The last time I interviewed Ross McCormack was nine years ago at the Flamingo Land theme park. There’s no punchline here. Flamingo Land once sponsored Leeds United’s academy and the club would hold up their end of the bargain by sending players on promotional visits. That was where you went to see Neil Warnock on a flying motorbike.

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McCormack hasn’t changed a lot, which is good to know because for a little while he hasn’t been seen much either. He is off the footballing radar and as good as retired at 36, with Achilles tendons that cannot cope with a full training week. He has a new business, designing and installing feature walls, and does not sound like he pines for the sport. McCormack was never going into coaching. He has not attempted any of his badges. “I always said that once I finished, I’d be finished,” he says. And here he is.

The reason for the Flamingo Land interview in 2014 was that McCormack, at his peak, was a quality player, a gilded finisher who had scored 29 goals for Leeds that season and made the player of the year award vote a one-horse race. Minus those goals, the club would probably have been relegated from the Championship. But he admits that when people remember him now, they regard him as trouble or “a bad egg”, a footballer whose vibes were toxic. He attributes that to his three years at Aston Villa, a miserable period which cast him as a problem.

“There’s this perception of me,” McCormack says. “But people who really knew me as a player would tell you that the way I was made to look wasn’t me. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but what happened at Aston Villa painted me as something I wasn’t.” If there was a wild-child streak in him, it appears to have faded. He no longer drinks much and is happy away from football. His eldest son, Layton, is in the under-12s squad at Crystal Palace. It’s the most contact he has with the sport. “He’s got a chance,” he says. “But I don’t put any pressure on him. I just enjoy watching him.”

McCormack has long been tempted to speak his mind, though, because a career that took him in his prime years to Leeds, Fulham and Villa left plenty to discuss. He avoided saying too much about it while he was still playing because he thought clubs reading controversial comments might write him off as too volatile to deal with, too unpredictable to touch. With hindsight, he wishes he had fought his corner there and then, to say his piece when it mattered. “My attitude was that I’d wait until I was done,” he says. But we’re in the Village Hotel in Leeds and he’s willing to speak now, to recall those days as he saw them.

Where to start? McCormack the footballer is a story in itself, the young boy from Pollock in Glasgow who supported Celtic but played for Rangers after Celtic decided he was too small to sign. He was player of the year once at Leeds, scoring four times in a single, brilliant performance at Charlton, and won the award twice at Fulham. He captained both clubs, too, and narrowly missed out on the EFL’s Championship player of the year prize in two different years. “I don’t think you captain clubs like Leeds and Fulham by being a bad egg,” he says.

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But therein lies the point. For all that he achieved, what people want to know about are the stories that followed him around, the stories that made headlines. At Leeds alone, where he played between 2010 and 2014, he was involved in high-profile politics: Mad Friday, the “McContract” nickname, the suggestion he dodged pre-season to force through his £11million exit to Fulham. All of it, he says, needs proper context.

Mad Friday, for the uninitiated, needs a little explaining, too. It was January 31, 2014, and transfer deadline day in England. Massimo Cellino, an Italian businessman and veritable loose cannon, had agreed to buy the club around 5pm that night and, without waiting for EFL approval or worrying about technicalities, he sacked the club’s manager, Brian McDermott, there and then. Leeds’ de facto CEO, Paul Hunt, was sent home, too. Chaos reigned and club sponsors, including Flamingo Land, threatened to pull their support. The squad were completely in the dark.

McCormack, Leeds’ captain at the time, was soon in the middle of the mayhem. He resented the treatment of McDermott and the fact that having been in a Championship play-off position around Christmas, Leeds were sinking down the table as incompetence at ownership level took hold.

“A lot of the players in the squad loved the manager and Gibbo (McDermott’s assistant, Nigel Gibbs),” McCormack says. “Really loved them. We were doing well at Christmas, in the play-offs. Then a load of nonsense starts above us and it all falls away. If you’re bright, it’s not very hard to put two and two together and see why that was.” McDermott, incredibly, was reinstated the day after Cellino sacked him. But that’s another story.

