Andre Ayew: ‘The King’ of Swansea talks promotion, his £80k wages, football family and why Partey will be ‘massive’

“If I don’t give everything that I have, I won’t be at peace with myself. And if I’m not at peace with myself, then I won’t be happy.”

On a typically wet afternoon in Swansea, Andre Ayew has been talking candidly for more than an hour, happy to answer questions on anything and everything, from his wages — he is the highest-paid player in the Championship and out of contract this summer — to the perception, or misconception as it turns out, that playing in the second tier of English football would be beneath him.

By the time we finish, the Ghana captain has even watched footage of one of his Swansea team-mates wiping a tear from his eye following a conversation between the two of them earlier this season about the pain of relegation. Asked whether he remembers that chat, Ayew replies, “Like it was yesterday.”

Aged 31, Ayew’s influence at Swansea is hard to overstate. With a CV that includes goals in the Champions League and World Cup finals, he has been there and done it and it is easy to understand why the rest of the Swansea players have taken to calling him “The King” — a moniker that prompts him to break into laughter when asked to confirm whether it is true. “Yes, that happens,” Ayew says, grinning. “It touches me because it shows you’re doing what you have to do.

“For me, being in this squad has been marvellous. A lot of people, whether family or friends, say, ‘Why are you staying in the Championship?’. After my first year with Steve Cooper (the head coach) and this squad of players, I really felt something special here in my inner self and also with what we can achieve.”

Ayew’s regal presence was there for all to see at Oakwell on Monday night, when his wonderful goal provided a rare moment of beauty in the ugliest of matches. It was his 17th of the season and means that the Welsh club go into the second leg of their Championship play-off semi-final against Barnsley on Saturday with a narrow lead. It also underlined just how important Ayew is to this Swansea side.

The top scorer for the last two seasons despite not playing as an out-and-out centre forward, Ayew is Swansea’s talisman, the figurehead of the team and, as that trademark left-footed goal against Barnsley showed, the one player capable of altering the course of a game with a piece of individual brilliance.

“I can’t hide behind anything,” Ayew says, listening to that description of him. “It’s fact. It is what it is. These words that you’ve used, to me it’s good and it’s great because it means that I’ve worked hard to earn that. So I sense a lot of trust, not only from the club, from the manager, from the players, etc, but also from the fans and that gives me a lot of strength, a lot of belief, a lot of responsibility to deliver.”

As the older brother of the Crystal Palace striker Jordan and the son of Abedi Pele, who won the Champions League with Marseille and is widely regarded as one of the greatest African players of all time, football has consumed Ayew for as long as he can remember. Ibrahim, his other brother, has also played for Ghana. “My whole family, football made us,” Ayew says, smiling.

There is a lot more to that line than meets the eye. “I know where my dad comes from, and when I went to see where my dad was sleeping when he was young, I cried,” he says. “I know how much he has worked to get to that level, to be able to provide for us. And not just provide being able to go to school and to be able to eat; provide to be able to have a very good life.

“So when you go from that and you see what he’s been through, you can’t give up. You can’t take things for granted. And I can’t take football for granted, because football is everything that we’ve had. If we have a life today, if we are a big football family in Africa, or however people want to put it, it’s because of football. So if I don’t respect the game and give everything that I have to what has provided for my whole family for the past 30 or 40 years, then I would be very stupid.”

That answer comes on the back of a wider discussion about Ayew’s £80,000-a-week salary — a legacy of his £18 million club-record transfer from West Ham three and a half years ago — and his unwavering commitment on the pitch at Swansea over the past two seasons, which has surprised a few people.

Neil Warnock commented on both a couple of months ago when the Middlesbrough manager suggested that he would need to set up a “GoFundMe” page if they wanted to sign Ayew on a free transfer in the summer, while also praising the Swansea forward for his “brilliant attitude” in the Championship.

Ayew reflects on all of that kind of talk matter-of-factly. “When managers or people speak about money, when you look at football it’s a sport where when you do your job very well, you get paid more as the years go — it’s the same as a journalist, it’s natural,” he says.

“If you get to that stage, and when I look at what I’ve done, I can’t be sitting down and saying I’m earning too much money. No. Because I’m working hard and I’m doing everything to deserve what I get. And I don’t play football and think about the money that’s coming. I play because I want to win.

