IT has always been a bit of a puzzle how John William Madden, a riveter by trade, and a retired Scottish footballer who had played at the highest levels for Celtic, Tottenham Hotspur and Scotland, had arrived in Prague in Bohemia in 1905. At that time, Bohemia was a province of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But whatever the circumstances were, Bohemia would be the country in which Madden would live for almost 30 years until his death in 1948. During that time he became a football legend in what is now the Czech Republic and is widely regarded as the country’s Father of Football.
Madden arrived in a country undergoing far-reaching changes. In 1900 it had a population of just over six million people, and was one of the most thickly settled provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Czechs formed around 60 per cent of the population and the Germans 40 per cent. The Germans lived chiefly near the boundaries of the province especially near the northern and north-western boundaries. Prague, the Czech capital, had benefited from the industrial expansion of the second half of the 19th century in Bohemia – its slums had been cleared, and it had grown from a provincial town into a lively metropolis.
A new cosmopolitan class of people had emerged in the city – the so-called ‘generation of the 1890s’ – with the wealth and status to bring about improvements. More individualistic, innovative and artistic than their forebears, they had an optimistic view of the future. They welcomed the national revival which had begun earlier in the 19th century in Bohemia. Czech history, art and culture were celebrated and new institutions founded such as the National Theatre in 1861 and National Museum in 1890. The influential Czech national gymnastic society and youth movement, Sokol (Falcon), was launched in 1862 and recreational activities had become popular.
The introduction of football into Bohemia had been relatively slow to develop. It first appeared in the country in the early 1880s, primarily among its German population, but in the Czech lands it was far less prominent. The most powerful team in the period 1885–95 was Regatta Prag, a team which although playing in Prague, consisted mostly of ethnic Germans.
The game had faced conservative opposition from the influential Sokol management which refused to recognise football as a sports movement and insisted on their own style and method of physical training.
If Czech athletes played football, it was for the most part to diversify their training for the more popular sports of rowing and cycling. But interest in football gathered pace in the 1890s, especially in the Czech secondary schools, and an important breakthrough for the game came in 1897 when the official rules of football were first published in Bohemia in Sokol’s magazine. The game from then on took root, not only in Prague but in Czech cities such as Nymburk, Chrudin, and Mlada Boleslav.
In 1892 the students at a branch of a Czech literary and debating society in Prague had set up a sports club which they called Slavia Prague. At first the main interest was in cycling whose popularity had spread to Bohemia from the neighbouring countries of Germany and Austria. But four years later, with football becoming more and more fashionable in the city, a league for Prague football sides had been established. The students decided it was time to launch their own football team – SK Slavia Prague. At the first meeting of the organising committee, it was decided that the new club’s shirt colours would be red and white, the red signifying the heart with which the team would play, and the white for its purity of thought and fairness.
The team started to play at the beginning of 1896 and within three months recorded their first victory. Later in the same year another Prague football club was founded – AC Sparta Prague – and gave birth to what became the greatest rivalry in Czech sport. For the next few years Slavia Prague enjoyed moderate success but the standard was relatively low and it was soon clear that big improvements were needed in its organisation, management and training. In fact there was no official manager or coach, and team captains were left to sort matters out as best they could. It was not long before those responsible for the club recognised that if it were to prosper, it simply had to be professionally run. And it was Britain that they looked to for help.
Johnny Madden was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, on 11 June 1865. He was one of at least nine children of Irish immigrants Edward Madden and Agnes Mcllvaine. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic and probably educated at St Patrick’s School in Dumbarton, adjacent to the church of that name. Little is known of his early life. He left school without any formal qualifications and became a riveter working in the local shipyards. It was arduous and dangerous work and instilled in him that hard work ethic which was characteristic of his later life.
It was soon apparent that he was also a very promising footballer. Strong, elusive and skilful, he possessed a powerful shot. Whenever he hit the goal post it threatened to uproot it, hence the nickname he acquired – ‘The Rooter’. His club career began in 1886 in Dumbarton with two of the town’s minor sides, Albion and Hibs, before he moved on to playing regularly for Dumbarton. Like several of his Scottish contemporaries, if offered a chance of earning an extra shilling he would take it. On occasions he was prepared to turn out for other teams as far apart as Grimsby Town and Gainsborough Trinity who were both members of the English Football League. He would work all week riveting at the shipyard, travel overnight to a club in England and return in time for work on Monday morning.
