Come on, you bastards!" he shouts. Staring belligerently down the camera lens, Michael Owen is taking the photographer’s request to make us afraid very seriously indeed. With far more feeling than anyone expected, in fact. As he puts on a hooded top over a black suit, his brow darkens, the lines of his face harden and you have to look very closely indeed to recognise the clean-cut golden boy of English football. A few years ago, hoodie or not, he couldn’t have got arrested in a suburban shopping mall; now he could pass unnoticed among the Dark Lords of the Sith.

Apart from his being cooped up in a baking Madrid studio, it would be easy to find reasons for a prima donna mood. The past year, the first he has ever spent sway from his North-West roots (where he once bought every house but one in a street for family and friends) has been far from ideal. The story is that Owen made the first mistake in a perfect career arc by moving to Real Madrid; the club have won nothing and he has often been consigned to warm the bench for his galactico team-mates. Furthermore, this afternoon, while Owen sweats in the studio, his old team-mates at Liverpool, who he left to join Madrid, are preparing for tonight’s European Champions League final, where they will overturn a 3-0 half-time deficit to beat AC Milan on penalties – a boy’s own story without the boy.

Owen, however, is not one to sulk. An hour or so later, he is laughing and joking as he performs scissor-kicks in a suit - £16 million of international striker landing perilously close to the edge of a school-gym crash-mat. The striker himself, though, is more worried about the threat to his trousers, which are cut a little close to his muscular, 5ft 8 in frame for comfort. "Bloody hell, I’m scared to fart in these," he says. "I’ve split more pairs of pants than you would believe. I’ve got the biggest arse in the world."

At 25, he has already achieved far more than most players ever will, but Owen never has acted the big star. Improvised swearing aside, he is polite, friendly, patient and, with his new Iberian tan, adjusting nicely to life as a Madrileno. "It feels like home here now," he says. "It’s not rocket science – the more time you spend in a place, the more friends you meet and I feel more at home with the language and everything else. I miss things like my dogs and my racehorses, which are still at home, but I do the same kind of things, except..." – he can't help a smile – "except over here I play golf with Ronaldo." But even a friendship with the Brazilian superstar and renowned party-boy hasn’t lured him from the life of domestication. He recently married his childhood sweetheart Louise; when we meet, he is hatching plans for a stag weekend in Las Vegas. "Something’s wrong if you can’t spend all your money there, isn’t it" he says. While his gambling is the only scent of blood the tabloids have ever had from him (two years ago he admitted to running up losses of £40,000 – about half a week’s wages), in the event his Vegas odyssey gives them little to shout about – though he is spotted playing $2 slot machines until dawn after one vodka and Red Bull, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Born to be mild".

He saves his mean streak, for the pitch; as an ITV co-commentator might put it, he has always had a bit of devil in him. The defining match of his career, in the 1998 World Cup when the 18-year-old Owen terrorised the Argentinian defence and scored the goal of the tournament, saw him glibly canonised at home as Saint Michael. It was his opponents that day, though, whose sense of nationhood is partly defined by hostility to the English, who saw the essence of Owen most clearly and paid him a far bigger compliment. They called him "el pibe", the street kid who takes on the bad guys with skill, cunning and guile, a romantic idealisation of the Argentine national character. Even more than for the virtuosity of his goal, they admired Owen for his dying baby swan impression as he collapsed in the box to win England a dubious penalty. Diego Maradona, the embodiment of el pibe, praised Owen for his "speed, wickedness, balls".

Owen bristles at the caricature: "I never saw myself as a wonderkid," he says emphatically – and with typical modesty plays down his uniqueness. "I am competitive, and still get the adrenaline for the games," he admits, "but there’s not a professional footballer on earth who’s not got a big competitive streak. You’re the one, out of hundreds of thousands of kids, who makes it, so there’s got to be something about you to be one of those players."

But there’s got to be something else about you if you’re to become, say, the youngest England international for a century (1998) or European Footballer of the Year at 22 (2001). Something that would be unable to accept being left on the bench, even at Real Madrid – unless it was a challenge. There can be few more daunting prospects in football than usurping Madrid’s galacticos, but this, as Owen is not slow to point out, is what he has done. "I came here and everyone was telling me I was fourth-choice striker. It was as tough as I expected, but I’ve played a lot more games than people think – perhaps only two or three players have taken part in more games than me. The last 10, 12 games when we were chasing the title, I played them all. Ronaldo and Raul have been fit throughout the season so I’ve played when the manager has really shuffled the pack, and in my eyes it’s even more of a feather in my cap that he’s prepared to drop a midfielder like Luis Figo to play me."

