When a 22-year-old Michael Owen won the Ballon d’Or, the highest individual accolade in world football, in 2001, he was one of Britain’s most famous faces. Still slight of frame and boyish of face, the public watched as he moved from Liverpool to Real Madrid, precipitating the slow, tempered decline of his career. Gradually, his celebrity was superseded by contemporaries like Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard.
Now a new Amazon documentary series, Meet the Owens, takes us deep into the banal afterlife of the former England striker. They live with their four children: Love Island star Gemma, daughters Emily and Jessica, and a son, James, who has a degenerative sight condition. But aside from scenes of domestic harmony (there is a three-minute sequence showing Michael and his sprogs decorating a Christmas tree), the main focus of Meet the Owens is on Manor House, a Cheshire stables owned by the family.
The whole family buys into this: Jessica is an aspiring showjumper, while Gemma gamely signs up to be a jockey at a women’s only charity race at Goodwood. Who on earth is this show for? Michael Owen is most famous as a footballer, yet the show is very light on reflections on his playing days or involvement in the modern game.
Cameos from the likes of Rooney and Jamie Carragher feel like non-sequiturs. He confesses that his career as a matchday co-commentator was scuppered by his inability to pretend to care about matches like West Ham v Burnley, yet his enthusiasm for horseracing shines through. There is a world, then, where Meet the Owens deploys the Clarkson’s Farm template for equestrianism, yet the access behind the scenes at the stables is limited.
We see Michael drop a quarter of a million pounds on new horses at an auction. This is the sort of confusing conflation of personal and business expenses that Clarkson’s Farm skilfully navigated. And then there’s the presence of Gemma (“a female version of me,” according to her dad) who entered the Love Island villa as a 19-year-old, finished as runner-up and has gone on to amass 1.6 million Instagram followers (her father only has 513k, to his shame).
Perhaps Amazon is hoping that she will be able to convert some of that audience to this show. Young women searching for the glamour of House Kardashian, mixed with a bit of Northern charm and point-to-point plumminess. If those viewers do give Meet the Owens a chance, they might find themselves somewhat alarmed by how much of the action is given over to her dad, a self-described “boring prick”.
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