“Anything I do on the pitch is because I love the game, because I love the jersey I’m wearing, a Swansea shirt, and that is also something important because if you’re somewhere and you’re not happy and you don’t love it, you don’t have the same connection, the same answers to difficult periods. I feel that I’m happy here, and I give everything that I have.

“When you give, they (the supporters) appreciate what you’re doing. And that makes you always want to do more. Like my first thought this season was, ‘OK, last season in the league I had 15 goals. Can I get more this season?’. So I was able to get 16 in the league (before the play-offs). I’ve got one more. I should have got a few more, to be honest!”

Ayew starts laughing after that last comment but there is a serious point that he wants to make. “I’m very hard on myself because I know what I can do, the way I can deliver, so I try to always give myself high targets. I think if you don’t see that your dream is maybe impossible, then maybe your dream is not big enough. That’s how I see it, that’s what I put into the game, and that’s why I’ve put my life into it.”

Ayew’s eyes light up when the word “legend” is mentioned in relation to his father. “A big legend,” he says, his face beaming. “We’re proud of it. He’s not just someone who had a great career; it goes beyond that. And not just in Ghana, but all of Africa and in the world. I saw it, I felt it. And even now, anytime that there are big meetings, big players, they always call him.

“What he did was incredible and when I look back at all the games he’s played, even when I was younger and the games I don’t really remember, like when they won the Champions League at Marseille… what a player. Three times the best in Africa.”

His father’s success with Marseille, where he played alongside Jean-Pierre Papin and Chris Waddle and was later part of the team that won the 1993 Champions League final against a Milan side that featured Marco van Basten, Franco Baresi, Frank Rijkaard and Paolo Maldini, made him a trailblazer for African footballers.

“There was a generation of players, like him and George Weah, and they paved the way to the highest level,” Ayew adds. “There were African players before them, but they didn’t really make it the way those two made it to really open the door for the rest. Then you have the (Samuel) Eto’os and the Didiers (Drogba) and all of them who came over to that kind of level.

“And just imagine how difficult it was then with all this racism that was happening. Now we’re trying to fight it but imagine back then how they had to deal with it. So, for me, I respect so much what he has done in the game and I’m very proud of what he is, because he’s my idol on the pitch and especially off the pitch. As a man, as a father, I take everything from him.

“He’s gone through so many things in his life, from real poverty where there’s no food and he goes days without eating, to the place where there’s more than enough. So the journey was very long. I hope that I can follow in those footsteps, especially as a man, more than even on the pitch.”

On the field, Ayew started treading that path from the moment that he joined Marseille. He spent eight years with the French club, from 2007 to 2015, and that period shaped him in so many ways. He talks about the influence of some of the big personalities that he featured alongside, including Samir Nasri, Steve Mandanda and Mamadou Niang, and how Gabriel Heinze in particular “put an arm around me”.

Ayew was learning about himself as a footballer at that time but he was also discovering what it means to play for a club where there is a winning culture — something that became ingrained in him to such an extent that he has never forgotten how strange it felt to walk into the visitors’ dressing room at Watford after he suffered his first defeat as a Swansea player and to see the reaction of his team-mates.

For some context, it was September 2015 and Ayew was in his first spell at Swansea, after joining the club on a free transfer from Marseille that summer. Swansea had started the season brightly, picking up eight points from four matches, including drawing at Chelsea and beating Manchester United. They were fourth in the table and Ayew, who had won the Premier League’s player of the month award for August, was clearly not prepared for what happened next.

“At Marseille, you always have to win, there is no excuse. Even in the academy, it was already the mentality,” he says. “I remember our first loss here after I came, it was after we played Man U, and the players go into the dressing room and all calm down. ‘Let’s go and prepare for next week’. I was like, ‘Fucking hell!’”

Ayew picks up on the smile on my face. “Honest to God,” he says, shaking his head and laughing with a sense of bewilderment. “At Marseille it was the end of the world for three days after you lost a game. So I was thinking, ‘What’s going on here? How can you lose and come in and everyone is calm?’. OK, no one was happy. But when you are at those clubs with big players who are used to winning, they don’t accept defeat.”

