What I've Learnt from Meeting Lee Chapman, Pelé and Other Footballing Heroes

The author (right) with Pelé

I hung out with Pelé last week. The whole thing was as odd as you might imagine. I was walking into the office when my phone rang and one of the editors at the newspaper I work for went, "Um, can you interview Pelé this lunchtime?" I thought 'Shit', said 'Yes' and, three hours later, I was loitering in the basement of a swanky New Bond Street art dealership waiting for the greatest footballer of all time (his words) to show up.

I am not – and you may have twigged this by now – a proper, dedicated football writer. Still, over the years I've had to interview a fair few players and managers. I once spent an entire day traipsing round AC Milan's training ground in the hope of getting ten minutes in the presence of Zlatan Ibrahimovic. I've walked around Ryan Giggs's mansion in my socks (Giggs enforces a strict shoes-off-at-the-door policy) while making small talk about shopping centres and Vimto (he likes Vimto). For a reason that must have made total sense at the time, I ended up spending a fair bit of time asking André Villas-Boas about his favourite Brad Pitt films. I honestly don't know where I was going with that one. Still, for the record, he thought Inglorious Basterds was fucking hilarious.

This all sounds like it should be fun, but as a rule it's pretty stressful for a couple of reasons. For a start you have to try to get these men to say interesting or enlightening things, which is easier said than done. This isn't me being an intellectual snob or in any way down on footballers – I would honestly trade lives with a Conference North centre-back in a heartbeat – I'm just making the point that all good interviews generally require the subject to be introspective or self-critical. And footballers tend to be neither of these things. Or at least not in public, anyway. They are, in that sense, the total opposite of every pissy-pant singer in every pissy-pant indie band that has ever been. And this is entirely logical. Eye-rollingly dull it may be, but all the cliched cut-and-paste positivity that players trot-out in their post-match interviews is, often as not, serving a function. And that function is – win, lose or draw – to keep them in a state of perpetual self-confidence and belief. I guess what I'm trying to say is that most footballers have effectively trained themselves to be emotionally bulletproof, which is great when it comes to playing in front of 45,000 angry people from Sunderland, but a fucking headache when it comes to making them say stuff anyone would actually want to read.

The other reason these assignments sometimes feel like a bit of a hospital pass is that there is always a circus. It's never just you and the player, because the player is invariably shilling something, so there's a baggage train of corporate camp followers on-hand to throw their weight around. So before anyone could interview Zlatan – who was promoting a digital version of his autobiography, I Am Zlatan – a squad of Swedish PRs were on hand to literally force you to scroll through an iPad and make sure you read the book. It's like… lads, I fucking know who Zlatan Ibrahimovic is, alright? I got a plane to be here and everything. It was worth it, though, because Zlatan was awesome, like some kind of massive, slightly droll, multi-lingual samurai who didn't mind taking the piss out of Wayne Rooney's hair transplant. At Giggs's place there was an entire roomful of unidentified men who sat-in on our interview, men who were presumably there to jump in and perform some kind of injunction bukkake on me should I mentioned their client's "complicated family life". I couldn't get Adam Lallana to talk about the fact he grew up in an old people's home – which is both mental and fascinating, right? – without him first dutifully enthusing about some French Connection jumpers. In an otherwise empty conference room, a PR for Walkers crisps once told me I was asking Gary Lineker too many questions about football and not enough about crisps. She had placed a large selection of crisps on the table and everything, just in case either of us forgot that he was there to "sell spuds" (his words). Nine times out of ten, this is what you're dealing with.

Anyway, the reason I got to meet Pelé is that a load of artists have been commissioned to make a load of artwork "inspired" by the 74-year-old three-time World Cup winner. I dunno. I'm sure it's a nice idea and everything, but it meant that along with a weird mix of football and fine art correspondents, I had to sit through a press conference in the basement of the commercial gallery where these objet d'art will eventually be displayed. The footy people wanted to know what he thought of Eden Hazard ("I like him"). The art people wanted to know what Andy Warhol was like when he met him in the 70s ("quiet"). Personally, I quite wanted to know more about the thought process behind insisting that a particular goal he scored in the 1950s be recreated in 3D because it was so awesome and the world deserved to see it. I'm not joking, check it out. It looks like he's playing his mum on Pro Evo or something.

