million British record transfer. Everything came so easily; he appeared unstoppable.
“It was like a blur, everything just came so fast,” Carroll says. “Weirdly, I kind of thought everyone gets a chance to play football, everyone gets a chance to go to the England camp. It’s hard to explain, but I was just so laid-back about the whole thing.
“Obviously I was buzzing, over the moon, with the England call-up. But I didn’t appreciate that only a handful get selected to do these things and fortunately I was one of them. Obviously, 15 years later, I recognise that now.”
Looking back, the 2009-10 Championship-winning campaign at Newcastle was his most enjoyable.
“One of the greatest times ever,” he says. “We had an unbelievable team, a great manager (Chris Hughton), and every single one of the lads would go out together for dinner, or for drinks, at the weekend. We won games at the weekend, went out and partied, then we trained all week and we’d do the same again. That was the life we had. It was one big family.”
The Gateshead-born Newcastle fan rose through the ranks and established himself as their first-choice centre-forward.
“I asked for the No 9 shirt and Chris told me he’d have to ask Mike Ashley if I could have it,” he says “I just couldn’t believe it when I was wearing it. Five years before, I’d had a season ticket watching Alan Shearer wear it. Being from Newcastle, that’s something I’d wanted all my life and once I had it, I imagined all the other kids looking up to me and thinking, ‘That’s Newcastle’s No 9’.”
There were controversial incidents at Newcastle — including arrests for assault — but Carroll has come to feel that he was often, even then, unfairly targeted with negative headlines.
“It was often taken out of context because the lads would be together all the time,” Carroll says. “So, no matter the story that came out in the paper, I was with the whole team, but it was always about me who was the headline. Whether that’s because I was doing well, scoring goals, from Newcastle, I don’t know. But some of the lads would laugh and say, ‘We need to bring Andy out because, if anything happens, he’ll get the blame’.”
His whirlwind deadline-day transfer to Liverpool in January 2011 ramped the scrutiny up further.
“I began to feel the media glare more when I left Newcastle,” Carroll says. “At Newcastle, I was settled, I had my setup; my family, my friends, my routine. That was all I knew. I remember being in the helicopter on the way across to Liverpool feeling lost, not knowing what to expect.
“When I went to Liverpool, obviously the fee and everything… I was still only 21, had never left Newcastle, was told to pack up my life and go across there, and then it didn’t start well. The media were a lot different and I was in the spotlight on a grander scale.
“Would I rather have stayed at Newcastle? All day long, it’s my hometown club. But I don’t regret going to Liverpool, I don’t regret anything. It turned me into who I am, it made me stronger. I wouldn’t change anything.”
Carroll “loved” his time at West Ham, who he joined from Liverpool in 2012, before injuries and repeated surgeries afflicted him. He made only 142 appearances across seven years and struggled psychologically.
“With my ankle, I kept doing all the rehab, which is hard enough, watching all the lads go and enjoy themselves training, then you try to come back, feel it again, have a scan and you need another surgery,” says Carroll. “Then everyone’s like, ‘Well, you’re injured again’. But that wasn’t my fault, the surgery hadn’t solved the problem.
“Then you start thinking, ‘Well, is it me? Is it something I’m doing?’ Even though I know exactly what’s wrong and what’s happened, I’m now questioning myself because I’m hearing it everywhere. It felt like everyone was putting me down, every other story was negative.
“All you’re trying to do is try and be positive, and then you go to restaurants and people are making comments. It gets to the point where you do get put down. You do start believing it, actually.”
Start believing what? “When everyone says, ‘He’s always injured’, you start to think, ‘Perhaps I am always injured’, or, ‘Perhaps I’m not good enough’,” he says. “You go through these spells thinking: ‘Why is everyone saying it?’. You start believing they must be right and I must be wrong.”
Carroll sought professional help and he still speaks to psychologists now. His family, and especially his five children, have been extremely important for him. “You’ve got to have people around you who know who you are, that’s what gets you through it,” he says. “It makes you realise that all the other things outside of you and your family mean nothing. They’re the ones who know the sacrifices you’re making to get back to where you want to be.”
