Legendary Premier League frontman Benni McCarthy turns 47 today and his controversial career was summed by an unusual greeting he used by mistake
Legendary South African striker Benni McCarthy often grabbed the headlines during his controversial career, including during a spell in Spain where he ended up calling everyone a “motherf***er”.
McCarthy is best known for helping fire Porto to Champions League glory back in 2004 under Jose Mourinho. His successful spell in Europe earned him a move to the Premier League and he almost grabbed the golden boot in his first season at Blackburn Rovers. Unfortunately, his form in Lancashire dwindled and he was eventually sold to West Ham after becoming overweight.
He even missed out on a space in South Africa’s 2010 World Cup squad on home soil due to a high body fat percentage, with the Hammers fining him £200,000 one pre-season in the hope it would push him to lose some timber.
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Now retired, McCarthy was most recently a first-team coach at Manchester United under former manager Erik ten Hag. He was axed in the summer as part of a first-team coaching overhaul led by INEOS, but it didn’t seem to work, with Ten Hag losing his job just a few months into the new season.
Several of United’s strikers worked with McCarthy who tried hard to help Marcus Rashford recapture his goal-scoring form after a poor return last season. Benni knows what it’s like to overcome struggles having had a less-than-successful spell with Celta Vigo before his unexpected triumph in Portugal.
McCarthy actually turned down a move to England when he headed to the mid-table La Liga side in the summer of 1999. Speaking in an interview with FourFourTwo magazine in March 2017, he said: “After establishing myself at Ajax, I felt ready to move on. My dream was to go to England.
“I could have gone to Tottenham but my agent persuaded me that Spain was the place with the best teams and the best lifestyle. I should have done more research. I didn’t realise how difficult it would be to learn Spanish, and not a single person spoke English at Celta.
“I had to guess what people were saying to me, or what they wanted. I watched TV with my little book full of words and learned Spanish. My team-mates would teach me all the wrong things.
“They told me that the words for ‘good guy’ were ‘you motherf***er’. So for two weeks I was going up to people all over Vigo and calling them motherf***ers!”
The man who would later lift the Champions League managed just 10 league goals during four seasons in Spain. However, it wasn’t all bad for McCarthy while living in Vigo – a city best known for being the biggest fishing port in the world.
He said: “The lack of Spanish affected my game because I didn’t know what the manager wanted. I played off instinct and everyone had a go at me because I did the wrong things, but after eight months I could speak Spanish.
“As for Vigo being an ugly port, well… when I went to sign, they used an attractive translator to show me all the best bits of the city, and the beaches full of half-naked girls. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and I was thinking, ‘This is the life’.”