McCormack, Leeds’ captain at the time, was soon in the middle of the mayhem. McDermott and Massimo Cellino (Photo: Tony Marshall/PA Images via Getty Images) “I don’t think you captain clubs like Leeds and Fulham by being a bad egg,” he says. He captained both clubs, too, and narrowly missed out on the EFL’s Championship player of the year prize in two different years. 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. 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. But we’re in the Village Hotel in Leeds and he’s willing to speak now, to recall those days as he saw them. “My attitude was that I’d wait until I was done,” he says. With hindsight, he wishes he had fought his corner there and then, to say his piece when it mattered. 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. 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. It’s the most contact he has with the sport. His eldest son, Layton, is in the under-12s squad at Crystal Palace. He no longer drinks much and is happy away from football. 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. “But people who really knew me as a player would tell you that the way I was made to look wasn’t me. “There’s this perception of me,” McCormack says. ![]() He attributes that to his three years at Aston Villa, a miserable period which cast him as a problem. ![]() But he admits that when people remember him now, they regard him as trouble or “a bad egg”, a footballer whose vibes were toxic. Minus those goals, the club would probably have been relegated from the Championship. 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. “I always said that once I finished, I’d be finished,” he says. He has a new business, designing and installing feature walls, and does not sound like he pines for the sport. He is off the footballing radar and as good as retired at 36, with Achilles tendons that cannot cope with a full training week. McCormack hasn’t changed a lot, which is good to know because for a little while he hasn’t been seen much either.
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