Andy Farrell lays bare the ‘brutal’ level of ‘disgusting’ abuse Owen Farrell got as a young player
Owen Farrell was a 2025 mid-tour British and Irish Lions call for head coach Andy, inset
Andy Farrell has revealed the level of ‘disgusting’ abuse that his son Owen had to cope with while growing up playing rugby league in Wigan.
The Ireland head coach was only 16 when he learned that his future wife Colleen was pregnant with their first child.
Farrell, at that stage, had yet to make his breakthrough with the Warriors but after he quickly emerged as a star player at the club, he made sure that his son Owen grew up around the set-up, watching training and matches.
That was a terrific learning ground for the young Farrell, instilling in him a love for sport and an insight at an early age as to what it took to succeed at a professional level.
“Owen grew up on the touchlines…”
The downside of this upbringing, though, was the negative attention that fell on Owen as he began to make his way through age-grade rugby league, the sport he played until he switched to union after his father crossed codes to join Saracens in 2005.
That move to London was the beginning of an incredible father-son story in rugby union that culminated 20 years later in Andy becoming the 2025 British and Irish Lions head coach and calling Owen up to join him mid-tour in Australia.
With that tour series won 2-1 against the Wallabies, Farrell has taken the opportunity in his new book, The Only Way I Know, to shed light on the father-son relationship and the “brutal” level of abuse that Owen suffered making his way in rugby league while his dad was a Wigan star.
Farrell wrote in an extract published by The Times: “Most players choose to have their kids near the end of their playing careers, but Owen was part of the furniture at Wigan from the age of four. Owen grew up on the touchlines, watching training and matches.
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“I never forced him into it. He couldn’t wait to come to training with me and would fetch the balls when we were doing kicking practice. Before long, he was doing the kicking himself. Every child is different. Owen made a decision to commit to the game and then off he went: it became part of his life, as it was mine.
“He, like me, grew up only wanting to play the game for the love of it. Not to be a big personality off the pitch or revel in the celebrity of it all. Being a character on the field and earning the respect of your peers is what mattered to us both. The apple definitely didn’t fall far from the tree.
“Sadly, too, he was subjected to abuse as a young boy simply because he was my son. Owen had taken to rugby league even more quickly than I had.
“Having spent so much time with me at training, when he got to year five he was already playing a year up on the Wigan town team, and when he was eight he also joined Wigan St Patrick’s rugby league club.
“He loved the game, but at times it was hard for him because of my profile. Once, when he was playing for Wigan St Pat’s against Blackbrook, a scuffle broke out, and one of the parents ran onto the field and pushed Owen to the ground.
“On another occasion, I was training at Wigan and Owen was playing in a game around the corner from the stadium. Colleen phoned me in a bit of a state. ‘You need to get here now; there is a fella on the sideline who is absolutely abusing Owen,’ she said.
“I remember screeching out of the car park to drive over to Wigan St Judes, where the game was being played. Even as I got out of the car I could hear this guy screaming at Owen. ‘He’s rubbish,’ he shouted. It was disgusting. You would get arrested nowadays. That was the world that was rugby league at the time.
“Some kids might have thought to themselves, ‘This is not worth it’. But it obviously was worth it to him. It is right that people now have a sense of how it was for Owen, because it was brutal and it would have shaped him to a degree.”
After captaining England at the Rugby World Cup 2023, Owen Farrell decided to step away from Test rugby due to the negative social media narrative about him.
Some months later, he confirmed a club move to Racing 92 in Paris but he is now back in the PREM after one season across the Channel, rejoining Saracens and rekindling his aspirations to play for England at the age of 34.