Robbie Fowler’s time at Manchester City was unremarkable. His Liverpool prime was
long in the past by that point and, arguably, it’s a period of his career most memorable
now for the chant with which the City fans used to serenade him, sung to the tune of
The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
“We all live in a Robbie Fowler house…”
Fowler liked that chant. “It was a good one. It did make me chuckle”, he told The
Guardian in 2015. Understandably so. In 2005, Fowler was included in the Sunday Times Rich
List, with an estimated wealth of £28m – partly raised by his career’s earnings and the
endorsements collected along the way, but embellished by substantial property holdings
across the UK.
By today’s standards, that isn’t noteworthy. But Fowler comes from a different era of professional
era. He emerged at Liverpool during the 1993-94 season, the second in the Premier League’s
history and at a time when money and fame were just becoming industry standards.
From that time there are too many scare stories to mention – of bad investments, bankruptcy
and, ultimately, tales of naïve players who weren’t properly prepared to deal with the
money and the media coverage. Fowler, who was born and raised in Toxteth and scored
goals with such uncomplicated class, was heading for a world he could barely imagine.
And the changes were sudden and startling, as Fowler described in his autobiography.
“Nothing… changed in my routine, except that when I went down the chippy and got (my)
special fried rice, it would be wrapped in a newspaper that had my picture all over it.
It's no wonder I struggled to come to terms with it all ... Every game I played, something
seemed to happen that made me a little bit more famous, or a little more notorious.”
This wasn’t the generation of gilded academy contracts. Fowler earned £29.50/week as a
trainee and his first professional deal was for just £220/week. Even after scoring five
goals in a league cup game against Fulham, the extension Liverpool hurriedly offered
only promised £500/week.
Fowler came through at Liverpool under the management of Graeme Souness. However paltry
the young forward’s wages may have been at the time, Souness still recognised how
his talent was likely to make him vulnerable. He was right; by the end of the decade, Fowler
would be earning £30,000/week and many of his peers had become cautionary tales. Football’s
boom was certainly decadent, but it was also dangerous.
Fowler would avoid those pitfalls though. As a teenager, Souness introduced him to George
Scott, a financial advisor he’d met during his time at Glasgow Rangers. Over time, Scott
would become a long-term ally, a second father as Fowler describes, and he would also act
as his agent during contract negotiations and endorsement deals which, among others,
he would sign with Nike and Kellogs.
He would also fight Fowler’s corner during one of the first recorded instances in British
football of an image rights dispute, over Liverpool’s attempt to sell a VHS of his
goals without paying him royalties. He would eventually be recompensed with £2 for every
video sold and, while incidental by modern standards, it put him at the vanguard of a
different sort of footballing movement.
Fowler’s property interests date back to 1998. He had already bought houses for his
mother, his father and himself, but with the aim of providing an income for himself after
retirement, he began building a portfolio of buy-to-let properties.
Today, that’s hardly an original approach. Back in the 1990s, however, there was still
the expectation – derisory as it was – that footballers should know their place, and any
sense that they were spending money on something other than fast cars, gambling and nights
out was treated with distrust and – often – as it if must have an ulterior motive.
When, for instance, Fowler and his advisors spotted a rental opportunity in Hadley Wood,
a leafy suburb north of London, the tabloid splash in early 1999 became that he was preparing
for a move to Arsenal.
Two decades on, the dimensions of his portfolio are rather vague. Fowler has always contested
the veracity of reports surrounding his wealth, claiming the figures to either be media guesswork
or based on calculations that ignore that he works in partnership with others.
Whatever the case, it’s his wife Kerrie whom he credits for much of the success.
“(She’s) the one who has been wearing the trousers. She’s the boss, he told the
Guardian in 2015. “She did it all while I was playing. Basically I go out and earn
the money.
It’s his name that carries the weight, though. The Robbie Fowler Property Academy is owned
and run by a transatlantic training company. The courses and products don’t involve Fowler
himself, but it’s his face that looks out from the promotional material, inviting those
interested to ‘build a property portfolio without the need for a footballer’s salary’.
In Fowler’s case, it’s quite the portfolio, containing in excess of 80 properties. The
majority of which are reported to be apartments and small family homes spread across Liverpool,
Cardiff and parts of Scotland, although the list is thought to include larger properties,
too, and some outside of the United Kingdom. Past acquisitions also include nine terraced
houses on a single street in Oldham, an entire side of the road, and a further six on a separate
street.
The Liverpool Echo interviewed one of his tenants, who described a typical two-up, two-down
set up inside, while the Manchester Evening News interviewed another in 2004 who was happy
with his cheap rent - £55 a week - and delighted to have a celebrity landlord.
In February 2020, Fowler also announced that he was part of a new development project in
Liverpool city centre. St Anne’s Gardens was originally scheduled for completion in
2021 and will, when finished, offer more than 300 luxury one and two-bedroom flats in the
heart of the city and just a short bus ride from Anfield.
Almost full circle for Robbie Fowler, then, but a very long way from the Toxteth of the 1980s.