Ayew is now at a stage of his career where the master and pupil roles have reversed. With all his experience in the game, he is setting the standards and passing on advice to others. The day before we speak, one of the senior coaching staff recalls a match at Middlesbrough in December, when Ayew spent a long time afterwards with Viktor Gyokeres, the 22-year-old Swedish striker who was on loan from Brighton, going through a difficult time and devastated with being at fault for the second goal in a 2-1 defeat.

“That is part of my duty,” Ayew says. “Staff or managers can’t control everything in the team, that’s what I believe. There are some things in the dressing room that can only be controlled by the players. That’s why I’m here. That’s why Wayne (Routledge) is here, that’s why Kyle (Naughton) is here, for certain moments. Not when it’s good. When it’s difficult you need people and you want people, because we’ve been through it.

“I think it’s normal for me to be able to help out the younger ones who really have quality and who want to succeed. Talking to a younger player, or trying to help a younger player who wants to make it, who is willing, is different from someone who doesn’t care. So when you know that people care, you also give more to help the person.”

A video of an interview that Connor Roberts gave earlier in the season pops on the screen. “I was sitting with Andre the other day and we agreed that there is something inside of us, we both played in that game where we lost against Southampton…” Roberts’s voice cracks with emotion and trails off.

The Swansea defender apologises as he pauses to wipe his eyes. “I’m nearly crying here,” Roberts adds. “It was a terrible, terrible night. We lost and it pretty much sealed that we were going down, and I said to him (Ayew), ‘Imagine the feeling if we got promoted and we could say that we are still here’. We came down to the Championship, we love this club and we love playing for this club. We brought us down and then we could take us up and contribute to that — that would be some achievement.”

For the first time since we have been talking, the expression on Ayew’s face hardens as he listens to Roberts and sees photos of himself in the background being consoled at the final whistle of that Southampton game in 2018. Asked for his thoughts, Ayew replies in a sombre voice, “Connor said it all. It was a very difficult moment. I never experienced that in my career. I’ve always played high in the table or to win trophies. And getting that feeling (relegation) was a feeling that I never wanted to have, so it taught me a lot. I saw how the fans were down, how the city was down.

“It was a difficult period. I think a lot of people underestimate how the players feel when things go badly, and how it can get into you. But, like Connor said, we spoke about it that day (earlier this season) and we both said we have to give everything that we have to at least not have any regrets, to at least know that we put all in it to try and get the club back in the Premier League.”

That Ayew is still around to be able to try to shape that narrative is something that nobody at Swansea could have imagined three years ago. Swansea had re-signed Ayew from West Ham in January 2018 in the hope that he would help to keep them in the Premier League. Four months later they were desperate to sell him to fill a huge financial black hole in the wake of relegation. In the end, Ayew moved to Fenerbahce on a season-long loan.

That meant that Swansea were in the same predicament the following summer, when Ayew returned to the club and Cooper replaced Graham Potter as manager. Ayew simply had to be sold — that was the constant message inside the club. Yet by the time the season started, he was still at Swansea and ended up coming off the bench to turn around a Carabao Cup tie against Northampton. It felt like a farewell appearance and no more than that. After all, how could Swansea afford to keep him? And why would Ayew want to play in the Championship?

Eight days later, Ayew started a league game for Swansea for the first time in 15 months. Ayew listens as I tell him a personal story about being in the away end at QPR that night, watching him set up two goals for Swansea in a 3-1 victory and telling my son not to get excited and that it would be a waste of time for him to have Ayew’s name on the back of his shirt because he would be gone. Because Ayew wouldn’t be motivated by playing at that level. Because Ayew wouldn’t want to play for Swansea.

Ayew smiles as I hold my hands up and accept that I got it all wrong. “I think there’s a lot that plays a part — we have to be honest,” he says. “Coming back, I didn’t think I would have stayed at the start. I had other offers for the Premier League, for Ligue 1, for Serie A etc. Then I came in, trained a few days with the gaffer, had long talks with him, played the first cup game that season against Northampton… that day changed a lot.”

