Kevin Keegan knew it was no ordinary village on his first day of house-hunting when the estate agent suggested they go for lunch to discuss the options.
Keegan had just been appointed manager of Manchester City and, in his first meeting with the players, he made it clear he did not like the stories he had heard about a drinking culture at the club.
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What he did not realise was that he was moving into a village that had become one of the go-to places on Manchester’s football scene.
“I had never been to Hale in my life,” Keegan recalls in his autobiography. “We had the choice of at least a dozen restaurants in the centre of the village. The one we chose was called Up & Down and the same could be said of my heart rate when I walked through the door to find a group of my players with a bottle of Champagne at their table.”
Welcome to Hale, eight miles south of Manchester, among a strip of affluence that has so much appeal to the modern-day footballer it is attracting players from clubs separated by as much as 150 miles.
“We have always had lots of Manchester United and Manchester City players moving here,” says Jackie Atkins, a director of Hale Homes luxury estate agents. “But we are also getting footballers from Liverpool, Everton, Stoke, Bolton, Blackburn, Leicester and other parts of the Midlands or north west.
“They live alongside one another. It’s a beautiful area and, because there are so many of them, they can wander around the village and feel safe without being pestered. You see them in Sainsbury’s, pushing a trolley. It’s quite normal.”
Rivals on the pitch, neighbours off it, it does not need long among the gated mansions and pristine lawns to understand why so many footballers are attracted to Hale and the broad, tree-lined roads where it merges into Hale Barns and Bowdon.
Every football town or city tends to have a players’ enclave. The difference here, perhaps, is that Hale and its neighbours have gradually become a hub for Merseyside, Lancashire, Staffordshire and even further afield. One study, in 2010, estimated there were at least 33 Premier League players living in this leafy locale. The numbers are considerably higher these days as more and more footballers come in from outside Manchester.
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Trent Alexander-Arnold is one. Alisson, Liverpool’s goalkeeper, used to have Paul Pogba and Raheem Sterling among his neighbours in Hale Barns. Chermiti, Everton’s new signing from Sporting Lisbon, has been seen in the village, as has Burnley manager Vincent Kompany and numerous others.
At one point, Marcus Rashford and Danny Welbeck, United team-mates at the time, had Joe Hart and Kyle Walker, then City team-mates, as neighbours. Bruno Fernandes found a house three doors down from Stephen Ireland and there were so many Leicester City players living locally — Danny Simpson, Jonny Evans, Danny Drinkwater, Matty James — that a driver used to turn up in a minivan every morning to take them to training 100 miles away.
Relationships are formed, rivalries put aside. Every week, a five-a-side match takes place for a group of ex-pros who live in or around Hale or the so-called Golden Triangle of Wilmslow, Alderley Edge and Prestbury, where there is the highest proportion of millionaires per head in the country. The standard, says Ireland, is “frightening”.
The same description could be applied to some of the “absolute monsters”, to quote one of Hale’s estate agents, that have gone up in the parts of the village where old money meets new.
Peter Crouch tells a story in his autobiography about his first day as a Liverpool player and cruising around Hale Barns, windows down, music blaring, in an Aston Martin he had bought to celebrate his transfer from Southampton.
“I’m trying to convince myself I look like Steve McQueen or Daniel Craig, ignoring the old Peter telling me I’ve become everything I swore I wouldn’t,” Crouch writes.
“I pull up at a set of traffic lights and there’s Roy Keane. He looks back at me. Even through my shades, I cannot mistake the disgust on his face. He shakes his head and stares back at the road ahead. I’m frozen in my pose, grin slipping off my face, and when the lights change he drives off without a backward glance. I’m left there with the handbrake on and an awful realisation: Oh my God, I’ve become one of those t****.”
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Crouch says he sold the Aston Martin the next day. Yet it wouldn’t have stood out as too flashy in a place where sports cars and SUVs tend to have smoked windows and private registration plates. “A leisurely flow of Shogun jeeps,” reads one review, “stopping to park while their owners buy tuna steaks, have a manicure, or nip into the interior designer’s.”
That is the caricature, anyway. The reality is that Hale, with its population of 15,000, has a good mix of people, lots of unpretentious parts and is rarely as poseurish as, say, Alderley Edge, where car-spotters with cameras slung over their shoulders used to line the main strip every Saturday to get pictures of the footballers’ dream machines.
Alderley Edge is where David Beckham, Carlos Tevez, Cristiano Ronaldo and various other A-listers chose to live. The rumour used to be that one England international would repeatedly drive his Ferrari up and down the hill, roaring his engine, to get the car-spotters chasing after him. Nor was it unheard of to find DKNY, Versace and other designer labels in the window of the Oxfam charity shop. “Older women might frown,” as The Guardian cattily observed, “if they hadn’t botoxed out the option.”
Contrary to the impression left by the British television series Goldplated or The Real Housewives of Cheshire, there are different layers to this part of Manchester’s southern commuter belt.
