MRS PARSLOW: Foreign is he?
GRANVILLE: It looks like that, Mrs Parslow.
MRS PARSLOW: Ee, don’t they have some funny ways?
Open All Hours, ‘St Albert’s Day’ (Roy Clarke; BBC TV, 1981)
SOME HAD gone prepared with bags of scrap paper or had chopped up pages from phone books. Others, seeing what those around them had planned, quickly improvised by tearing newspapers or food wrappers. When Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa climbed the steps that brought the players into view at the south-west corner of White Hart Lane, passing below the ubiquitous navy blue home-made Spurs banner, the makeshift tickertape fell about their ears in a poignant reminder of home.
It took an exaggerated stretch of the imagination to truly conjure up images of the sea of white that welcomed the World Cup-winning Argentina team every time they’d entered the River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires during the summer but, for the Tottenham fans who had grabbed places close to the players’ tunnel on this sunny August afternoon, it was their way of welcoming two men who had become the talk of English football.
‘Pre-season was absolute chaos,’ Villa, the less celebrated of the duo, recalled of his arrival in London. ‘People seemed to gather wherever we went, in their hundreds at training.’754 Yet it was a home game against London rivals Chelsea – the third game of the campaign – that offered most of a fascinated population their first chance to see these exotic specimens in their new habitat. Commentating for The Big Match, Brian Moore welcomed the players to the field by highlighting ‘this amazing atmosphere’ and added, ‘It really is still a novelty to see those two great Argentinian players on an English field.’
There was no danger of mixing up the two men, born within two weeks of each other 26 years earlier and now firm friends. Short and slight, Ardiles, in the No.8 shirt, wore several days’ dark stubble, giving him an even leaner look than usual, like a Spaghetti western villain. Villa, No.7, sported a full beard and a taller, fuller figure. Opposing them was a Chelsea side boasting experienced defenders Ron Harris and David Hay, himself a World Cup veteran, and a group of fresh-faced, mostly home-grown, forwards, including skipper Ray Wilkins.
It had been Chelsea’s previous visit to White Hart Lane more than three years previously when 18-year-old Wilkins, more commonly known in those days as ‘Butch’, had inherited the Chelsea captaincy for the match that, as well as featuring battles on the pitch between the fans, ensured that it was the visitors who were condemned to relegation. For this game, Spurs, fresh from their own one-year sentence in the Second Division, had seen their fans gathering around Tottenham High Road since early morning in readiness for their first home Saturday of the season. At least they were intent on voyeurism rather than violence, inspired by the opportunity to see men who had reportedly cost a combined £700,000.
Both players crossed themselves as the game kicked off and Spurs centre-forward Gerry Armstrong, sporting one of several fashionable bubble perms on view, hit the first shot over the bar. Colour television was still uncommon enough in 1978 for Moore to say sorry to those monochrome viewers having trouble distinguishing the traditional Spurs kit from Chelsea’s yellow shirts and green shorts, but there was nothing apologetic about the way the big blond figure of Steve Wicks bundled the ball and Villa into touch in the eighth minute. Far from clearing the danger, though, it set up a piece of Argentinian magic.
Villa dropped the throw-in at the feet of Ardiles, who took the ball down the right wing beyond his team-mate before dragging it back to his colleague with the sole of his boot. Villa powered around the outside of a desperate challenge by Gary Stanley and then back-heeled into the path of Ardiles advancing into the area. He skipped past Wicks and used the outside of his left foot to flick the ball back from the byline. After it bounced off Armstrong’s chest, Scottish striker John Duncan tucked away the loose ball for a goal that was, according to Moore, ‘the work undeniably, though, of the two Argentinians’. A couple of teenaged fans in cap-sleeved T-shirts ran on to hug Ardiles as the crowd took up the ‘Ar-gen-tina, Ar-gen-tina’ chant that had been heard so frequently during the summer.
The lead lasted less than a minute and Ardiles set about aiming to restore the advantage, clipping a shot outside the post. With half-time approaching, Villa laid the ball off to Ardiles. Progressing into the area, Villa latched on to a nicely-weighted first-time return pass from his team-mate, checked back inside Kenny Swain and presented the ball for Armstrong to drive in from near the penalty spot. ‘And again the Argentinians have made it,’ observed Moore, who chirped as the half-time whistle blew, ‘Tottenham are beginning to get dividends from their outlay. Little Ardiles has looked so skilful, so spritely and so capable of pulling off the incredible.’ He couldn’t do all the defending, though, and the final score of 2-2 meant a third game for Tottenham’s new acquisitions without victory.
