The soft side of football's hardest man: In a remarkable five-part podcast the tears flow as Graeme Souness opens up about his brush with death at 38, the sick little girl who inspired his Channel swim - and the one regret that still haunts him

Graeme Souness is 71 — at that age where too many friends are departing for that great football stadium in the sky.

‘I’ve lost a few recently,’ he says, referencing fellow footie legends Trevor Francis and Gianluca Vialli, who both died last year, hitting him hard. ‘I have a few others who have dementia.’

He may appear hale and hearty, but who can tell? This is, after all, a man who had a triple bypass aged just 38, when he thought he was in peak fitness.

He takes nothing for granted. ‘Nothing brings it home to you about how fragile life is like looking in the mirror and saying to yourself, “You are not so special after all, are you, son?”

‘After my operation I remember sitting in a shower and being washed by a nurse. I didn’t even have the strength to lift my own arms. She was great. She wasn’t letting me get away with feeling sorry for myself and she made me laugh about it, but that’s a moment you don’t forget.

‘One minute, you’re on top of the world, loving life, walking into a room having won the European Cup and with a Miss World as your date, and then… well, you realise that you are not so special.

‘However cocky you are — and someone once said about me, “if Souness was a bar of chocolate he would eat himself”, and there was some truth to that — you can’t escape the reality. Life is fragile and unpredictable.’

Today the hair (always Souness’s pride and joy, but he insists ‘can you clarify that I never had a perm’) is getting whiter by the year. ‘The way I see it, I’m standing on a railway line, looking into a tunnel and I can hear something coming — but I’ve no idea what it is.’

Who knew the hard man of British football — almost as famous for throwing punches and rubbing people up the wrong way as for his skills on the pitch — had become such a philosopher? He chuckles, though, at a recent ‘altercation’ with one of his footie pals who seemed to have been next on the list to depart.

He and Alan Hansen — fellow Scots, fellow Liverpool FC legends — go back a long way, on and off the pitch, and he tells me that when he heard from Hansen’s wife that he was in a bad way, he feared the worst. I was actually in touch with her, calling her on Alan’s phone — he’s saved in my phone as Big Al — but this particular day I was on a train in Germany.

‘I was trying to find my seat when my phone rang and Big Al came up. I thought it was the call I’d been dreading, from his wife.

‘I couldn’t answer. Didn’t want to hear it. I sat there, then plucked up the courage to call back. And Big Al himself answered! He was giving me dogs abuse for my punditry. I have never been so relieved to hear him tell me to eff off.’

Souness is in a reflective mood today, having recorded a podcast about his life story for the Daily Mail’s Everything I Know About Me series. Listening to it is like throwing yourself into a ‘Who’s Who’ of football, the span of his career meaning that football icons like Bob Paisley and Jack Charlton come to life as he talks.

And what a rollicking life it has been. How fruity the language was in dressing rooms, back in the day, how un-PC the atmosphere. And what a lot of baths, communal or otherwise!

There are stories about sharing a room with a young Kenny Dalglish (who wrongly thought Souness was gay because he unpacked a hairdryer) and a communal bath with the giant that was Charlton (this is a hair-related anecdote too — Charlton, who was using ‘red carbolic soap’ to scrub himself down, took a dim view of the young Souness’s two-step shampoo and conditioner routine).

In between there are tales about punch-ups and plaudits, triumphs and tragedies. Lots of death too, among the high living.

Today he gets a little choked talking about being there when the late great Jock Stein, manager of Celtic, collapsed and died ‘on the job’, with Souness watching through the doors as the team doctor tried to revive him. Every Souness anecdote starts something like, ‘We’d just won the European Cup’, or ‘we were 2-1 up against Leeds’), but this one ends with him weeping. ‘A great man,’ he concludes.

Ditto the late Joe Fagan, another old-school mentor, and his one-time boss at Liverpool. The tissues come out again when Souness remembers being on a team bus, aged 31, having been told his mother would not survive the night. ‘We were playing Southampton and I’d got off at Oxford to call my brother from a payphone. He said she wasn’t going to make it. I got on and Joe Fagan gave me hell for being late back on the bus. “Who do you think you are, holding everyone up?”

‘I didn’t say a word and went and sat down, but someone told Fagan. That man came and put his arm around me and sat like that all the way from Oxford to Southampton. That was the mark of the man.’

What’s a little surprisingy, given that Souness typifies a certain era (‘people can call me a dinosaur if they want,’ he shrugs) is to hear him talk in very modern touchy-feely terms about the peaks and troughs of his life. Has he gone soft?

At some stages he almost depicts that life as a ‘gam of two halves’, with his heart bypass in 1991 — and the feelings of fragility that came with it — as half-time.

‘I’ve never been so scared before or since as I was when I was alone in that intensive care unit,’ he says, taking himself back to perhaps his most vulnerable time. ‘The night light was on and I was looking up at the clock on the wall telling myself not to go to to sleep now, because this is how people die. And I think they do warn you now, but they didn’t then, that you can have some big psychological issues after. I certainly did. For no reason at all I’d just have tears streaming down my face.’

