Ryan Giggs
Ryan Joseph Giggs (born 29 November 1973 in Cardiff) is a football player also reknowned worldwide as arguably being one of the greatest wingers of all time in the game. Giggs currently plays for Manchester United- where he is the most decorated and one of its longest serving players in history. Giggs had played for the England Schoolboys team, but plays for the Welsh national team as an adult, once holding the Guinness World Record for being the youngest player to ever play for Wales.
Giggs is the most decorated footballer in the history of Manchester United, having won eight Premier League championships (a record he shares with Liverpool's Alan Hansen, Phil Neal and Kenny Dalglish), one Champions League and four FA Cup titles. He has also won the PFA Young Player of the Year award twice, making him the first player to win the award consecutively- a feat unsurpassed till today. Giggs holds other records including being the top all time scorer in the FA Premier League not to play in the position of striker, and interestingly, holds the record for scoring Manchester United's fastest goal (16 secs), set in February 1996.
Beginnings
Contrary to popular opinion, Giggs could not have played for the full England national side. He could only play for the English Schools team because he went to school there. In order to play for the England national team, he would have had to be born in England or have had English parents or grandparents. However, both his parents and all four grandparents are Welsh. Giggs has often been secretly wished for by England supporters as the dream left-sided answer to the problem of the very generation of his - lack of world class left wing talent.
A left-sided winger who occasionally plays as a supporting striker for United, Giggs shot to superstardom in Britain in 1992 as one of the most exciting talents in the history of the game when he was just barely 18, and had earned the tag of 'Boy Wonder'. He was arguably the first ever teenage soccer poster boy to have garnered such attention last seen since the likes of George Best, a player Giggs was ceaselessly compared to, and who, alongside Bobby Charlton personally went down to United's training sessions at the Cliff specifically to watch Giggs work his magic. Giggs' form in the years ahead was breathakingly scintillating to say the least, earning him the two aforementioned PFA Young Player of the Year awards and admirers continent wide as well as around the world. Even players like Roberto Baggio described Giggs as the most exciting British footballer they'd seen in years.
Superstardom
As an added bonus, Giggs also scored in the marketing department, with the result of his boyish good looks making him a hit with fans and unsurprisingly, a teen icon whom the media tabloids and modelling agencies sought relentlessly, with his fame comparable with the likes of Pop Stars at the time like Take That. In 1994, the BBC described Giggs as "one of the most photographed persons" in Britain. Giggs or 'Giggsy' as he was known, was also hailed as one of the at the time nascent FA Premier League's biggest stars and could oft be found as the picturebook merchandising icon of the league's early years in marketing itself globally (along with Jamie Redknapp and Lee Sharpe) and reforging its image after the hooliganism affected years of the 1980s.
Giggs turned professional in November 1990 and made his League debut against Everton at Old Trafford on 2 March 1991 as a sub for Denis Irwin. In his first full start, Giggs scored his first ever goal in a 1-0 win in the Manchester derby and collected his first piece of silverware in April 1992 as United defeated Nottingham Forest in the League Cup Final after Giggs had set up Brian McClair to score the only goal of the game.By the start of the 1992/1993 season - the first season of the nascent FA Premier League, Giggs made the left-wing position at United his own, and come into light as British football's leading prodigious talent. In the years ahead, Giggs' feats of intricate dribbling patterns weaved to delightfully thrill and enthuse the fans were becoming a hallmark of his game and his terrifyingly electric pace and stupendous skills were also considered by many to be way ahead of his time, earning him previously unoffered opportunities to footballers until they were at least much older and established: like that of hosting his own television show, 'Ryan Giggs' Soccer Skills', a hit with ITV and Granada in 1994. Compounded with an uncanny ability to score wonderful goals and more crucially, play architect to a huge proportion of Manchester United's goals of the 1990s scored by Eric Cantona, Mark Hughes, and later Andy Cole and Dwight Yorke, and with a flair unseen in the game in a long time, Giggs was often hailed as 'wizard' or 'genius' by critics and pundits alike, and according to an article in World Soccer by Stephen Thanabalan, alongside Steve McManaman was regarded as leaders of a new breed of creatively crafty new wingers in the English game that was crucial to its new image of dispensing with that of the boring long ball styles of previous generations.
The Ryan Giggs chant often heard from the fans during the Manchester United games is as follows, "Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, Running down the wing, Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, Can do anything, Feared by the Blues, Loved by the Reds, Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs, Ryan Giggs." Another chant goes, "Giggs, Giggs will tear you apart, again", adapted from the Joy Division song 'Love will tear us apart'.
By the late 1990s, with the emergence of Giggs' fellow fledgling young colleagues like David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville and Nicky Butt, Giggs seemed to have been around for ages. Giggs' popularity in the fame and looks' departments gradually dissipated over those years, as he aged significantly, but alas his football skill was still marked genius, and he developed into a more mature senior player by the time United won their record breaking and unprecedented "Treble" in 1999, with Giggs' goals and form in the competitions a major force in the side. It was in this super season that Giggs' scored his finest goal. It came in the 1999 FA Cup semi-final replay against Arsenal, where his extra-time solo run from the half-way line, dribbling past five players, won the match for his team. Giggs later knocked the ball into the path for Teddy Sheringham to score the equaliser in the UEFA Champions League Final and set United on their way to the treble. Giggs was the left winger in the side when they won the Intercontinental Cup that year as well and Giggs had etched himself into Manchester United's ranks of Legends.
