Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  I went to see Ken Stanley in Huddersfield, but in the end what he did for George failed because George went off the rails. The great thing that McCormack understood was that if you look after the sport, the sport will look after you. He told Palmer to come and play the Open here in 1960 because he knew that if the sport grew worldwide and Palmer was the top player in it, they would all benefit. That was always in my head. The problem was that this philosophy works better in an individual game like tennis or golf but in a team game the manager can frequently not want one superstar to stand out. Leicester, however, were happy for me to do things with Shilton because they thought if he earns money with me it will stop him wanting to move. If you did a ten-grand deal for a player with a club then that was enormous money. I didn’t do Shilton’s deal at Leicester; I did it when he went to Stoke. I’m not a bitter or a vengeful person in a negotiation. I just enjoyed winning against them and doing things that hadn’t been done before. League contracts were still done with wages per week not annual salaries, and managers would tell players, ‘You’ll be earning eighty quid a week’. We had to get the contract signed and driven up to Football League HQ in Lytham St Annes so when I was doing Shilts’s contract I made them buy his car. Alex Humphreys was a director at Stoke. He ran a company called C & C Supermarkets. And then when the annual salary I wanted came out at £363 a week or something like that I said we should round it up and he exploded his sandwich all over the table. ‘How much is this car worth?’ ‘Three thousand,’ I said quickly. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ll buy it.’ Then he came back and said the car was only worth a thousand but it was too late; he’d bought it. It was so unsophisticated. When Shilton went to Forest I negotiated with Clough by walking round and round the Forest car park at half past nine one Friday night. At that stage Clough was not a drunk. I knew he was desperate to sign Shilton because he’d wanted him at Leeds and Derby. He said he could sign another keeper but I knew perfectly well that Shilts was who he wanted and I also knew they had the money at Forest then. Clough could be physically intimidating though; he came in and kicked me.

  The importance of the role of the agent inevitably increased as sport became more commercial and opportunities presented themselves to elite sportsmen. When David Beckham was agitating for representation in the Stalinist dictatorship of Alex Ferguson, his manager pointed him in the direction of Harry Swales who had done what Ferguson considered a good job for Giggs and for the notoriously publicity-shy Paul Scholes, both of whom he was still representing in 2011 when Swales was eighty-five years old. Beckham was prepared to listen to Ferguson on matters relating to football, but when it came to his off-field commercial activities he reckoned his wife had a better agent. In view of what has happened to Beckham since, it appears that he was right.

  Beckham certainly couldn’t have achieved his rise to world celebrity if he had not had talent as a footballer, but it was factors beyond his skills on the field of play that eased his entry into the ranks of pop-cultural aristocracy. He was fortunate in that the rise coincided with the early days of a Labour government that abandoned Clause Four and the traditional close if turbulent relationship with the trade union movement in favour of a new and even closer relationship with the world of spin and public relations. Labour now believed less in traditional Labour values of public service than in Thatcherite market-driven economics that fed the consumerist and celebrity-obsessed culture in which David Beckham and his ‘advisers’ flourished. Above all, the age of Blair was the age of spin and sophisticated public relations and it was that which turned a good-looking working-class footballer from east London into a global figure whose celebrity might have started with his football but ultimately owed relatively little to it.

  Wright, Moore and Lineker were all celebrities in their own way, but they were known principally as famous footballers. Beckham is known because of things that are only tangentially related to football and that is because he began his career just as the media landscape was changing so profoundly. Beckham was the perfect man to be in the right place at the right time.

  A young David Beckham in 1995 (Tim Roney / Getty Images).

  Lineker did well to emerge from the depressed decade in which he played. His goals for England, his captaincy of his country and his successful move to Barcelona and the exotic climate of the Catalonian coast, all marked him out as a shining light in an era too readily associated with Heysel, Hillsborough, Valley Parade and Kenilworth Road.