More than once on deadline day, McCormack appeared live on Sky Sports News, backing McDermott while he was still in a job and then criticising Leeds after news of his dismissal broke. In the meantime, Cardiff City were bidding to sign McCormack and the striker decided that if Leeds were inclined to sell him, he would leave. Cardiff sent a helicopter to Leeds-Bradford Airport to give themselves a chance of getting the transfer over the line in time. McCormack drove to Elland Road to finalise paperwork for his release, but when he got there a message was passed on from one of Cellino’s advisors, Graham Bean. The deal was off.

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From the outside, it looked as if McCormack had tried to force his way out, to use Sky’s coverage of the past few hours of the window to make a move happen. “Massimo never actually spoke to me himself,” McCormack says. “I hardly ever spoke to him or heard from him. He was a bit like that. I don’t think ‘coward’ is a fair word to use, but put it this way: if you make decisions, at least face up to them yourself.

“Everyone had told me that a bid was going in from Cardiff and was being accepted. ‘Get yourself down to Elland Road because time’s tight’. That’s why I was there. There was no transfer request or whatever, it wasn’t my call, but the stuff I said on Sky — I was speaking out because I felt the manager was being treated unfairly. I look at it now as me being the only person with a set of bollocks to stand up and say it like it was. Everybody else just stayed in their own lane, said very little and let things happen because it was easier that way. I wasn’t like that. It went too far.

“The next day, I scored a hat-trick against Huddersfield and the fans chanted for Brian to come back, which he did. So I hear people say ‘you did this and you did that on deadline day’, but the crowd had Brian’s back, too, so what’s the difference? I was his captain, I thought he was getting hung out to dry. And as for Cardiff, if Leeds want the money then yeah, I’ll go. That’s how football works. There’s no loyalty in the game. Talk about loyalty makes me laugh. When it suits, players are pieces of meat.”

Cellino, in certain moments, had the capacity to be amusing or comical. McCormack tells the tale of former Leeds striker Matt Smith, a player with a business degree, walking into a meeting with Cellino to be greeted by the comment: “Ah, the businessman! Forget football. You can help me run this fucking club!”. But on Cellino’s watch, McCormack feels certain staff were treated poorly, himself included. Gibbs would later take Leeds to the High Court after he was sidelined and left without any genuine duties in the summer of 2014.

“There were days when Gibbo had to go into the offices at Elland Road between eight in the morning and five in the evening, with nothing to do,” McCormack says. “Rather than sacking him, he was treated like that. It was out of order.” Gibbs eventually resigned and was awarded more than £300,000 in damages in a subsequent legal case.

By then, McCormack — popular as he was at Leeds because of his goalscoring — had earned the nickname “McContract” among the fanbase on account of the number of times his deal was extended. The impression of him was that he was regularly angling for an extension, forever after better pay. “I laugh at that one,” he says. “McContract. It’s quite funny. But nobody knows that I took a pay cut of 35 or 40 per cent when I came to Leeds from Cardiff. I wasn’t on big money or anything like it. And the new deals I got didn’t put me on big money either, not by the standards of the game.

“One of them I got after scoring 19 goals in a season. That seems fair enough to me. I’m not being funny but if a new contract’s there for you then you’re going to take it, aren’t you? The numbers never went through the roof. I guess it’s just the way it looks. I get that.”

In the summer of 2014, Leeds were drifting aimlessly and McCormack was sold to Fulham. He says he was told Leeds seriously needed the money. As the squad, now in the hands of a new manager, David Hockaday, flew out for a pre-season camp in Italy, McCormack was missing from the group. Coverage at the time claimed he had refused to travel and that he was digging his heels in to make sure his move to Fulham went ahead.

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Cellino spoke angrily about it afterwards. “I was disrespected and he was aggressive with me,” Cellino said. “He didn’t turn up for the tour and all the time he wanted to go. He’s a bloody good player and I’m not going to pretend he isn’t, but it wasn’t possible to keep him.”

McCormack’s version is different. “The very first day of training, I went out in my trainers and took my boots because you always started with running sessions on day one,” he says. “Dave (Hockaday) pulled me straight away and said: ‘You won’t need them’. I joked with him saying I hoped he meant the trainers rather than boots, but he said: ‘No, the boots. Massimo says you’re not to train. You’re not allowed’.

