When Gazza met Gaddafi

Telegraph

14-05-2025

It was the hopeful first spring of a new millennium, and yet an almighty stench from the previous one lingered. That May, in a court near Utrecht, the trial of two Libyans had begun so that a deadly riddle might be solved – the savage bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.
With the trial three weeks old, across the North Sea, Jimmy 'Five Bellies' Gardner raced through Tyneside. He was on a quest to transport Paul Gascoigne's forgotten passport to Newcastle Airport. Then, the ageing maestro would visit the alleged terrorists' homeland. This, though, was no chicken-and-fishing-rod sympathy escapade. Gazza had a match to play and a Gaddafi waiting to man-mark him.
On the Sunday, Gazza's solid Middlesbrough had finished their Premier League season with a 2-0 victory at Goodison Park. Three days later, they would be special guests at the opening of Tripoli's Great Man-Made River Stadium – witnesses to the ribbon cutting for Colonel Gaddafi 's new concrete toy. 'We're taking a strong squad,' said manager Bryan Robson, 'and treating the visit seriously. We are ambassadors for this country, after all.'
Members of that squad were far from enthused by their coming adventure. ''It was a strange thing for us to do,' says midfielder Neil Maddison now. 'It was a trip I don't think any of us wanted to go on. Libya was involved with the Pan Am disaster, that was the theory. I think as players we felt uneasy about going there.'
Then as now, however, those players were slaves to the schedule put in place for them, unquestioning pawns of the sport's rhythms. 'You're in that routine,' says team-mate Robbie Mustoe. 'You're just a group of young men who follow orders… I would've appreciated a little bit more understanding from the club, maybe to sit us down as players and say, 'OK, this is a trip we're contemplating, and here's a little history'. I can't recall that happening.'
Pleas for Gazza to be allowed to fly without passport
It did not help that a footballer's prerogative after a season's slog was to recline on a beach in Ibiza or Crete rather than venture into the dusty unknown. At Newcastle Airport, the situation worsened when Middlesbrough 's players encountered another track-suited mob in a nearby check-in queue. 'The Newcastle squad were there,' recalls Chris Barnes, then the club's head of sports science. 'They were making a lot of jokes about it, them going to the Caribbean and us to Libya. It was the last thing we needed.'
Remarkably, Middlesbrough allowed a film crew to shadow their every move. Leeds-based production company Chameleon TV had won a commission from Channel 5. 'The documentary name itself, Gazza v Gaddafi, probably helped get it made,' supposes Chameleon sound man Chris Gibbions from a quarter-century's distance. 'There was this obvious pull of the two big names.' Gibbions also recalls the moment Gazza – palpably close to discharging a batch of trademark tears – realised he had left his passport at home, and made a panicked call to Five Bellies for its conveyance.
The crew then captured club commercial manager Graham Fordy – the chief organiser of this Libyan jaunt, who had been trying to make it happen for four years – requesting that a document-free Gascoigne be permitted to fly. 'It isn't as if nobody knows who he is,' Fordy pleaded with airport staff. With Five Bellies' task accomplished, however, Gazza boarded among 28 members of the Middlesbrough party on flight BA2898 to Tripoli.
Discontent was not the preserve of the players alone. Among supporters and in the media, there had been fierce objections to the tour coinciding with the Lockerbie trial and the club's apparent engagement with a tyrannical regime. Fordy acknowledged these grievances but insisted that the trip was about 'the building of relationships for the future, rather than looking in the past'.
He may have had in mind the nearby economy Middlesbrough existed within. Teesside companies had in recent years won Libyan construction contracts and in the local press it was claimed that 'Middlesbrough's invitation came about through the North East's strong links with the Libyan Interest Office'. Some, meanwhile, accused Middlesbrough of greed, suggesting that the club were to be paid a fee of £1 million by the Libyans. This claim was dismissed as 'grossly exaggerated' by a spokesman. Offering further confusion as to club motivations, The Times reported that Middlesbrough's invitation had been sent by the Libyan Olympic Committee.
Robson offered a defence for this acutely unpopular endeavour, stating that: 'The Home Office wanted us to take this trip. Britain and America are trying to get reconciliation pacts going with Libya.' The notion that a mid-table football team from a post-industrial town could help smooth future relations with an ostracised dictatorship does, of course, require a considerable leap of faith. Yet the concept of Gazza et al as peace envoys contains a smidgeon of credence. Certainly, Middlesbrough's Tripoli jaunt was approved of, and even encouraged by, UK government figures. Rapprochement with oil-rich Libya was well underway, and Tony Blair's handshake with Colonel Gaddafi only four years in the future.
Over in Libya, meanwhile, Al-Saadi Gaddafi – a footballer son of the Colonel – claimed that he alone had brokered the deal that summoned Middlesbrough, due to his friendship with Gascoigne. The two had met while players in Italy. 'I've known him since he played for Lazio,' said Al-Saadi. 'He's been a very good friend of mine since then.' Whatever the truth behind Middlesbrough's excursion, Gazza versus Gaddafi was on.
Gazza joked about Gaddafi's son 'downing cocktails'
Mustoe has never forgotten the drive through town on a coach designated 'Meddlesbrough' by a sign fixed on a side panel, just beneath the obligatory portrait of Colonel Gaddafi. 'Tripoli was so rough, and so broken and so crumbled,' he says, 'it was shocking to see little kids walking around that looked like they had no home, and wild dogs running about.'