There is a pause as Ayew thinks about what he is going to say next and then rewinds for a moment. “When we went down there were a lot of things that were said,” he adds. “I came back from West Ham and I was injured. And I came back early from the injury, because I didn’t even play the first few games when I came back. I didn’t get a goal for about 10 games. I won’t say I didn’t play well; that’s not true. But everybody was expecting ‘Andre to come and keep the club up’ — that’s a fact and I don’t hide from that responsibility.

“I was quite unlucky when I came — the plan that (Carlos) Carvalhal (the manager) had was to put me (Wilfried) Bony and Jordan (Ayew) up front. Bony did his ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) the day after I signed, Leroy (Fer) did his achilles, and Jordan got a red card and was out for three games. So all of a sudden your strike-force has gone. Sometimes things happen in a way that you just don’t understand. But I took the responsibility (of relegation) personally. I know it’s a squad game but I took it.

“So, coming back (two seasons later) was a bit of a mixed feeling: how would the fans think? What do the fans want? I go a lot with emotions in my heart. And then I remember that day I was on the bench (against Northampton) and as soon as I got up to warm-up, literally all the fans stood up and were clapping and singing my name before I even came onto the pitch. Already, (the fans) started to make me feel like, ‘Hmmm. Think about it’. Then I got onto the pitch and some days are like this… I got two goals.

“I had a big discussion with the manager and even after that I (still) had some doubt. But the manager explained exactly what he was expecting from me. All the players here were talking directly to me, from the younger to the older ones, saying, ‘You need to stay. You have to stay.’

“When the question came up, and the wages issue came up in my head, the gaffer said, ‘But the club is ready to keep you if you want to stay, and this is my plan for you if you do stay’. Then we shook hands and that was it. A few days before (the end of the window), I told my agent, ‘It’s OK, I don’t want anything to get sorted. We’ll see in January, or we’ll see in June. But I don’t want to move right now.’”

Ayew also talks about needing stability in his life at that time. He had spent 18 months at West Ham, half a year back at Swansea and a season in Turkey with Fenerbahce. In that respect, putting down some roots in Swansea made sense. The one problem was the level. “It’s true it was difficult at the start because being the captain of Ghana, and being part of the big African players, to say you are playing in the Championship, let’s be honest, is not the best.

“But sometimes you need to look back and see what you did wrong, or what went wrong, and start over again. And that was my motivation, my idea. I was in that place where, ‘OK, forget everything you’ve done, forget the World Cup goals, the Champions League goals, the Premier League. Just forget it and start over. Make it a new Andre’. And the manager gave me that belief, that trust.”

Ayew talks warmly about Cooper and it is clear that the two of them have a close relationship. He predicts a bright future for the Swansea head coach, who had never managed at senior level before taking over at the Liberty Stadium, and says that for him to make the play-offs two seasons in a row “is no fluke”.

Although Ayew has thoroughly enjoyed being part of that journey, he still wants to play at the highest level. We talk about his brother being at Palace and Thomas Partey, another Ghana team-mate, playing for Arsenal, and I ask Ayew whether he watches the two of them in action and misses the Premier League.

“Oh yeah,” he says instantly. “Oh yeah, I do. It would be a lie to say that I don’t. You miss it. But it’s not like I didn’t have the opportunity to be there. It was my decision. So you don’t look at it like, ‘Why am I not in the Premier League?’ I’ve played there, scored goals, so it’s not a problem of level or quality. It’s just something to make things right. And sometimes in life you need to take a step back and jump three or four steps.

“I’m happy and proud of what my brother and Thomas are doing. I think Thomas… they’re going to see a lot from him very soon. I know his quality very well and he’s going to make it big. As soon as he’s going to get free with his injuries and get to his full speed, he’s going to be massive.”

It is not impossible that Ayew could be back in the Premier League playing against Partey for Swansea next season, bearing in mind that the club would be likely to offer him a new contract if they win promotion via the play-offs. “That would be lovely because I’m happy here and the family’s happy,” Ayew says.

“But I’m not trying to think about what can happen because I want to put everything that I have into what’s coming. And if I say something now I will be a liar, because I don’t know what the situation will be. What I know is that we have a chance to get up. And if we do that, we’ll see where the future lies.”

Credit: The Athletic UK