Robbie Fowler has admitted that he never got along with the late former Liverpool manager Gerard Houllier.
Houllier was a superb manager across six years with Liverpool. Having famously won a treble in 2001, the Frenchman was loved at Anfield and is sorely missed since his passing away in 2020.
But according to Fowler, the two of them ‘never got on’ as player and manager. Speaking on the Up Front with Simon Jordan podcast, the legendary Reds striker detailed his strained relationship with Houllier.
“What I would tell you about Gerard Houllier is that he never played me so I disliked him for that,” claimed the 48-year-old. “I never got on well with him.
“But that doesn’t mean that I disked him as a person or a manager. I genuinely thought what he brought to Liverpool was brilliant. We spoke about Graeme Souness in terms of how he changed the lifestyle and culture of that Liverpool team. Houllier did the same. That was probably hard for me to adapt to.
“He tried to sell me but Gerard Houllier genuinely was a nice man. I did fall out with him. But I fell out with every manager I ever played with. That was me.”
Fowler recalls Houllier spat
Fowler’s Liverpool career is a really funny one to analyse. Although he was only 23 when Houllier was appointed, he’d already scored 129 goals for the Reds. Unbeknown to Fowler at the time though, his best days at Anfield were already behind him.
Perhaps it was simply a case of playing too much football at a young age, but Robbie could never quite recapture the form of his younger years once Houllier arrived.
If you ask him, it sounds like he’d say that was down to a lack of playing time. And maybe it was. But there is obviously regret from him that things didn’t end the way he wanted at his boyhood club.
In the end, Houllier did ultimately sell Fowler. Having been phased out during the 2001/02 season, the striker eventually left for Leeds United that summer.
From there, Fowler could never quite find his scoring boots fully, with his stint at Elland Road and a later one at Manchester City failing to ever really get going.
That isn’t to say he wasn’t a wonderful player for Liverpool, because he absolutely was. Records that Fowler set 20 some years ago are only just falling now courtesy of Mohamed Salah.
His 183 goals for the Reds after coming through the academy will always and forever make him a Reds legend.
But things could quite clearly have headed in a different direction during his later years at the club. Fowler obviously looks to Houllier as potentially the man to blame for that.
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