“I understood why. If you’ve got an £11million asset and you need to sell him, you’re not going to risk him getting injured. So no chance I was going on tour either. But then I read that I’d refused to go, at the same point where I was down at Fulham getting everything done. I was thinking ‘Leeds had already done the fucking deal. Leeds had already sold me. What is this?’. I wasn’t smashing (Cellino’s) door down to go. He had a choice and he chose to take the money, but I don’t blame him. It was a lot of money.

“If people think ill of me, all I’d say is look at what was really happening at the club. I had to look out for myself, no denying that, but I spoke out because some of it had gone too far. And I stand by what I did.”

For one season, his last at Elland Road, McCormack carried Leeds and the squad. He scored 28 league goals and Matt Smith got 12. No one else scored more than three. That struggle gave him a perception of life at Leeds which, on the back of the season just gone, might still apply today. “The biggest thing about playing for Leeds is the ability to cope with pressure,” he says. “It’s the biggest thing by far. You’ve got to be a certain type of character to take it. If you’re not, it won’t happen.”

Between Leeds and Villa, McCormack’s two years at Fulham look nothing other than fairly placid. The second of them, he says, was the best of his career, as well as he ever played. The coach who signed him, Felix Magath, was famously off the wall and McCormack remembers a running session which went on for an hour and 10 minutes “simply because Felix basically disappeared and no one knew when to stop”.

But he and Magath got along, for all the time they worked together. Magath was sacked a little over two months after McCormack signed. “He was weird but he got me very fit in that first summer,” McCormack says. “He got me and he seemed to like me. I lost so much weight that I went to see him because I was getting pushed off the ball by under-17s, which had never happened before. I said I need a bit more on me, that I’d meet him in the middle with a different weight target. He was happy to do it.”

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At various stages of his career, McCormack had been denied a move to the Premier League by clubs refusing to accept offers that arrived for him. By 2014, he had started to realise that his only way into the division might be via promotion from the Championship, which was why he went to Fulham and then Villa. Both clubs looked like they should be able to compete strongly. Fulham ultimately underwhelmed.

“The one regret I have about my career is that I went to Villa for the exact same reason I went to Fulham,” he says. “I should have learned from Fulham. I should have stayed there longer, maybe another year, rather than chasing it. But Aston Villa are a really big club. At the time, Premier League clubs weren’t paying big money for Championship players. It was hard to say no.

“There’s always been this group of players who seem too good for the Championship but aren’t certain of being good enough for the Premier League. People said that about (Aleksandr) Mitrovic and I’d maybe include Billy Sharp, too. I felt like I was the same but my form was so good for Fulham that I felt I was ready to give the Premier League a crack and I thought Villa would get me there. I kind of knew that I was only going to make it by being promoted.”

Fulham finished 17th in his first season and 20th in his second. Villa had been relegated from the Premier League in 2016 and the prospect of joining them was seductive. That summer, a deal was done for £15million. McCormack left London for Birmingham. As he looks back now, it is the one decision he wishes he hadn’t taken. “That move knocked the stuffing out of me in every way,” he says. “It made me feel like I didn’t want to play anymore.”

There are aspects of his time at Villa, or situations in that time, McCormack still does not want to speak about. He intends to at some stage, but for now, there is some of it he prefers to hold back.

Villa, as a transfer, was an unmitigated failure. McCormack started 13 games in three years and spent as much time away from Villa Park as he did inside it. Roberto Di Matteo was manager when McCormack signed but, like Magath, did not last for long. Steve Bruce replaced him and neither Bruce nor McCormack would pretend that the relationship they developed was a good or healthy one.

“It got personal between us,” McCormack says. “But the thing is, I was excited when he first came in. I’d been told he’d tried to sign me before at Birmingham. He played two up front and I thought everything would be sweet. I was looking forward to it.”