The Dumbarton centre-forward soon attracted attention nearer to his home. He was asked to join a newly created club to be called Glasgow Celtic. He was reluctant to do so as he was aware that several former attempts to start the club had failed. However, he was impressed by the ambition now shown, for instance a volunteer workforce had built their ground at Parkhead, and thought this time there was something different, so he agreed to become part of Celtic’s squad.
On 28 May 1888 he turned out for Celtic in their inaugural match in which they defeated a team called Rangers Swifts 5-2. Although Madden had not scored, at the celebration party afterwards he was asked to join Celtic permanently. However, Dumbarton were a successful team, so he declined initially and returned home.
Celtic however would not take no for an answer and despite offers from other clubs in England, he eventually signed for them in August 1889 and stayed until 1897. The side went on to win three Scottish League championships in the 1890s. They played in a typical Scottish style – a skilful, close passing and dribbling game – suited to Madden’s talents. He excelled and the crowd loved him. One of his former Celtic colleagues, James Blessington, claimed that as far as the five-a-side version of the game was concerned, Madden was the greatest player Scotland had ever produced. In one season alone he won dozens of gold watches and clocks to furnish every room in a mansion. He is said to have given most of them away to friends and relatives as wedding presents. [John Madden. www.west-dumbarton.gov.uk]
However, his Celtic side did not always have their own way. On New Year’s Day 1892, Celtic, with Johnny Madden in their side, played Dumbarton in a prestigious friendly watched by 15,000 people. When the final whistle blew Dumbarton had beaten the home team 8-0. Rumours immediately swept the East End of Glasgow that the Celtic players had been out drinking on the eve of the game and that more than a few were feeling the effects during the match. Naturally, the Celtic fans were not happy to see their team so badly beaten.
However, there were in the eyes of at least one observer some grounds for excuses, ‘At that time, the festival of Christmas was not celebrated to any great extent, with shops always open and many people working on the day. By contrast, the New Year was a real holiday, the drinking bouts beginning during the afternoon of Hogmanay and continuing through the night and into the next day or even two! The Celtic players would have found it difficult to avoid the company of drinkers during the 24 hours prior to the game and probably, in the knowledge that the match against Dumbarton was a friendly, a few might have succumbed to the occasional glass, with the inevitable consequences. As to why the Dumbarton players were not similarly affected, one can only assume that, during that particular New Year festival, to use a Glasgow colloquialism, there were more “bevvy-merchants” among the Celtic side.’ https://www.kohlibri.e-bookshelf.de/products/reading-epub/product-id/4049/title/Celtic
As Johnny Madden’s reputation as a player spread, it was not surprising that some of the professional clubs in England would come knocking. Officially, Scottish footballers at that time were amateurs but ambitious English clubs recognised talent when they saw it and were quite prepared to dangle attractive financial contracts before what were called colloquially the Scottish ‘salmon’. The poaching of their best players naturally aroused strong feelings among the Scottish clubs, and Madden became involved in an incident which illustrates just how dangerous a task it could be for English scouts when trying to recruit in Scotland.
In September 1891, when Madden was a Celtic player, he met up at Partick railway station with a Mr Dickinson from the Yorkshire football club Sheffield Wednesday and a Mr Wilson, probably a football agent. They adjourned to a local pub in Dumbarton which Madden left after a while, but then returned with two other Dumbarton footballers – Spiers and Towie. Just as Towie was about to succumb to a bit of smooth talking from Mr Dickinson and sign for Wednesday, the pub door flew open and in marched some Dumbarton club officials and a number of local heavies. It was most probably a situation that Wilson had been in before, for he wasted no time in beating a hasty retreat from the pub, leaving Dickinson and Madden, with backs to the wall to face the music.