Figo, Owen’s predecessor as European Footballer of the Year, may now have played his last game at Real, and the Englishman’s form meant even Raul’s position was questioned by fans ("I still feel useful but I don’t want to be in the way," was the Bernabeu’s icon’s meek response). "I had a patch in the first few weeks when I wasn’t in the team and people hadn’t seen this player they had bought," Owen says. "I got one chance to start and I got injured after about five bloody minutes. But then I played well in the internationals against Wales and Azerbaijan and came back feeling like a different player. I scored in something like seven consecutive games and that just changed everyone’s opinion from, ‘Who’ve we bought here?’ to ‘Oh, he’s a good player’, then ‘He’s a lethal finisher!’ and by the seventh game they were talking about all-time Madrid records. So I couldn’t have expected it to go any better. The only thing that’s been disappointing has been not winning the title."

So when he saw Liverpool’s European exploits…"How was I meant to know?" he says with a rueful grin. "But if you look at it in black and white, it’s a strange season they’ve had, isn’t it? If Steven Gerrard hadn’t scored that goal against Olympiakos in the first round, they’d have been out in the first round of that, out in the third round of the FA Cup, fifth" – he spits the word out, contemplating previously unimagined depths of failure – "in the league. It’s their worst season in 20 years."

Madrid have not had the best of seasons either, despite Owen’s goals (13 in 20 starts) helping them push Barcelona to the line. In fact, he may have played too well for his own future in the team. Having arrived for a cut-price £8m as his Liverpool contract ran down, his successful debut season probably makes him worth at least twice that – a tidy sum for the profligate Real board to set against an overhaul of the squad.

"The club haven’t won a trophy for two years, which is quite bad around these parts," Owen says, "and because I’m British and I’ve played all my career in the Premier League, the press associate me with other clubs. But it’s the president (Florentino Perez) who decides who comes and who goes. Obviously I’m a foreign person, but I’m enjoying it and I’m not fighting to get out, put it that way. Out here is my new home."

He changes into a T-shirt, shorts and sandals and prepares to head back out into the Madrid sunshine. In a week’s time he will win his 70^th England cap, marking the occasion with a hat-trick of perfect finishes to beat Colombia 3-2. He would be sad to leave Spain for many reasons, one of them being the way it has sharpened him for the international side. "I think it has made me a better player," he says, "but it’s more that the whole experience of playing in a foreign country changes you as a person – living here, starting again, I’d never moved out of the area I lived for 25 years so it was a big challenge. Looking selfishly, from an England point of view I couldn’t have done it more perfectly last season. But obviously it’s this season that matters."

This season means the World Cup in Germany. It will be Owen’s third, but his first as one of England’s senior players, a description he still can’t quite believe ("I don’t see myself as the experienced one, but caps-wise I suppose I am.") Alongside him will be Wayne Rooney, who has emulated some of Owen’s football feats, but comfortably surpassed him in the field of lurid tabloid revelations.

"It’s what happens when you’re in the public eye," Owen sympathises. "I speak to Wayne and I’m quite pally with him but I don’t force myself on anyone. Obviously he’s his own lad, like I’m my own person, and we all enjoy different things. If my love of horse racing causes the wrong headlines, then his whatever…" he trails off diplomatically. "Everyone’s different aren’t they? The important thing is what you do on the pitch and as we all know, he’s a special player."

Owen’s always had his priorities in order. Live right, look after your family, spend within your means. Save yourself for the big game. For England’s golden generation, they won’t come any bigger than in this World Cup. "I wouldn’t swap our squad for anyone else’s, " he continues, "We’ve been a young team growing up together and we’re starting to peak. We’ve also got people like Frank Lampard, who were on the fringes a few years ago but now are one of the first names on the sheet. The next few competitions are the big ones for us. We’ve got some unbelievable players, but it’s not always the best team that win the World Cup – look at Greece winning the European Championship. We’ve got as good a chance as any team." Converting chances, of course, is Owen’s speciality.