EXCLUSIVE: ‘I don’t bet or drink but I gambled on people… and I lost it all’: Craig Bellamy says battle against bankruptcy is ‘like being on Death Row’ – with no house, no car and no mortgage, he now has a warning for young players
- Former Wales star Craig Bellamy lost his fortune and was declared bankrupt
- His financial ruin is the result of a series of failed investments made on his behalf
- He hopes that his situation offers a stark warning to young players of today
All of it is there on one page. It is hidden but it is there, shouting in anguish above the legal jargon. The millions he earned in the Premier League wage explosion of the Noughties; the monopoly money he got at Newcastle United and West Ham and Manchester City, the watch collection that was his only real extravagance; his absurd generosity, the lengths he went to for others; the injuries he suffered; the pain he went through. The money he earned and how dearly it has cost him.
It is there on that page, hidden but howling: the school he set up in Sierra Leone, the funerals of strangers he paid for in Cardiff, the kid from a favela whose education he bankrolled in Rio de Janeiro, his divorce settlement, the friends he indulged, the friends who betrayed him, the advisers who misled him and cheated him, the loss of his family home, Sant-Y-Nyll, in St Brides-super-Ely, the £1,398,071.20 he owes to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. All there, all reduced to stark lines of black and white in a one-page document.
‘In the High Court of Justice, Business and Property Courts of England and Wales,’ it says at the top of that page, ‘Insolvency and Companies list (ChD). Insolvency and Companies Court Judge Jones, 27 March 2023, in the matter of Craig Douglas Bellamy, and in the matter of the Insolvency Act 1986, upon the petition of HMRC, creditor of the above-named debtor, presented to this court on 03 February, 2023…it is ordered that Craig Douglas Bellamy be adjudged bankrupt.’
Bellamy stares at the page in the modest flat where he lives in north Manchester. He does not own the flat. He cannot own it. It is rented for him by Burnley, the Championship club where he is assistant coach to Vincent Kompany.
He does not own any property any more. He does not own a car. He cannot own a car. He is now, officially, a bankrupt and if there is some relief in that fact being public, he is also keen that his situation acts as a warning to today’s young footballers, who earn even more than he did and who have unscrupulous hucksters and ruthless opportunists circling them just as they once circled him.
Burnley assistant Craig Bellamy says his battle against bankruptcy is ‘like being on Death Row’
Bellamy (right) has no house, no car or mortgage after losing everything, with his financial ruin the result of a series of failed investments made on his behalf on a number of properties
‘I have been living the last five or six years on Death Row,’ says Bellamy, ‘just waiting for someone to put me out. I have been waiting for the cell door to open and someone to say: “Today’s the day”. It’s like the feeling of not being able to look forward to anything. All the money I’ve earned, I can’t get a mortgage. Financially, I have no future. The hurt of that. I can’t own anything. Everything’s gone.
‘My life has been on hold. I’m not a tax dodger but I have been very naive and the HMRC have been pursuing me for unpaid tax for some time. Everything I have had has been taken from me. If you get the wrong people advising you, it all haemorrhages, it all dwindles. It has got to the point where bankruptcy is a relief. It means I can just live again.
‘I know some people will probably think I have squandered all my money on drinking or gambling or drugs. I haven’t. I can go quiet where you won’t hear from me but I won’t be down the pub. I have never touched drugs since I was a young kid. I don’t gamble. I have never gambled. It doesn’t make any sense to me. But I have gambled on people unfortunately.’
Bellamy’s financial ruin is the result of a series of spectacular failed investments made on his behalf in properties on the Albert Embankment in London, a building project in Cefn Coed Road in Cardiff, a wine bar and steakhouse in Penarth Marina called Pier 64 and a film partnership-tax deferral scheme that was targeted by HMRC and was responsible for plunging numerous other footballers and celebrities into financial trouble.
Some of it was also the product of plain bad luck and chaos. A collection of expensive watches that he bought to identify landmarks in his life might have been considered assets but only one remains. Four of them are understood to be in the possession of a jeweller but cannot be recovered because the business went into liquidation in 2020 and the jeweller has entered into a police witness protection scheme and is unable to be contacted.
Bellamy played for clubs including Liverpool, Manchester City and Newcastle during his career
Though he didn’t drink or bet, Bellamy says losing his money this way would have ‘felt better’
At least one of Bellamy’s former advisers became the subject of a police investigation when suspicions were raised about the management of the ex-Wales international’s finances, about forged signatures, about a man impersonating him in a conversation relating to a loan, about arrangements concerning properties that were mortgaged to the hilt, about the sale of some of those properties and the non-completion of several of his scheduled tax returns.
Bellamy was subsequently told that, after three years of that police investigation, charges were not to be brought against the people he blamed for his plight because it was not deemed in the public interest to do so.
‘I want this to be a warning to other players,’ says Bellamy. ‘Check everything, make sure the people advising you are regulated. If they are not regulated, it’s the Wild West. Get your stuff audited by independent people, the equivalent of getting a second opinion. I was brought up in a generation of footballers where everything was done for you. Every bill. Wherever I was, the club did everything for me. I think that’s wrong.