Apparently, news of the event had spread and a crowd of some 200 had by now gathered outside the pub. Dickinson was roughed up and with his mouth and nose bleeding, he fled to the station with a mob in hot pursuit. Fortunately for him a train was just about to depart for Glasgow and the exhausted Dickinson collapsed into a compartment where he found Wilson, who had come out unscathed, sitting spick and span. The whole episode does not reflect well on Madden who was obviously acting as some sort of a go-between. [John Madden.west Dumbarton]
In fact, it was not the only controversial episode he was involved in. In the following year, another occurred, again connected with Sheffield Wednesday. Madden had apparently registered with the English FA as a player with Wednesday although still on Celtic’s books, and had done some training with the Yorkshire club. It is not clear how serious his intentions were, though he may have had some family connections in the area.
But Celtic’s suspicions were aroused and they were taking no chances. One of their star players, by fair means or foul, was certainly not going to be lured away that easily. There may well have been some strong-arm tactics brought to bear and even some dubious religious pressure. There is a story of Madden being ‘spirited’ back to Celtic by a Catholic priest who had been in Sheffield for only two days. [John Madden. west Dumbaton]
To protect themselves against any further poaching, so it was rumoured, Celtic ensured Madden was made one of the highest-earning players at the allegedly amateur club. During his eight years at Celtic he won championships medals in 1882 and 1883 and numerous other cups. He scored 49 goals in 118 appearances and worked hard for the team. Surprisingly, he played for his country only twice. In total, he scored five goals for the Scottish national side, four of them in a game against Wales. After leaving Celtic he had short playing spells with Dundee and Tottenham Hostspur before he finally retired as a player in 1898.
There has been much speculation as to why in 1905, after seven years of retirement, Madden should suddenly arrive in Prague. One theory is that during his time with Tottenham Hotspur he had played alongside an amateur known as Ernie Payne who had connections with Slavia Prague and Madden was put in contact with the club.
Another explanation is that the Czech team members badly wanted a British coach and their attention had settled on a very good Rangers player called John Tait Robertson who had been born in the same Dumbarton street as Madden.
Robertson, however, had no interest in managing abroad at that time (although later he went on to coach MTK Budapest and Rapid Vienna) and with the help of another footballer from Dumbarton, also of Rangers, a plot was concocted to deceive Slavia and get Madden into the post instead. Madden was dressed up in a Rangers jersey and Scottish international cap and duly presented to Slavia with all the right credentials.
We know that Madden had a wry sense of humour and an eye for the main chance but the story seems difficult to believe. Nonetheless, it did gain some credibility later when the Slavia club about 1910 issued a picture postcard bearing in the caption ‘John Madden Glasgow Rangers’.
Be that as it may, in February 1905 he arrived in Prague to take up the post as official coach to Slavia Prague Football Club, and became one of the first Scottish players to work as a coach/manager on the continent of Europe. He was 40 years old. He had only a very basic education and no linguistic skills. A record of his far-reaching arrival is recorded in a book, Czech Lane, by the author Maxim Boryslavsky, ‘My name,’ he said firmly to the Slavia players, ‘is Madden – em, ay, dee, ee, en. I have definitely had good experience. I know you have talent. We shall surely be friends.’
Madden became the finest coach in the country. He brought to Czech football ideas about how a side should be coached and managed which were revolutionary for the time. Since there is no evidence that he had previously had any serious coaching experience, it was remarkable that he should have been so successful.
However, he was an intelligent and confident man and had always kept himself physically very fit. He went about his work in a determined and methodical way, and when needed was a strict disciplinarian. All players needed to obey instruction; come well prepared and properly kitted out, even laces kept as tight as possible to get ready for a possible pass.
Training, he maintained, had to follow strict routines on a level and well-marked pitch. It would begin with warming-up exercises, short sprints and rapid steps. He introduced the typical Scottish short passing style of play, good movement, trickery and the use of both feet. But he was always on the lookout for new methods of training that would hold the interest of players and he was quite happy to introduce, for example, gymnastic sessions to provide variety and to strengthen muscles. Care was taken to draw up individual training regimes for members of the squad, and post-match reviews with players were introduced.
His skills as a coach soon extended beyond football and he helped ballet dancers, tennis and hockey players to get to their peak of physical fitness. Perhaps the most innovative point of all was the attention he devoted to the health and wellbeing of his players.