  Television did not greatly care for its current relationship with football, which is why it could afford to be so blasé when the game disappeared from the nation’s screens in 1985. It took a change in the media landscape for television to rethink that relationship. Recorded highlights, which had been the basis of televised football for twenty years, were no longer enough. A glance across the Atlantic quickly revealed that live sport would be the future. Trevor East was the Executive Producer for ITV Sport who, together with Greg Dyke and the ubiquitous Arsenal director David Dein, discussed a plan to form a breakaway league:

  I reported back to Greg that we had an ally in Dein so what we needed to do was to get the top five clubs together which were then Arsenal, Spurs, Man United, Liverpool and Everton. What pushed us was that by late 1987 [the new satellite company] BSB had emerged and they were hatching their own plan with Ken Bates and Ron Noades and Trevor Phillips to nick the whole thing. I went along to a BSB presentation in my capacity as a director of Derby County FC. I came out of it and rang Greg and told him, ‘I’ve just seen ninety-two Football League chairmen with pound signs revolving round their heads. We need to move quickly.’ Amidst much acrimony and with the help of the big five clubs we managed to block the BSB deal. Then we did a deal for £44 million over four years for twenty-one live games per season – eighteen league matches, two League Cup semi-finals and the League Cup final. This was Greg and me dealing with the Football League directly and sidelining Brommers [John Bromley] who was not pleased about it but he was locked into the old duopoly. The same thing happened to him as had happened to Gerry Loftus at Granada during ‘Snatch of the Day’. As part of the contract I got all ninety-two Football League clubs as they still were then to sign up to play in the League Cup in perpetuity which is why the Premier League clubs are still in it.

  ITV had already started to make changes to the way football was presented on television even before the coming of the Premier League. Sky likes to proclaim that it changed the nature of football coverage on television, but in fact the landscape had been evolving in the late 1980s under the terrestrial broadcasters. East remembers:

  We had eighteen to twenty-two cameras at the ITV live games in 1989, 1990 and 1991. We introduced hand-held touchline cameras, we introduced new graphics with players changing into team formations and things like that. What we didn’t do at first was put the score onscreen all the time. Sky did start that but I nicked it off them very fast. When we lost the Premier League, we went out and bought the Champions League straight away and I put the score up there for the first time on ITV. I was sitting in the truck and I got phone calls from three or maybe even four MDs of the ITV companies, all saying, ‘Get that bloody thing off the screen’. It looked awful, they thought. I said no. I’d been watching it on Sky and it worked. I told them they’d get used to it.

  The first Monday Night Football match on Sky in August 1992 was an instantly forgettable 1–1 draw at Maine Road between Manchester City and Queens Park Rangers. The biggest talking point was the faintly incongruous appearance of the ‘Sky Strikers’, a troupe of dancing girls, equivalent to the cheerleaders who featured on US television during NFL games. It gave no sign of the impact Sky was to have on football and ITV executives who watched the unappealing display would have been forgiven for thinking that it was the ITV broadcast of the climactic end to the 1988–9 season which really marked the start of the new age of football on television. Going into the intimidating atmosphere of Anfield just a few weeks after the Hillsborough disaster, Arsenal had to
beat the all-conquering home side by two clear goals to deprive them of another league and Cup Double to match the one they had claimed three years earlier. A goal by Smith early in the second half raised expectations but it was the second and decisive goal by Thomas in the dying moments that brought Arsenal the title for the first time since 1971 and encouraged the belief that television could deliver absorbing excitement in a perfectly contrived dramatic climax. From the start of the new decade football became a game watched live on television rather than a game for supporters to watch live in the ground.

  Despite East’s claims of technological innovation, the fact remains that when Sky Television absorbed BSB and then submitted a successful bid to the newly formed Premier League for the rights to televise its games, the media landscape changed significantly. Neither ITV nor the BBC had the air time on its channels to show so many matches whereas the creation of the Sky Sports channels meant that Sky had endless amounts of time to fill and live sport was its key component.