A walk through Hale shows the village is not immune to the difficulties of modern life. A number of shop units are lying empty. One Six Eight, the cocktail bar, has closed. So has the Cheshire Midland pub, purportedly because the owner had a hissy fit that so many people were ignoring a ban on mobile phones.
Overall, though, there is the unmistakable feeling of wealth. Paparazzi will often be positioned outside restaurants that have snappy names such as Cibo and Riva. Art enthusiasts browse the Clarendon Gallery. Obediently trained dogs have their fur clipped at the Canine Cutting Club.
Locals talk about seeing Erik ten Hag riding a bike to Marks & Spencer to grab some dinner or Louis van Gaal, one of United’s previous managers, queueing to be seated at Danilo’s, a now-closed Italian restaurant, and — classic Van Gaal — not happy he had to wait (“this had better be good”).
The Railway pub is where John Stones, Fabian Delph, Bernardo Silva, Vincent Kompany and Kyle Walker joined regulars for a beery celebration after City had won the 2018 Premier League title.
Captain, leader, legend 🔵🔵 @VincentKompany @ManCity @City_Watch pic.twitter.com/CGIg5HGkIQ
— Alex Hunt (@AlexHunt01) April 15, 2018
Sam Allardyce had his interview for the England job at the Bowdon home of David Gill, then a Football Association director, and the stories are legendary about the lock-ins for Bryan Robson, Norman Whiteside and assorted United players at the Griffin pub.
These days, however, it is nothing out of the ordinary that Luke Shaw lives just along from Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk, or that you might see Michael Keane of Everton getting a coffee, James Milner walking his dog or Robin Olsen setting off for training at Aston Villa 80 miles away.
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What you might not notice are the security guards parked up as “static controls” close to the more opulent, Hollywood-style roads where houses measure upwards of 10,000 square feet (more than 900 square metres).
“There was a time, around 2008 and 2009, when Hale stopped being so popular because it was a high-crime area for footballers,” says Haydn Roberts, who was City’s player liaison officer. “Some terrible things happened if you look at the robbery on Roque Santa Cruz’s house.”
Santa Cruz, the former City striker, was targeted while he was away playing for Blackburn Rovers. Criminals also robbed the houses of Liverpool’s Emile Heskey and United midfielder Darren Fletcher. In each case, their partners were at home and threatened at knifepoint.
“There was a lot of scaremongering at the time,” says Roberts. “But it’s a new generation of footballers now. Attitudes have changed and Hale, which always had the restaurants and huge houses, became on-trend again, probably more than ever.”
For wealthy footballers, the answer was security — and lots of it. Almost every house has electronic entry and sophisticated anti-theft systems. Many have ‘panic rooms’ where homeowners can lock themselves inside if there is an intruder. One property even has bullet-proof windows.
A study last year found five of the 10 most expensive roads in north-west England were in Hale, Bowdon or Hale Barns, with the motorways nearby, the airport so close you can almost touch the wings and plenty more to add to the celebrity feel: parks, boutiques, golf courses, high-performing schools, see-and-be-seen eateries and a Priory hospital (always a sign of money) in case it all gets too much.
Barrow Lane, where Zlatan Ibrahimovic used to live in Hale Barns, was at the top of that list, with an average house price of £3.3million ($4.1m).
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Broadway, in Hale, was next. Nobody will find it on Google Street View, though, because the cameras were barred from this stretch of Millionaires’ Row. Horse riding is also prohibited, presumably because anyone in a saddle could peer over the strategically high walls and hedgerows.
At Brooks Drive, meanwhile, another security sign explains the long list of don’ts: no loitering, no walking, no cycling, no dogs, no school drop-offs, no trespassing, no driving above 10mph.
It might seem over the top, but the beefed-up security has made a difference in an area where dozens of footballers past and present mingle with Coronation Street stars, musicians and other showbiz types.
A blue plaque on Hale Road shows where singer Paul Young used to live. Paul ‘Bonehead’ Arthurs, the former Oasis guitarist, has a house in the village. Johnny Marr and Mike Joyce moved into the area at the height of The Smiths, so did the band’s frontman, Morrissey, for a while. Music trivia: Marlborough Road is where The Queen is Dead and Meat is Murder albums were written.
As for Keane, you wonder what he makes of rival players from such a wide circle of clubs becoming neighbours and, in some cases, friends (though Micah Richards, his punditry pal from Sky Sports, is also close by).
Keane’s relationship with the area began 30 years ago and, if you remember him quitting the Republic of Ireland’s World Cup in 2002, you will also remember his daily dog walks with Triggs after flying home from Saipan, with the world’s media outside his gates.
Sadly, Triggs is no longer part of Hale life, but the dog’s part in the drama did persuade Paul Howard, the award-winning Irish writer, to pen Triggs – an autobiography of the animal.
“Hale was a respectable area where people voted Conservative and had their lawns mowed in tonal stripes,” was the dog’s verdict. “It was known as the Stockbroker Belt – and this was back in the days when stockbroking was considered a respectable job.”