He insisted that a healthy lifestyle was the foundation for a successful sporting career. He advised his players on eating and what to drink, and importantly what not to drink. He would not tolerate players who did not like training and tried to dodge it. It was said that he learned only enough Czech to scold players he saw as lazy or more interested in pubs and women than in training. And very unusually for the time he banned smoking, declaring, ‘If a player smokes, he is no player.’
But he was careful to add, ‘The trainer can smoke!’ His habit of puffing away at his chibouk (a long Turkish tobacco pipe) which he never laid aside, even in the dressing room when issuing pre-match instructions, became legendary.
He acted also as masseur and doctor to the players though placed strong faith in the use of ‘Scottish jets’, spouts of cold water for curing injuries and muscle strains. A player described how Madden had dealt with torn muscles in his leg which a doctor had put in plaster: ‘Madden removed it and I placed my foot on the bottom of the bath tub, and from a distance of one metre, for half an hour he discharged a powerful jet of cold water on the foot. It was Easter and I was frozen.’ But it seemed to do the trick.
Madden was just as meticulous about his own personal appearance. In many ways he was the model for the overseas British manager of the age. He was always smartly turned-out and wore distinctively British-styled clothing and a black bowler hat and shiny shoes.
In that respect he was the mirror image of another Father, Fred Pentland, who was managing Athletic Bilbao around the same time.
Madden’s influence on Slavia’s fortunes was soon felt and the team was soon chalking up victories and winning cups in Bohemia (in many continental countries of the time, in the absence of leagues, ‘friendlies’ against over clubs often made up the fixtures). Comparing the results of some early matches which Slavia played against touring Rangers and Celtic sides provides a good indication of how quickly Madden had raised the playing standard of the team. When the two Scottish clubs had toured Bohemia earlier in 1904, they had both beaten Slavia comfortably.
But when Celtic returned in May 1906, this time Slavia drew 3-3.
The club’s supporters and the press were euphoric at the result. A newspaper disclosed it was well known that Madden viewed Celtic as ‘the best team on the globe and adjacent planets’.
The paper reported that to get a draw amounted to Slavia performing a miracle, and said 29 May 1906 will be in the history of Slavia – double-underlined in red. Several years later in 1922, when Madden was still manager, the two sides played one another again. This time Slavia won 3-2, an outstanding victory for the Czech side, although in truth it was a quite brutal game and two of the Celtic players were sent off for fouls.
Undoubtedly, the game Johnny Madden relished the most as a manager was the twice-yearly derby with Sparta Prague – the club founded shortly after Slavia. Traditionally, Sparta have drawn their support from the city’s working-class districts whereas Slavia has appealed more to the comfortably-off and intelligentsia.
Sparta had followed Slavia’s example by enlisting the services of another Scottish coach, John Dick, who had played for Airdrieonians before joining Arsenal in 1890. He moved to Prague in 1912 as a trainer of Deutscher FC before taking over Sparta where he was very successful in the years 1919–31. The emotionally-charged and bitter rivalry between the two clubs, which exists still today, would not have been new to Madden who had experienced the Celtic– Rangers clashes as a young man in Glasgow.
In Madden’s time in Prague, football was subject to many changes resulting from the radical national and political changes that took place in the country and which inevitably impacted on how the sport was organised and run. In 1918 the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War and by 1920 the first Czechoslovakian republic (including Bohemia) was established which was to last until 1938 when the country fell under the control of Hitler’s Germany.
In the 1920s and 30s the republic was relatively stable and prospered, and football became a highly popular sport. A professional league – the Central Czech League – was set up in 1925 and by 1930 had around 300 professional players. The two Prague clubs dominated the league. Under Madden’s management, Slavia won the championship in 1925, 1929 and 1930. He officially retired at the age of 66 in 1930. In total it is estimated that Madden, during his 25 years at Slavia, led the side to victory in 134 out of 169 domestic matches, a fabulous record.
The relatively high standard of football of the two Czech clubs can be seen by the success they had in the prestigious Mitropa Cup which was competed for by all the leading clubs from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Switzerland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Sparta Prague won the first competition in 1927. Slavia were the losing finalists in 1929, but were finally to win the cup in 1938, beating Genoa, Juventus and Ferencvaros on the way – a victory hailed by some Slavia fans as coming about while under ‘the indirect leadership of Madden’.
