A footballer who savoured confrontation on the pitch and got it back in equal measure, from his fellow professionals and the thousands of fans who loved a target to hurl abuse at.
Yet Mills is able to look back at the stick he received with some amusement. And he sees the funny side of some of his explosive encounters on the pitch.
PEARCE … ‘terrible’
The former England international, whose five-year deal with Manchester City ran out in the summer, has retired after failing to recover from a knee injury picked up playing on loan for Derby at Portsmouth on January 19, 2008.
Mills is looking forward to the future and his immediate focus is April’s Brighton Marathon where he will compete in a wheelchair as he raises money and awareness for the National Association of Disabled Supporters and the Association for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus.
But today, Mills, 32, gives a typically honest and candid account of his career, speaks about his reputation as a troublemaker and tells you his opinion on some of the biggest names in football.
He said: “I will be remembered as a slight headcase – a bit mad. People think I was always being shown red cards but I think I had eight sendings off in 15 years, which is not that many.
“Two of them were stupid – one with Craig Bellamy but I can live with that one. We never got on that well, even at Man City.
“We were playing at Newcastle and I launched him into the stands. I got a straight red but had no complaints. I don’t regret anything I have done. As I was always told, never regret something you can smile about.
“When you have an opinion in football, that can worry managers. If it is sensible, reasoned opinion, it can also be seen as a threat.
“I had a reputation for causing trouble simply because I was happy to argue my point and stand up and say when things weren’t right.
“I’ve had a lot of stick from fans – I got booed at every ground I went to – but it was never really nasty. It was more jovial stuff like ‘If you can play for England, so can I’ or ‘Oi Mills, you’ve got no hair’.
“I was an old-fashioned full-back. I was not technically good enough to go out and play amazing football. I had to train at 100 per cent and play at 100 per cent, otherwise I was nowhere near good enough.
“In pre-season, I was a world-class player because we never had any balls and it was all about running. Without a ball, I was brilliant!
“I sometimes forget I played 19 times for England and in all five games at the 2002 World Cup.
“In three years I had three proper conversations with Sven as his inner circle was mainly made up of big-name Manchester United players.
“I’ve done some daft things and been outspoken. Probably the biggest thing I spoke out about was in 2003 and the fiasco about Rio Ferdinand missing a drugs test. Some of the England players wanted to go on strike and I put my hand up and said I wouldn’t strike for England. It didn’t go down particularly well.
“The player ballot was apparently unanimous in favour of a strike but my definition of unanimous was different to other people’s as there was at least one person who did not vote to strike.
“Gary Neville was clearly not happy with me, as he later told me during a game. Maybe it was a coincidence but I wasn’t selected many times for England again.”
Mills, who lives in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, has ended up mates with one of his biggest foes.
He revealed: “Me and Robbie Savage didn’t get on. I once picked him up by the throat and we later said a few things about each other.
“Then, I joined Derby and he came in soon after. I thought it would be quite difficult.
KEEGAN … soft
“I got a picture of me throttling him, stuck it on his locker and wrote ‘To Robbie, best wishes, no hard feelings, lots of love, Danny’. To be fair, Robbie was great about it and a lot better than I thought he would be. He’s a decent man – but a real wind-up merchant.
“Robert Pires was not one of my favourites. I was gutted when he moved to Spain. I thought my chance had gone of giving him a good whack – fairly, of course! His diving and cheating used to drive me bonkers.
“Pires was the stereotypical Frenchman. Great player but with such an air of arrogance and he pretended not to understand English. He had that ‘I’m French, you can’t touch me and I’m technically better than you’.
“I played under about 20 managers. As an all-round manager, my favourite was Alan Pardew.
“He was excellent, even though he thought he was the best-looking and best-dressed man in London.
“At City, Kevin Keegan had no discipline in his training sessions.
“Players turned up late but there were no punishments. I told him ‘You cannot let players keep turning up late’ and he said ‘I don’t like fining players’. I said ‘You fine them once, they won’t do it again’.
“Stuart Pearce came in and was terrible. He only liked players he could control. He got rid of David James, Ben Thatcher, Claudio Reyna and tried to get rid of Joey Barton.
“From the outside it was ‘Psycho – Stuart Pearce – don’t mess with him’. But if you stood up and had a go, he didn’t know how to respond. When he took his daughter’s toy horse into the dugout, the lads thought ‘Hang on a minute… ‘.
“Also, he didn’t have a big enough personality to deal with big players – and still doesn’t.
“Coaching-wise, Brian Kidd is the nicest man on the planet. Steve McClaren was a good coach but I didn’t rate his managerial skills and sometimes he wasn’t upfront.
“I sat in his room when I was on loan at Boro and he told me I was definitely part of his plans – but I already knew he had been looking at other right-backs.
“Some managers have an issue being straight with you. Players may not always be intellectual superstars but they want to be told how it is. That’s why Martin O’Neill is one of the best. All players respect him.
“David O’Leary, my old manager at Leeds, is not someone I like.
“Before the 2002 World Cup, he did an interview saying my disciplinary record made me a liability for England and when I saw him afterwards, he had the nerve to ask ‘Danny, did my reverse psychology work?’. I thought, ‘A***hole’.”
As for the game now, Mills says: “Some young players don’t respect the seniors. At City, they’d come in the first-team dressing room, you’d ask them to do something and they’d look at you like they had brought you in on their shoe.
“I was the last of a dying breed – the apprentice who had to clean toilets and scrub boots.
“The players coming through now get good money but it doesn’t mean they have to be disrespectful.
“I always loved the confrontational moment in the tunnel before a game when you looked across at your opponent. It’s almost gladiatorial and I miss it.”