I eventually got to sit down with him for a bit. He was decked-out in the sort of safari suit getup you tend to associate with African dictators and was texting from his iPhone when we were introduced. And he was nice! I mean, he was a 74-year-old man speaking in stop-start English, so there was only so much scope for bants, but yeah, he was pretty much what you'd imagine Pelé to be like. He spent most of the time talking about how humble he was – which is 100 percent the sort of thing that humble people do – and going on about how much he likes football. I asked him if he had any advice as to how I could be a better footballer and he said "just be yourself". I told him that wasn't going to help, then laughed loudly, so he knew I was making a funny joke. He just smiled and nodded along, which was good of him.

Before he left I asked for a photo. This is something I never request, but then it was Pelé, so what you going to do? As we posed for the shot I was absolutely delighted to find that he went straight in for the kind of bicep-flexing handshake you see Dutch and Dillon giving each other in Predator, which made me want to ask if he'd seen Predator, and if so, what did he make of it? But by that point he was being shepherded into a blacked-out people carrier.

Actually, what I just said about never getting my photograph taken with footballers is bullshit because I once posed for several shots with Lee Chapman. In my defence, I'd been commissioned by a magazine to produce a feature that involved meeting all my childhood heroes, and as Chapman had scored the goals that helped Leeds United win the title when I was ten, he was literally the first person I approached. At the time he owned a bar on the King's Road, so I phoned up and asked if I could come and meet him. We ended up having quite a few drinks and he seemed genuinely touched that I was there, warbling on about the posters I had of him as a kid. His wife, the actress Leslie Ash, popped by later on in the night and we had a nice chat, although I can't really remember what we talked about. It might have been something to do with interior design? Not sure. Anyway, the piece never ran because let's be honest, in the cold light of day, who really wants to read about me having a bit too much to drink with Lee Chapman? If you're reading, though, thanks Lee, I had a blast.

By now I've more or less named-dropped the majority of the footballers I've met, so I might as well run through the final stragglers. So there's Frank Lampard, who I met in a small room at Chelsea's Cobham training facility. He was good, actually, plus at one point I managed to make both him and his agent snigger. I've honestly never been happier. I guess there's a strong argument that if I spent less time trying to make professional footballers laugh then I might actually be asked to interview them more often. But then it's funny how your mind works in a crisis. Actually, the best thing about going to Cobham was seeing Petr Čech in normal clothes. He looked like a total nerd, as though he was some central European PhD student over here on an Erasmus programme or something.

Who else? Met Stuart Pearce not that long ago. He was alright. He talked about being an electrician for Brent Council and taking Nottingham Forest youth players to see The Stranglers. I told him that, as an eight-year-old, I'd cried when he and Chris Waddle spooned their penalties in the semi-final of Italia 90. This didn't seem to move him particularly. In fact, he said missing that penno was the "best thing he'd ever done", which is probably taking the whole "emotionally bulletproof" thing a bit too far. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, carried a notepad and kept calling me "Ben". He was like one of those firemen who come into school and tells you not to commit arson.

I once spoke to Gary Neville on the phone, but I don't think that really counts. Anyway, you know what Gary Neville is like. He was like that. Same deal with Harry Redknapp. Met him at a function laid-on by a banking and asset management group. He was so much like Harry Redknapp it was like someone with an amazing Latex mask was method acting Harry Redknapp.

So yeah, that's my life as a tiny cog in the modern footy-industrial complex. It's banal, surreal, but not a bad gig really. Plus I got to hang out with Pelé. That's alright. My gran was delighted.

@ben_machell