Not surprisingly, Madden’s talents were also recognised at the national level. As early as 1911 the Bohemian FA had appointed him to be the coach of their national side in one of the first football tournaments for international teams to be held in Europe. Although only three countries participated – England, France and Bohemia – the fact that Bohemia had been included in the tournament illustrates just how far football had progressed in such a relatively small country.
A British side had won gold at the 1908 Olympics, and would do so also at the 1912 Games, so England would have been formidable opponents. Their match against Bohemia provided a good example of Madden’s tactical acumen. His team recovered from an early English goal to go 2-1 up whereupon the English coach switched the formation of his players only to be countered effectively by Madden in a way which showed he was tactically ahead of the time. His team held on to record a famous victory although it required a penalty save by the Bohemian goalkeeper in the 83rd minute to do so.
Later, Madden was closely involved with the Czechoslovakian national side at the Paris Olympics of 1924 which was full of Slavia players. Similarly, several players in the national team that was runners-up in the 1934 World Cup had been coached under him.
Johnny Madden was deeply admired for his achievements at Slavia and had become affectionately known as Dedek or Grandpa. He remained in Prague for the rest of his life and enjoyed the respect shown to him and the opportunities to be part of the country’s sporting scene. When meeting his old Rangers friend, John Tait Robertson, in Vienna, Madden assured him that coaching in Prague was preferable to knocking in rivets on Clydeside.
He kept in close touch with the fortunes of Slavia Prague. Even after a stroke which had left him in a wheelchair with speech difficulties, he could still be found in his seventies directing training and making good use of a pointer.
A former player has left this memory of him, ‘At the end of one game, we noticed that our match had been watched by a few spectators, one of whom was an old man in a wheelchair. He was very animated, this man. He had a nurse with him who kept telling him to be quiet, but despite this, he continued to shout instructions at us boys. The instructions were in broken Czech and they were barked – he seemed angry to me, he spoke in a funny accent – yet he also seemed knowledgeable about football and at the end we were taken over by our coach to meet him as apparently he was quite famous – or indeed had been famous. He was introduced as “Dedek” or Grandpa and he was 80 years old.’ [http://www.talkceltic.net/forum/showthread.php?t=125897www.talkceltic.net]
No doubt he did miss his family and friends in Scotland, but there were good reasons too for staying put in Prague. Fairly early in his time in Prague he had married a local woman called Frantiska Cechova. They had a son named Harry, or Jindrich in Czech, and possibly a daughter. Harry, himself a footballer, had an unfortunate love affair and died early which deeply affected Madden. Financially, too, he seems to have been well remunerated. He had been awarded a pension by the grateful Czech authorities which he might lose if he left the country. He and his wife Frantiska were able to live in a fairly prosperous part of Prague and both were always smartly dressed. He remained a British citizen throughout the two world wars until his death. However, living abroad in enemy occupied country as a British citizen would not have been a pleasant experience for him and he may well have had to endure some form of internment.
In the spring of 1948, at the age of 83, Johnny Madden died. The Slavia team of the day, clad in their club shirts, gave his coffin a guard of honour. He is buried in the Olshanxsky Cemetery in Prague along with his widow who died in 1963, and their son. The anniversary of his death is still marked with wreaths of red and white flowers (the Slavia colours) laid by fans and visitors from abroad.
Inevitably his success in Czechoslovakia has given rise to its own legends. There was, so it is claimed, a famous statue of him in Prague erected in his memory but no one has apparently seen it. In recent years Slavia have rather struggled on and off the field, especially with financial pressures. However, embedded deep in the popular consciousness of what is now the Czech Republic is the memory of Johnny Madden’s outstanding contribution to football in his adopted country. In April 1988, on the 40th anniversary of his death, a newspaper published the following tribute to him, ‘The former Scot sleeps his eternal sleep in the Czech land and if there is life hereafter, surely his chibouk (pipe) will be hovering over a football pitch.’ [http://www.thecelticwiki.com/page/Madden,+Johnny?t=anon]