Steve Vickers, his room-mate on this and more mundane away trips, recalls 'so many abandoned vehicles because of the embargo the Americans had put on them at the time. There were no spare parts for vehicles, so when they broke down they just left them. It was like taking a step back in time. Donkeys pulling carts and that type of thing.'
Beyond giant room keys 'like something from an old castle' and 'rotten, minging food', at their hotel, Vickers, a neat centre-half, remembers 'a guy sat outside our room wearing a suit with a submachine gun strapped across his chest. He just nodded as we passed and we thought, 'My God, what's going on'.'
Armed guards would follow the players and film crew everywhere. Only the spartan poolside offered respite. Gibbions, who found Libya an 'interesting, incredibly friendly place', fondly recollects a poolside soaking by Gazza. Caught on camera, the incident transports seasoned Gazza-watchers a decade backwards to sunny hotels at Italia '90, ahead of so many wrong turns and dangerous corners.
On the first night, the Middlesbrough squad was treated to a reception at the British Embassy, where the players met a UK trade delegation. En route, however, the Meddlesbrough bus became lost in the crumbling maze of Tripoli's streets. As a jazz band played, discomfort afflicted Barnes. 'It was right in the middle of Tripoli,' he explains, 'this opulent mansion with marble and fountains, and a champagne reception, but all surrounded by poverty, all these tall apartments looking over us. You felt bad seeing that.'
There followed a meal at Colonel Gaddafi's favourite restaurant.
The next morning, May 17, Middlesbrough's squad took their bus to training. In one of the documentary film's most memorable quotes, to uproarious laughter from team-mates, midfielder Phil Stamp described the trip thus far: 'Libya? It's the s--ts. We all wanna go home. The food's s--- and we're getting no money for coming.' On a dreadful, bone-hard plastic surface moulded onto concrete, the players knocked a ball around with local children. Soon Gazza, clearly the main draw for the Libyans, was removed for an assembly with another Gaddafi son, Muhammad, and other regime figures. A joke about remembering Al-Saadi 'downing the cocktails' when the two had met in Italy did not land.
Fans whipped if they did not make noise
That evening, with the day's pulsating heat now dropping to 26C, in a quick-fire round-robin tournament they would play two 45-minute games against a Libyan XI and then Italian side Bari. A bagpipe band's offerings pierced the air and then roars erupted as an Iman officially opened the stadium.
The atmosphere felt raucous, urgent. Sports scientist Barnes offers a shocking explanation: 'There were 15,000 men in there and you've heard the phrase 'whipping up the atmosphere'. Well, that was literally happening – there were soldiers with whips hitting any fans that didn't make noise.' From his berth on the pitch, Vickers saw similar wickedness. 'The crowd was controlled by soldiers who had whips and big sticks,' he confirms. 'Any time they tried to get down to the front they were whipping them and hitting them.'
It hardly mattered, but on the pitch Middlesbrough's blend of young and old players suffered a significant handicap. Regular goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer had refused to travel and stand-in Ben Roberts was taken ill on arrival in Libya. That phenomenon beloved of fans everywhere, an outfield player in goal, would have to be enacted. It fell to Stamp to undertake kick-saves and improvised dives in jogging bottoms and a shirt far too baggy for him.
Against a Libyan outfit that Maddison remembers as 'a decent side, quite nippy', Middlesbrough were defeated 1-0 by virtue of a goal which wreaked of offside. Everything, though, was about Gazza versus Gaddafi, and the crowd did their boisterous duty when Al-Saadi was brought on as a substitute and began immediately marking the Geordie. 'We didn't really get close to Gaddafi,' says Mustoe, a fine midfielder for over a decade with the club, 'because it wouldn't be a good idea if you fouled him.' With Stamp remaining in goal, Middlesbrough then lost 2-0 against Bari.
Thoroughly bored and frequently bemused, Middlesbrough's footballers set out for Tripoli Airport the next day dreaming of home. Then, 'All of a sudden,' remembers Maddison, 'there were motorbikes and trucks alongside the team coach, ushering us into this long drive.'
Barnes continues: 'We pulled up outside this big, bombed-out house. A man with a rifle got on the bus and told us to get off.' The building, it transpired, was a former Gaddafi mansion, maintained as a ruin to highlight an American bombing raid which had killed the dictator's daughter in 1986. Sheepishly, the players filed around the rubble and among the family portraits of this macabre relic. They were shown a hole in the ceiling through which it was said the offending bomb had fallen. 'They'd shot down an American plane and put the pilot's overalls on a dummy and there were two American helmets,' says Vickers. Then, in an act of brazen propagandising, Robson and Gascoigne were forced to sign a book of condolence and filmed while doing so.
Finally, the shell-shocked players reached the airport. Their plane home climbed into the air and two air hosts lit cigarettes. Middlesbrough's season had finally concluded. Fordy saluted the Libyan supporters' 'passion for the game' and 'the PR for the club'. Robson offered that it had been a 'worthwhile trip as far as we're concerned'. Twenty-five years on, the engaging and articulate Mustoe is less convinced.
'I look back on it as a mature adult and it is a bit disturbing really,' he reflects. 'As players we are so naive, so ignorant to what's going on around us and what the bigger meaning behind this possibly was. You look back and you understand the history. The whole idea of the trip, the story of forwarding relations between the British and Libyan governments, I think to open up trade – we were kind of used really. I'm not thrilled when I look back at it. At least it gave us some stories to tell, I suppose.'