Last Friday Michael Owen was in Dublin to promote his second autobiography, Reboot. The book had received an extraordinary amount of publicity the previous week, thanks to Owen's viral Twitter spat with Alan Shearer – a squabble that had showcased the new, accelerated dynamics of news.

It all happened in the space of about 90 minutes. On Tuesday, September 3rd, the Mirror tweeted an excerpt from Owen’s book about the souring of his stint with Newcastle. Within the hour, Shearer had tweeted a clip of Owen revealing he had “hated” the last six or seven years of his career, with the comment “Yes, Michael, we thought that also, whilst on £120k a week . . .”

Seventeen minutes later, Owen retorted: "Not sure you are as loyal to Newcastle as you make out mate. I distinctly remember you being inches away from signing for Liverpool after Sir Bobby Robson put you on the bench. You tried everything to get out."

Owen's revelation that the Geordie Messiah had tried to abandon his hometown club after falling out with one of the most saintly figures in the history of northeast England set off a general free-for-all, with thousands getting involved to attack (or laugh at) Owen or Shearer. We had social media to thank for making it all possible.

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One less-remarked detail of the feud is that throughout their playing careers, they had the same agent: Tony Stephens, a high-level operator whose small but elite stable of clients also included David Beckham. It's noteworthy that Owen, Shearer and Beckham all had a similar sort of wholesome and clean-cut public image during their careers. These reputations had been carefully crafted by Stephens, whose method was to increase his clients' earning potential by projecting them as the sort of low-risk, controversy-free, universally acceptable personality vacuums to whom blue-chip corporate sponsors could feel safe attaching their brands.

Staid image

From Owen's point of view this was good for business, though he eventually found himself chafing against his staid public image – not least when Stephens advised him not to accept an offer from John Magnier to become part-owner of a promising racehorse. Even though Owen loved horses and gambling, Stephens felt a public commercial association with that world would not chime with his lucrative brand values. Owen doesn't know for sure whether the horse in question was Rock of Gibraltar, which Magnier would famously part-gift to Alex Ferguson the following year. He watched the Rock drama unfold first with envy and frustration, as the horse won race after race, and then with a measure of relief, as Ferguson and Magnier fought over the stallion fees.

Stephens, though, knew what he was doing. Owen, Beckham and Shearer were stars at the time when football was completing its transformation from working-class sport to mass celebrity entertainment. In the early 1990s, when Rupert Murdoch started pumping money into football through Sky's deal with the Premier League, the rest of his media empire began to cover the game the same way they had covered showbiz, the aim being to drum up interest in Sky's expensive new pay-TV show. By the mid-2000s, football had become the single most important source of tabloid scandal.

In early 2005, then-News of the World editor Andy Coulson - who nine years later went to prison for phone-hacking – accepted the National Press Award for Newspaper of the Year. The NOTW's biggest stories in their glory year had included accounts of David Beckham's alleged affair with Rebecca Loos (which won Scoop of the Year) and Wayne Rooney's visits to a brothel in Liverpool.

Nick Davies's 2014 book on the phone-hacking scandal, Hack Attack, described the picture of the tabloid industry that emerged from the internal memos of the News of the World, where staff would discuss the tips they had received about potential stories. People would write in saying, for instance, that they had met a famous actor in drugs rehab, or that they had photos of Kate Moss without make-up, or a jumper stained with the semen of a Premier League footballer.

Davies writes: “The messages disclose an apparently endless line of men and women who have collected some fragment of human interest and are now offering it for sale . . . as the messages flow on, the commercial side of this auction takes second place to something else more striking, something more human and more secret – a casual treachery. At the very least, these informants are betraying someone they have come across through their work . . . at worst, these are people volunteering to sell the secrets of those who most trust them . . . Everything is for sale. Nobody is exempt. What begins to emerge is the internal machinery of a commercial enterprise which has never previously existed, an industry which treats human life itself – the soft tissue of the most private, sensitive moments – as a vast quarry full of raw material to be scooped up and sifted and exploited for entertainment.”

Safety first

This was the fearsome machine that confronted footballers of Owen’s generation and dictated how they would be perceived by the public. No wonder Stephens’ approach to publicity was safety-first.

Since retiring Owen has worked as a pundit on BT Sport and has frequently been the subject of ridicule on social media. For those who find themselves at the centre of mockery, the experience can be terrible. Ángel Di María revealed last year he had spoken to a therapist about the experience of being mocked by what seemed like the entire internet. “The memes hurt us a lot,” he said.

On Friday I asked Owen which was worse – the tabloid-dominated era that he played through, or the current social-media era of memes and pile-ons. It turns out this was an easy question. “Having lived through them both, I think if you were a footballer, the worst generation to live in was mine. The press was the only way of communication. You had no control. People would have agendas. You’d have a turnip on your head one day, then you’d be lauded the next day. People would not report news, they would actually create it. There would be massive stitch-ups, they would send women to your hotel, knocking on your door and trying to catch you out. They would hack your phone, there was all kinds of unscrupulous and bad behaviour. It was troubled times. On the Friday you would hardly go to sleep, you were just waiting for your agent to phone and say, ‘Yeah, there are no stories going in this week.’ Even if you did nothing wrong, you were just petrified all the time of what was around the corner.”

Answering back

At least Twitter lets you answer back. Raheem Sterling's public rebuke of the Daily Mail last year was a significant milestone. Sterling showed he could take on one of the most powerful newspapers in the UK, and go over their heads to speak directly to an audience even larger than theirs. We hear plenty about the challenges posed by social media, and the complications for famous football players are obvious. In the past few weeks alone, Paul Pogba and Tammy Abraham have been targeted online by racists, Owen and Shearer had that undignified squabble, and Clinton N'Jie accidentally streamed a video of himself having sex on Snapchat. But in some ways at least, what we have now is not as bad as what went before.