‘It makes you too vulnerable. It’s good for players to have their own responsibilities because one day the club will not be there. You will finish your career and you will still be a young man and when you finish who’s going to pay your stuff then? You are going to have to learn to survive. You are going to have live in the real world.
‘When I was a young player starting out at Norwich, my biggest fear was money. I was always wary of it. I didn’t want to end up with a lot of money but no career. I would give you all the money as long as I could keep my career. I always thought money would be the Devil. It would distract me to a point where I would lose my hunger. It would distract me so I would lose my bite and my ambition to want to get to the top.
‘That chase of what everyone perceives to be success is not my chase. I don’t get that chase. Having nice things is nice, but it means nothing. I don’t wake up for that. I don’t wake up for the pursuit of nice things. I never felt like I had money anyway. I could afford nice things but there was no buzz in it. I actually felt like it was more of a pain in the backside, something for people to use you for.
‘Wherever you go, you get over-charged. Wherever you went, you got ripped off. People think: “It doesn’t matter, he’s got so much of it, he won’t even notice.” People think you’re a walking cashpoint for them. I felt guilty saying “no” when people rang up for help so I never said “no”. They don’t ring me now. You don’t hear from them. There was someone I helped get on their feet, he was living with me and then he ripped me off. We were best friends.
‘The idea — which I actually think is insane now but when you are a young kid who is hell bent on being a footballer, it seemed sensible — was for me to take care of my football career and for a guy I trusted with my finances to take care of the money. I said: “As long as when I finish football, it’s taken care of… you trust me to do the football and I will trust you with everything else.” It didn’t work out well, put it that way. Not for me, anyway.’
Sometimes, the money is all we talk about in football. We define players by how much they earn a week as much as by how many goals they score or how many trophies they win and so it was with Bellamy for a time when fat contracts were being negotiated for him at Newcastle United and West Ham United and Manchester City. And all the money he was earning, he was giving away. It felt like there was a bottomless pit of it. Sometimes he knew he was giving it away. Sometimes, he didn’t.
Bellamy’s story is a salutary tale of a kid who grew up on a tough estate in Cardiff, drifted in and out of juvenile delinquency, left home at 15 and soon found himself earning sums of money that did not make sense to him and which were alien to the social parameters that had defined him in south Wales. The money confused and perplexed him and so he trusted others to manage it for him. He didn’t even know how much money was in his bank account. He didn’t even want to know. He was ripe for exploitation.
Bellamy has issued a warning to young players on the back of his battles with bankruptcy
He was naive. Absolutely. ‘Beyond naive,’ he says. He was foolish. He would admit that, too. Worst of all, he was trusting. He was so trusting he gave one of his financial advisers Power of Attorney over his financial affairs. Bellamy was struggling with his mental health at the time, as he has done intermittently throughout his life, and he could not face the stress of even attempting to manage his money. He let someone else do it.
Footballers who blew their fortune
Diego Maradona
Argentine legend filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after Italian authorities demanded payment of £42m in unpaid taxed from his time with Napoli between 1984 and 1991.
Paul Gascoigne
England’s troubled star avoided bankruptcy in 2011 by agreeing a five-year payment plan with the HMRC over a £42,000 tax bill. He settled the debt by the deadline
Ronaldinho
Brazil’s World Cup winner had his passport confiscated in 2019 over unpaid taxes and state fines. He was reported to have had the equivalent of £5 in his bank account
‘People say footballers should know better,’ says Bellamy, ‘but why should I know better? I left school at 15. I felt like such a naive, stupid individual. I didn’t want to drink or gamble but if I’d lost money that way, maybe I could be kinder to myself. If I had done it to myself, then I could get on with fixing it. I don’t trust people because of this. As soon as you do trust someone, this happens. Deep down, I knew things weren’t right but I didn’t want to confront it. I didn’t know how to confront it. I thought: “If I have got it wrong here, I’m screwed”.
‘I am lucky I know what I’m doing as a coach. I’m OK football-wise. But imagine if I wasn’t. Imagine if I didn’t want to be involved in football. Where would I go? What could I do? What type of life would I have? When you go into a dark depression and you start thinking suicidal thoughts, that’s when it comes. I should have been enjoying my retirement from playing. All the injuries I had had, all the work I had put in…for what? For people you trusted to do that to you?
‘I entertained a lot of dark thoughts. But I realised the anger had to go because I was making myself ill. I am grateful I never turned to drink and I had close friends who have been incredible for me. And then Vincent comes up, completely out of the blue. I hadn’t been ready to take anything else on because my health was still not great — the dark thoughts and the dark moments can turn you bad. I wasn’t ready to manage because I had to learn to manage myself first.
‘I knew I had to get up and I had to keep working. Keep going, keep working and it will be OK. I knew if I kept working and I stayed with it, something amazing would happen. I have believed in that so much that I have brainwashed myself. And now I know how lucky I am to be at Burnley, to be doing something I love and something I’m good at. And now we are top of the league and I love what I do. And now, after everything, something amazing is happening.’
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