The Latter Years
Giggs had seen the team evolve since United's rejuvenation a decade earlier and became the most experienced and senior player at United when Denis Irwin left. According to a BBC Sport article in 2003, "the trajectory of Giggs' United career follows that of the club almost exactly". Giggs' form in the years after the achievements of 1999 were reflective of Manchester United's dominance of the English game up till 2003(when the club won its last FA Premier League title)- with Giggs still relishing his left wing slot, United won the League title four times within those years, and had always made the UEFA Champions League Quarter-Finals.
Giggs celebrated his 10-year anniversary at Old Trafford with a testimonial match against Celtic at the start of the 2001/02 campaign, while a year later he bagged his 100th career goal in a draw with Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. In 2003, Giggs missed a clear cut scoring opportunity in an FA Cup game against their biggest rivals of those years, Arsenal, but managed to win the FA Cup once more in 2004.
Playing in a victory over Liverpool in September 2004 saw Giggs become only the third player to play 600 games for United alongside Sir Bobby Charlton and Bill Foulkes. During the first half of the 2004-05 season, Giggs was linked in transfer speculation with Newcastle United, a club his best-friend at United, Nicky Butt, had left for. However, no move was made before the transfer window closed on 31 January 2005. After the season, Giggs signed a two-year extension with Man United, after chairman David Gill relented on his normal policy of not signing players over 30 to deals longer than one year. The extension, which runs through July 2008, will effectively keep him at Old Trafford for the remainder of his playing career. Giggs has reinvented himself as age caught and still catches on but amazingly still is contributing positively to the Manchester United cause even after all his team-mates like David Beckham and Roy Keane had left the club over the years, playing role model to even the latest batch of talents at the club like Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo. Giggs is used today as an example, alongside Gary Neville and David Beckham as a model professional for young players with hot tempers, such as Wayne Rooney to follow. This is largely due to his upbringing by United manager Alex Ferguson, who sheltered the player since developing him, and now it remains to be seen whether Giggs outstays his career mentor at the club or vice versa.
Personal Life
In his private life, other than his notorious spate of womanising as detailed in tabloids like the Daily Mirror over the years, Giggs has otherwise managed to avoid the limelight of celebrity trappings that tagged his earlier years, and in his recent autobiography titled: "Giggs: The Autobiography", revealed inside were possible reasons for his aversion to attention, and accounting for his quiet and bashful demeanour. The biography described how Giggs had a tough time as a youngster- as the product of a mixed marriage enduring racial taunts as a child. And, although he admired his rugby-playing father's sporting gifts (Giggs' attributes his speed to his father's passed genes), he hated the impact his "bullying aggressive nature" had on the family. In Giggs' words in an infamous interview with the Daily Telegraph, Giggs spoke of his father as a "real rogue". So much so that originally named Ryan Joseph Wilson, he subsequently adopted his mother's surname so that in his words, "the world would know I was my mother's son" after his parents' separation.
Giggs is harped by many as a player, who unlike Lee Sharpe and George Best, achieved considerable fame despite a relatively low profile overall as a celebrity, although he has done ads for Reebok, Givenchy, Fuji and Patek Phillipe, as well as being used for video-mapping in computer game simulations like EA Sports' FIFA 2003 series. An interesting article mentions how Giggs' deliberate shying away from the spotlight was crucial to his low profile. According to an article by BBC Sport: "In the early 1990s, Giggs was David Beckham before Beckham was even holding down a place in the United first team. If you put his face on the cover of a football magazine, it guaranteed you the biggest sales of the year. Why? Men would buy it to read about 'the new Best' and girls bought it because they wanted his face all over their bedroom walls. Giggs had the million-pound boot deal (Reebok), the lucrative sponsorship deals in the Far East (Fuji) and the celebrity girlfriends (Dani Behr, Davinia Murphy) at a time when Becks was being sent on loan to Preston."
Campaigner
In recent years, Giggs has also become a UNICEF representative, launching a campaign to prevent landmines from killing children in 2002. Giggs, who had visited Unicef projects in Thailand, told the BBC: "As a footballer I can't imagine life without the use of one of my legs...Sadly this is exactly what happens to thousands of children every year when they accidentally step on a landmine." Giggs is also an active campaigner in the fight against racism in football. Alongside fellow mixed raced mulatto players like Rio Ferdinand and Thierry Henry, Giggs is adamant about stamping racism out of the game. He told the Football Anti-Racism site 'Stop the BNP' the following in 2004: "A lot of people don't know that my father is black. He was a professional rugby player in the area that I played as a youngster. So a lot of people who I went to school with knew who he was and knew that he was black. So I would get racist taunts in school." He also added in the French L'Eqipe Magazine, "Looking at me from the outside, it is not very obvious, I know but half my family is black and I feel close to their culture and their colour. I am proud of my black roots and of the black blood that runs in my veins. I do not wish to hide my origins, nor do I seek to make it a subject of conversation. I am what I am."
He was born in Wales, but was brought up in England.
His nickname is The Welsh Wizard.