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What McCormack has not revealed before is that he suffered from depression from an early stage at Villa, caused by events in his personal life. He feels he could have been given more and better support. He points to a tweet published by Villa’s former owner, Tony Xia, which read: “Have talked to Ross. It’s hard to go through the difficulty (sic) time in personal life but we all have2take whatever 2become a real MAN! Stand up!”. McCormack denies that Xia spoke to him personally and did not appreciate the ‘real man’ remark.

Have talked to Ross.It's hard to go through the difficulty time in personal life but we all have2take whatever 2become a real MAN!Stand up!

— Dr. Tony Xia (@Dr_TonyXia) January 22, 2017

As time passed and the move turned sour, with McCormack on the periphery and mostly spoken about negatively, he became “like a recluse and totally lacking confidence”. “In every walk of life, I was struggling,” he says. “For two years I was scared to go to a gym because I felt like everyone was staring at me. I didn’t want to leave the house because my confidence was low and if I did leave the house, I usually got drunk to make me more able to speak to people. It was a disaster. I just kept thinking ‘If you don’t want me (at Villa), get rid of me.'”

An increasingly tense relationship between Bruce and McCormack came to a head spectacularly in January 2017 when Bruce told the media that McCormack had been dropped for missing training because his driveway gate jammed and he could not drive to work. Bruce suggested McCormack had missed other training sessions without permission, too, something McCormack disputes. “The gate story is a true one, though,” McCormack says. “I don’t apologise for it.”

McCormack was renting a house owned by Joe Bennett, Villa’s left-back. His version of events is that for several weeks, he had been using a manual override to open the gate because the automatic mechanism was broken. On the morning he missed training, the manual override failed, too. McCormack’s car was stuck. Bruce’s attitude was that the forward could have climbed over the fence and ordered a taxi. “Someone told me Bruce drove round and took a photo of the gate to prove a point about how small it was – though I’ve no idea if that’s true or not,” McCormack says. Bruce accused McCormack of being out of shape and vowed not to pick him “until his attitude improves”.

“The way it worked at Villa, if you had a problem in the morning you called the doctor,” McCormack says. “I rang in and said: ‘Listen, I’ll make it, but I’ll be running a bit later than usual’. He just asked me to keep them up to date.

“I was expecting someone to come and let me out quickly but they were late getting there so eventually, about 10.20am, I could see I wasn’t going to make it. The manager went off his head.” Several years later, and by pure coincidence, McCormack was driving out of the garage at a different Birmingham apartment. A man was fixing the shutter at the entrance and tapped on the window. It was the same engineer who had turned up to get him off the driveway.

The tale of the gate went around the news cycle for a while. McCormack departed on loan to Forest but that opportunity ended early. Reports claimed he had failed to appear for training after injuring an Achilles. Villa did not want him back, so in the meantime, he went to Glasgow for an operation to remove cysts in his mouth. He says that on the night he drove back to Villa, he was attacked by three men on his driveway and had his watch and wedding ring stolen.

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“Luckily, a woman over the road was watching and called the police straight away, so that got rid of them,” he says. “The guys didn’t get in the house but they wanted my car, any cash I had, my ring and my watch. I couldn’t help feeling that the reason it happened was because my house and that gate was in the papers every day for ages. It wasn’t difficult to work out where I lived, it was like an invitation for people who would do that.”

The solution to dealing with an out-of-favour McCormack was often to shift him elsewhere. At the start of the 2017-18 season, Villa loaned him to Melbourne City in Australia. He liked it there and scored goals regularly, 14 in half a season. But the transfer did not stretch to the end of the Australian campaign and Villa refused an offer from Melbourne City to keep him for longer, them only offering a small amount of money because of wage cap restrictions. “I loved it in Melbourne,” McCormack says. “Playing there and scoring goals made me feel like I could do it again, but Villa called me back and the message I got was that I’d be integrated into the first team again.

“I was happy with that, all good. But then I got home, went in on day one and was training with the under-18s. A waste of time. And because I’d played for Villa in the League Cup, I wasn’t able to sign for a third club that season, so I didn’t play at all.”