  Test cricket, with its five days of play, suited the new channels very well, and the BBC started haemorrhaging the rights to a sport that it had covered for decades. By 1999 the broadcasting of England home Test matches was in the hands of Sky and Channel Four. From 2006 the rights were Sky’s alone and Test cricket had apparently left terrestrial TV for ever apart from home Test highlights on Channel Five. Despite competition from BT Sport, Sky’s current hegemony in sports broadcasting is a far cry from the dangers it faced when it began. Murdoch gambled his empire on the success of Sky Television and football was vital to his eventual triumph. While cricket’s move away from terrestrial television to satellite broadcasting has been at best a mixed blessing for the growth of the sport, that hasn’t been the case with football, despite East’s early doubts:

  I thought when Sky started that it was a disaster for football, because it was lost to terrestrial television. ITV’s bid was actually more attractive for the new Premier League both in financial terms and in terms of exposure, but they went with Sky because Rick Parry fell under Sam Chisholm’s spell and then there was the question of Alan Sugar. I was sitting in the hotel having delivered the ITV bid when Sugar was on the phone to Chisholm telling Sky to blow ITV out of the water. It wasn’t at all transparently fair. Parry held up the proceedings in order to attract a revised bid. Sky didn’t have any more cash. Instead they put a valuation in financial terms on all the promotion time and the sponsorship they thought they could attract over the season and they added that on to their cash bid. That’s how they got to £304 million. In fact in cash terms it was high – £160 million – and ITV had bid higher. I think we offered early £170 million but for fewer matches. In those days it was still a hot topic as to how many matches you could televise before attendances would start to fall. Murdoch bet the whole of News Corp on that one deal. If it hadn’t happened Murdoch would have gone bust and Sky would have been strangled at birth. It was heavy-duty stuff and Sugar saved them. Sugar, to save his own business [Amstrad], saved Murdoch but he got his payback. In 2007 Murdoch bought his company. That slipped right under the radar. It had taken fifteen years.

  The marginalisation of BBC Sport and ITV Sport by the monolith that was Sky Sports, together with the ground improvements mandated by the Taylor Report under the aegis of the newly formed Premier League, created the new landscape in which football operated. It was much regretted by some traditional supporters as footballers became superstars in a ludicrous soap opera whose antics were lovingly detailed by the tabloid press.

  The first player to ‘benefit’ from these changes was Paul Gascoigne whose antics appeared as often on the front pages of the tabloids as on the back. The public’s fascination with him was a result of not just the goal for Spurs in the 1991 FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal or the brilliant solo effort for England in the match against Scotland during the European Championships in 1996, but also of the ‘Dentist’s Chair’ drinking game in Hong Kong before that tournament began, the wrecking of his hotel room when Glenn Hoddle told him he was being left out of the 1998 World Cup squad and the tempestuous nature of his marriage which ended in claims of domestic violence.

  Bobby Moore divorced Tina after he had fallen in love with his second wife, Stephanie, but although friends saw evidence of marital disharmony nothing ever appeared in the press. It would have mortified the eternally private Moore and the press knew it. Whatever rumours they heard they did not pursue. When Lineker divorced in 2006 and again in 2016 the events were treated with similar respect. The behaviour of the two players on the field and towards the press had earned them this kind of consideration. When Paul Gascoigne was interviewed on camera by a Norwegian journalist before an England game against Norway and was asked if he had a word for the people of Norway, he replied instantly, ‘Yes. Fuck off, Norway.’ Gascoigne’s career ended sadly and his life subsequently has attracted press attention only in moments when he has allegedly been facing premature death.

  Gascoigne was the embodiment of the old hard-drinking, hard-living, hell-raising working-class lad, all at sea in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of the 1990s and 2000s. Terry Collier of The Likely Lads would have adored Gazza and would have seen something of himself reflected in this Geordie hero. However, as Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? demonstrated so well, all that remained open to a soldier on his return to civvy street was a succession of dead-end jobs and his old bedroom in his parents’ house. Terry’s traditional Newcastle working-class culture was already on the way out in 1973. The future belonged to Bob Ferris, newly married, wearing three-piece suits, his feet firmly planted on the management ladder with his wife’s job as an assistant librarian doubling their disposable income and a new house with the other upwardly mobile couples on the Elm Lodge housing estate. Bob and Thelma would have felt at home at Beverley’s soirée in Mike Leigh’s classic 1970s suburban drama Abigail’s Party.

