Liverpool highs: “I don’t think the world has seen team spirit like it.” Liverpool highs: “I don’t think the world has seen team spirit like it.”
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You’ve been spruiking your clinics for 20 years to various football bodies. Everyone always says no. It’s cost you millions of pounds, bankrupted you. Why?

Simple answer: it was ahead of its time. It was a visionary project. And I always was ahead of my time.

Why spend your own money on it, though? You didn’t think to get financial backers? 

Money’s not the issue. Timing and common sense was the issue.

So why doesn’t the FFA pick it up and run with it?

In any sporting organisation you’ve got conflicts with technical departments and commercial partners. One of the reasons it hasn’t worked in the past is because commercial partners have said that what I do makes their programs look silly, therefore they can’t let it through. Governing bodies listen to sponsors because they pay the bills. So you’re locked into the politics of sport.

Why not get on board with the sponsors? Make it the Coca-Cola Craig Johnston Academy?

Ah mate, I can’t get into it.

You were bankrupt and reportedly homeless, yet you were once a millionaire player, feted by millions, living the dream. To be then living in a mate’s spare room – how low did you get?

Without dramatising it, as low as you can go. You don’t have a house, you don’t have a car. All the things you’ve worked for all your life … I invested my money in a grassroots program and people who said they’d back me didn’t for political reasons. I don’t need to say how low, but it’s as low as a bloke can go.

What dragged you out?

Ultimately it’s your friends and family and the things that are really important. I’d never failed before, basically. So recognising that it was all over was very tough. I walked away from the game and what I was doing and the thing I focused on, forgive the pun, was photography. I wandered the streets for a year. I forgot about the person I was because none of that was important any more. All the football business … now I was just a bloke. Photography had always been a love and a passion, and something that I’ve always done since I was 14. My first three or four wage cheques I earned as an apprentice with Middlesbrough I spent on a camera. Years later, at my lowest point, all of a sudden, all this pressure and the desire to achieve … it was gone. Everything I’d ever earned and built. I had nothing but this little camera that somehow the bailiff didn’t get.