'I was set to play with David Beckham at World Cup before road crash changed my life'

Former Manchester United target Matt Jansen recalls agonisingly missing out on the World Cup and the incident that left him fighting for his life

The summer of 2002 should have been a breakthrough moment in Matt Jansen’s career.

He was one of English football’s rising stars of the early 2000s and had just helped Blackburn Rovers win the League Cup. Manchester United had already come knocking, not once but twice, and he was on the verge of being part of the England squad at the World Cup in Japan and South Korea.

He was so close to the plane, he’d even received an invite to David Beckham’s pre-World Cup shindig. But some cruel twists of fate altered the course of both his career and his life.

Jansen, 47, now a coach at Stockport County, had been due to be involved in a friendly against Paraguay but was ruled out when a bout of gastroenteritis left him on a drip, robbing him of a vital chance to impress Sven-Goran Eriksson.

He still made the preliminary squad, only to be heartbreakingly left out at the 11th hour when Eriksson opted to take an extra defender, Martin Keown, instead. Eriksson had even told Graeme Souness, his manager at Blackburn, that he was on the plane.

“We played Liverpool the day before the squad was announced,” Jansen exclusively told MEN Sport in association with Palentir Financial Planning. “Sven had called Graeme before the game and said, ‘Make sure he doesn’t get injured because he’s going to the World Cup.’

“Graeme told me that, which gave me a bit of a buzz before the Liverpool game. We lost 4-3 but I scored and played pretty well. I’d got my suit, my invitation to David Beckham’s going-off party. The next day, the squad was announced and my name wasn’t in it. Souness couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it.

“The reason was that they decided to take Martin Keown as extra cover in defence rather than myself. It was devastating. I never won a senior cap, which is frustrating because it’s your boyhood dream to play for your country. But I thought it was coming. I was only 24 and my career was progressing.”

Indeed, it should have been a minor blip for Jansen, who was 24 at the time. But later in the same summer, he suffered life-threatening injuries in a scooter crash while on holiday in Rome with his girlfriend, now wife.

After winning his fight for life, he would return to the pitch but was never quite the same player. He recalled: “Unfortunately, the accident took its toll. I was in coma for week, brain hemorrhages, I was in a really bad way. From there, I couldn’t really recapture the heights of my career.”

Jansen dropped down the levels into non-league before going into coaching and managing Chorley before joining Stockport’s recruitment departure in 2020. He later became assistant first-team coach under Dave Challinor, playing a key role as County rose from non-league to League One.

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