Looking back, how did that brush with death change him? ‘I did emerge from that determined to change my life, to become a better person. I probably was… for about half a day.

‘I liken it to being on one of those driver awareness courses. You do them and think, “bloody hell, that was hard-hitting” and resolve to drive sensibly. Until you revert to your old ways.’

Quite how you regard Souness probably depends on what age you are and what football team you support. To some he is one of the all-conquering heroes of British football, part of the Liverpool team that won five league titles and three European Cups in the late 70s and early 80s.

He reckons he’s won 33 trophies in his career (‘11 of those as a manager’) and followed his playing and managerial careers with a third one, as a TV pundit. But controversy always stalked him.

He received death threats and Special Branch protection when, after being appointed manager of Rangers in 1986, he signed the Catholic Mo Johnston to the famously Protestant team. It’s a chapter of his life that reads like madness now. Yet some in the tribal West Coast of Scotland still wish him ill because of it.

‘I have no regrets there,’ he says. ‘I grew up in Edinburgh, where religion had never mattered. I was married to a Catholic at the time. I signed Maurice Johnston because it was the right thing to do for the team. No regrets.’

There are regrets about other chapters, though. Some on Merseyside can still never forgive him for giving an interview to The Sun about his heart op. In the aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy the paper was reviled in the city, for alleging fans were responsible. He was the manager of the team then. It was a grave error of judgment and today he acknowledges he handled it badly. ‘I should have resigned,’ he says. ‘I’ll keep apologising for the rest of my life.’

Souness’s bolshie approach — to football, to life — appears hardwired. He reckons it made him a good footballer, but a somewhat flawed manager.

Today he offers a mea culpa, of sorts, sounding a bit Frank Sintra when he says: ‘I lived my life but I did it my way. It’s taken me until my 70s to be able to look back on my life and think, “I shouldn’t have been so confrontational”,’ he tells me.

‘I’ve done well but I could have done better if I’d played the game better. If I’d been cuter, given a bit more thought to the fact that people aren’t necessarily passionate about the same things.’

Souness is old-school. He describes himself as a ‘prefab kid who grew up on a council estate in Edinburgh’. His life could have gone in a different direction ‘because, let’s be honest, council estate kids don’t always achieve what they could in life’, but when football came calling, his mum willingly sent him off. ‘Madness now. I was living in London at 15. I can’t imagine any of my kids doing that, but my mum wanted the best for me. She wanted that opportunity.’

An early disappointment seems to still rankle. He had been cock-a-hoop to be signed by Spurs, but his dream seemed over before it began when he was found lacking and sold for £30,000. He almost spits out the figure. ‘I was worth more and I knew it.’ It still hurts? ‘F**k, yes.’ But it spurred him on too. ‘I had something to prove then. I knew I was good — and they were going to know it too.’

His has been the sort of life they make movies about. He won’t be drawn too much on the Miss World-on-his-arm chapter (for the record, it was Mary Stavin, who went on to date George Best). ‘My wife will read this!’ he objects, but we can safely say that he lived up to the reputation that all footballers had at the time.

‘I was living every young man’s dream. Winning the European Cup, and walking into the celebrations after with a Miss World on my arm. Of course!’

His first marriage, to millionaire’s daughter Danielle Wilson, floundered after eight years.

I ask if you can be a good footballer and a good husband and father, and he can’t quite answer.

‘You have to be arrogant, to a point, to be a professional sportsman and that does affect the people around you. People get hurt.

‘I had a very stable upbringing and it underpins everything I went on to achieve, but my three children from my first marriage didn’t have that.

‘When I met Karen [his second wife of 30 years] she had also been through a divorce and had two children from her previous marriage. It’s only James, the son we have together, who hasn’t been through that.’

He and Karen had only been together for three weeks when he was told by doctors that he needed his heart bypass. He can’t quite believe she didn’t walk out on him there and then.

‘I was this guy in peak condition. We had literally only been seeing each other for a few weeks when I had to say: “Listen I won’t see you for a few days. I have to have open heart surgery”. I could see her thinking “really?”’

Karen, 64, was there for his recovery, giving him strength (apart from the moment where, after his wound became infected and he needed a second operation, she slid down the wall mid-faint) and has been ever since.

Hilariously, it is Karen we can credit with the removal of that famous Souness moustache. It is still famous in its own right (it even has its own X account) but it was no more after Karen declared she hated it.

‘She said, “I don’t like it. Get it off”, and so I did.’

When was this? Again, he charts his life not in years but in football teams. ‘I think I would have been at Blackburn.’

In the wider sense, how has she changed his life? ‘How do I put in to words what she has meant? Well I loved her from the day I met her and I’m still loved up now. I’m punching. I think the secret, if there is one, is that she keeps me on an extremely tight leash.

‘She doesn’t take any of my nonsense. She stands up to me. And she has Irish blood, so I don’t push it.

‘These days, I only pick fights I can win.’

Listen to Graeme on the Mail's spellbinding podcast Everything I Know About Me — find it on Apple or Spotify