Villa were in contention for promotion in the 2017-18 season and towards the end of it, stories began to run saying McCormack — despite having no involvement in any of their Championship games — would receive a £1million bonus if the club went up. What he says is that his deal promised him a pay rise had Villa jumped from the Championship to the Premier League. “It’s pretty much standard. It might not sound right but it’s how it goes. Loads of players have that in their contracts,” he says.

The relationship had long been doomed, chequered by his total lack of impact, the narrative around him and questions about his fitness. “I don’t accept my fitness was a problem,” he says. “‘A fit young man’ the manager called me when he wanted me to climb over that gate. Throughout my career, my weight and physique probably made me look less fit than I was. Could I have been fitter? Of course, I’ll admit that. But I was fit enough and I did what I should have been doing.”

In the close season of 2019, with bridges burned, he and Villa agreed to tear up his contract a year early by mutual consent. A statement from Villa wished McCormack “well for the future”. “We should have done it sooner,” McCormack says, and very few people would argue with that.

Club statement: Ross McCormack

👉 #AVFC

— Aston Villa (@AVFCOfficial) June 3, 2019

McCormack’s penultimate loan from Villa, with Australian side Central Coast Mariners, gave him an unexpected memory. Out of the blue, the club handed a trial to 100m and 200m world record-holder Usain Bolt, the charismatic and unrivalled sprinter who fancied himself as a footballer. The trial came to nothing but McCormack laid on an assist for Bolt’s first goal in a friendly in 2018. “It’s a little claim to fame,” McCormack says.

Here it is, @usainbolt, the footballer, scores his maiden Mariners goal. What a moment! Don't think limits! ⚡️ #SWSvCCM #CCMFC 🎥@FOXFOOTBALL

— Central Coast Mariners (@CCMariners) October 12, 2018

Was Bolt any good, though? McCormack laughs. “Erm, not as good as he thought he was,” he says. “But he was a lovely guy, really down to earth. And a massive star, too. I’d been at clubs where the biggest players get a hard time when it comes to always having to sign autographs and deal with attention. Barry Ferguson at Rangers was one of those.

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“But with (Bolt), we’d walk down the road for lunch and as we went, everyone, and I mean everyone, would cross the road and start following us. By the time we got where we were going, we’d have this massive crowd behind us. It was ridiculous. The way he was, he didn’t like it, but he didn’t not like it either. He just realised the attention came with being who he was.

“You know what, though? His pace was basically useless in football terms. He’d say that himself. He takes 30 to 40 yards to get up to full speed and you don’t really get that space on a football pitch. But there was one drill where he was crossing the ball from the left and someone overhit a pass to him. He opened up to catch it and my reaction was ‘Jesus Christ’. You couldn’t see his legs. It was like a blur, like a cartoon. He was a top guy.”

It was one of the happier moments in the back end of a career which ended quietly and off the beaten track. McCormack’s last transfer was to Aldershot as a free agent in 2020, a descent into non-League. His Achilles tendons were bothering him and he felt the attention on him at Villa “had put clubs off signing me”. He played twice as a substitute for Aldershot and on his second appearance, on October 17, 2020, he completed 24 minutes before leaving the field injured. He has never appeared since.

Retirement did not scare McCormack and his time since Aldershot has been spent pursuing business ideas. He wanted to build a football centre on Gelderd Road, close to Leeds’ Elland Road stadium, but could not reach an agreement for a piece of land with Leeds City Council. His latest venture is the launch of Feature Walls UK, a company that does what it says on the tin by designing and installing specialist feature walls.

It was not necessarily his plan to be an ex-professional by the age of 36, but McCormack knew that once he was done, life would take him away into different fields. All the same, he has been talking to minor clubs about the possibility of playing in the local leagues around Leeds next season, for fun more than anything. “There’d probably be no money in it,” he says. “But I think I’ll do it. Training Tuesday night, playing Saturday — my Achilles can take that. But training all week and then playing? No chance.”

I tell him I’ll come and watch his first game, to see how he copes with non-League centre-backs and to see if that finishing touch is still there. McCormack in West Yorkshire’s local leagues would be quite the spectacle. “Aye,” he says. “Just don’t expect a hat-trick.”

(Top photo: Richard Sellers/PA Images via Getty Images)