  In The Likely Lads, the original series transmitted in 1966, the two youths had both been apprentice electricians, but in 1973 changing circumstances took Bob out of the socio-economic group into which he had been born but left Terry stranded in it. The comedy stems from Terry’s refusal to compromise his traditional working-class values and Bob being torn between his desire to subscribe to Thelma’s bourgeois aspirations and his loyalty to Terry and his own roots. If Terry had been a footballer he would have been Paul Gascoigne. If Paul Gascoigne had watched the series his sympathies must have been with Terry. Perhaps a more accurate parallel would be Gascoigne as Bob and his late drinking companion Jimmy ‘Five Bellies’ Gardner as Terry, although Gascoigne’s wealth and celebrity in the 1990s took him way beyond the Elm Lodge housing estate.

  It seems reasonable to assume that David Beckham took a good look at the fates that befell both Gascoigne and Best and decided they were excellent models to avoid completely, for Beckham has managed to ride the waves of constant media exposure with extraordinary poise. Beckham was born in 1975 in Whipps Cross Hospital in east London, not far from Barking where Bobby Moore grew up. The parallels between the two men extend far beyond their birthplace and their captaincy of the England football team. There was a similarity of character between them in the way they conducted themselves. They were each dedicated to improving their skills in a way far beyond that of other professionals in their teams. They each suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. It has already been noted how Bobby Moore’s mother used to wash and iron the laces in his football boots before each game and how he liked his clothes ironed not folded and hung in the wardrobe in strict order, from the darkest colour to the lightest. When other players after training or a match would simply tear off their dirty strip and leave it on the dressing-room floor while they padded off to the showers, Moore would scrupulously fold his own filthy clothes and make a start on those of his team-mates. Ted Beckham was surprised to discover how neat and tidy his young son was. David, too, folded his dirty laundry and a parental suggestion to his teenage son that he might wear blue trousers and a
clashing red shirt induced a toddler-like rage. His bedroom was kept constantly immaculate as if he was expecting a visit from Her Majesty the Queen or possibly Bobby Moore.

  However, the political and social order in which Moore grew up was very different from that experienced by Beckham. Moore came from a solidly working-class Labour-voting family. Beckham’s father was the son of a sweetmaker by trade and grew up in Sheerness where he scratched out a living making rock and sweets for holidaymakers. His own family started in a small flat in Walthamstow, then the sixth floor of a tower block in Chingford, then a three-bedroom house in Leytonstone, which is where he and his wife were living when David was born.

  Ted Beckham had left school without any qualifications at a time when education was probably at its widest and most effective, between the impact of the Butler Act of 1944 and the growth of comprehensive schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He worked as a waiter at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, then found a job with a small building firm doing re-pointing and roofing work. He walked out of that job in disgust when his boss refused to give him the afternoon off to celebrate the announcement of his engagement. Bobby Moore’s father would probably have been disgusted at such dereliction and lack of working-class pride, but it is an interesting reflection of the way in which attitudes to work changed in the 1960s and 1970s. The thousands of hands that would go up at Longbridge or Dagenham in favour of strike action for any cause that union leaders cared to place in front of their supine members regularly demonstrated that the fear of unemployment which had been so all-pervasive in the years before 1939 no longer held the same power.

  Unlike Moore and Lineker, David Beckham did not take the Eleven Plus. In the 1950s it would have offered his father a way out of the endless dead-end jobs he was forced to take, but by 1984 the system of comprehensive education made selection at the age of eleven an irrelevance to most state-school pupils. The ten-year-old David’s football skills soon got him noticed by both Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United after he had won a place at the Bobby Charlton Summer School in 1985. He trained with both clubs, both of which offered him terms. Mrs Beckham had problems with Alex Ferguson because she couldn’t understand a word he said on the telephone, but in the end his and his father’s long-standing support for United – which had begun, as it had for so many others, in the aftermath of the Munich air disaster in 1958 – proved the determining factor.