Carroll became an insular figure, often reluctant to leave the house. When he did, he wore caps or hats to try to stop himself from being recognised. “I don’t even like hats,” he says.
“I went through a really hard phase in my life,” Carroll says. “It was difficult to do anything, I didn’t really want to go out. When people don’t know the truth and are saying things about you that aren’t true, it hurts. It really hurts.”
After the lows of his final years at West Ham, Carroll thought he had found contentment at Newcastle. A pay-as-you-play deal offered him a route back to his boyhood club and, he hoped, regular game time.
“Mike Ashley said to me, ‘If you want to come back, tell me what you want to earn and we’ll see if it’s alright’. I said: ‘Look, I just want to come back and play. Money is not important to me,’” Carroll says. “They offered an incentivised deal, which was nowhere close to what other players were getting there, but I didn’t care. It was perfect. I thought that would be me done for the rest of my career.
“It was a strange feeling going back. It felt even better making my second debut. I just appreciated it so much more. My dreams were completely different when I went back.”
But the move did not work out as planned. Covid-19 meant most of his second spell was played behind closed doors, and manager Steve Bruce used him sparingly.
“I wanted to play in front of the fans but it was often empty stadiums and it was just not really what I dreamt of,” Carroll says. “It was frustrating and disappointing that I didn’t get much of a chance, really.”
There were tentative conversations over a new deal and, after the final game of 2020-21, he was promised a call. It never came.
“I couldn’t believe that I didn’t end up staying there,” says Carroll. “To this day, I still don’t know why I never got a call.”
Much has changed at Newcastle since Carroll’s exit but the feeling at the club was that the relationship had come to a natural conclusion.
Five months later, Reading offered him a route back in the Championship.
“They didn’t have the money then, much like here,” Carroll says. “But I got a chance to play again and it was a great time.
“I fell in love with the game then all over again. My mindset changed to, ‘I love football’. It’s not my time to give up, to throw in the towel, and playing every week and training every day brought so much excitement out in me again.
“It was just like I was 17 again, coming through at Newcastle — the exact same feeling. I had it at Amiens and I have it here at Bordeaux again now.”
Bordeaux’s training ground may be a relic of their top-flight past, but the amateur era is very much upon them.
As Carroll and his team-mates jog out to warm up, they fill up their own water bottles using an outside tap. During the drills, Carroll, who looks leaner than in his Premier League days, seeks clarification of instructions from his English-speaking team-mates.
With half a dozen fans watching on through a metal fence, Carroll takes part in an 11-v-11 exercise. The standard is low, with Carroll clearly several levels above, but he is humble and he is encouraging. “F***ing great pressing,” he shouts.
The style is direct — get the ball wide and whip crosses into the box — and Carroll is deemed the ideal fit.
Bordeaux may be 10th, but they have won two and drawn one of the three games Carroll has played. He has scored all five goals during that time, including two on his debut against Chateaubriant in the vineyard derby.
Is scoring in the French fourth tier really comparable with scoring in the Premier League? “Yeah, it’s an unbelievable feeling,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what level it’s at. Even with my kids when I’m in the garden, I’ll score and celebrate. Scoring goals is just a great feeling.”
Carroll is already the darling of Bordeaux. The city-centre club shop has his shirt on display while he signs jerseys for fans after training.
Although the weather has been changeable, Carroll has already visited Cap Ferret, a beach an hour away, while he has eaten out in Bordeaux and is settling into his rented house.
Having signed an initial two-year deal at Bordeaux, he is still thinking long-term. His 14-year-old son, Lucas, is a talented footballer and Carroll has even spoken about “doing a LeBron James” by playing alongside him. He is determined to continue to his 40th birthday.
“I’ve got absolutely no plans of stopping,” says Carroll. “I just love playing football, it doesn’t matter what level it is.
“With injuries, I’ve missed time playing football, which is frustrating. But the happiest part of my life is when I go out and play football. It just takes away everything. I’d be doing it anyway but I’m actually doing it for a job. It’s perfect.
“I still feel like a big kid, really. I just want to keep playing because that’s really all I’ve ever known.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: The Athletic)