The contribution of Ardiles was enough to encourage The Big Match producers to piece together a slow-motion montage, shot on film, of the Argentinian flitting around the field to the musical backing of Lindisfarne’s recent top ten hit, ‘Run For Home’. Wicks was rather more prosaic in his reaction. ‘Ardiles could cost them a lot of goals because he doesn’t get back,’ he argued. ‘Every time an attack broke down he seemed to be standing next to me.’
It had not been because of defensive abilities that Ardiles had found Spurs manager Keith Burkinshaw sitting with an interpreter in a Buenos Aires hotel, two weeks after Argentina had beaten Holland 3-1 in the World Cup Final. Energetic and intelligent with a sharp mind and a delicate touch, Ardiles had been one of the most important elements of the host nation’s progress to what appeared pre-ordained glory. Having missed the 6-0 victory over Peru that had earned them a place in the final after suffering an ankle injury in the previous game, he was considered so vital that Argentina’s medical staff gave him a series of painkilling injections to ensure that he got through 70 minutes of the final. Prompting the play from central midfield in his No.2 jersey – courtesy of his country’s alphabetical distribution of squad numbers – he provided the platform for the headline-grabbing Mario Kempes. ‘Half my job was to create, the other half to defend,’ Ardiles explained. ‘I was a pure midfielder who you rarely saw in either penalty area.’755
Burkinshaw’s journey had been inspired by Sheffield United boss Harry Haslam, who, in conjunction with his Argentinian coaches Danny Bergera and Oscar Arce, had been tracking young players in the country, including an exciting prospect who had just failed to make the World Cup squad, Diego Maradona. Knowing that Ardiles’s club, Huracan, needed more money than Sheffield United could afford, Haslam alerted Burkinshaw and arranged for Antonio Rattin, the Argentina captain infamously sent off in the 1966 World Cup quarter-final, to help broker a deal.
Ardiles had already begun imagining himself in European football, although in Spain or Italy, whose biggest games were shown on local television. ‘While the Italians drooled over his skills and the Spaniards awaited developments, Burkinshaw caught a plane to the Argentine capital,’ reporter Malcolm Folley explained when the Daily Express broke the exclusive story under the headline, ‘SPURS SCOOP THE WORLD’. Daily Mirror chief sports writer Frank McGhee countered by claiming Burkinshaw made his move having ‘studied my report that the successful Argentine team was about to break up’.
Ardiles was summoned to the Sheraton Hotel in his nation’s capital. He knew little of English football and had never heard of Tottenham Hotspur; he certainly had no idea they had only just regained First Division status. Burkinshaw watched him intently while an interpreter laid out the Spurs offer. Like a prospective dog owner who chooses two puppies so that they can keep each other company, Burkinshaw had been persuaded of the wisdom of signing two Argentinians and revealed his interest in Villa, who had roomed with Ardiles during the World Cup. ‘Many people think he is the best player in Argentina,’ Burkinshaw said of a man who had played only twice as a substitute during the World Cup. Hence Villa picked up the telephone and heard his friend asking, ‘Do you fancy playing in England?’
Once it had been explained that Tottenham was in London, Ardiles and his wife, Sylvia, took little persuading. Having begun training for a law degree before becoming a professional footballer – a curiosity most commentators couldn’t resist mentioning at least once per game during the World Cup – Ardiles negotiated on behalf of both players, ensuring identical personal terms. Surprisingly, the reported combined transfer fee of £700,000 (or £750,000 in some newspapers) was weighted towards Villa; £375,000 to £325,000 according to his own recollection. Both men were to be paid a £25,000 annual salary, not a great deal more than they had received in their home country. Villa noted, though, that it was a novelty for him when his wages arrived on time. He also banked £45,000 as his percentage of the transfer fee. Additionally, Spurs gave the players a monthly allowance to call home, but as Villa’s parents in Roque Perez didn’t have a telephone it meant a little extra cash in his pocket.
News of the transfers stunned British football. There had been no inkling in the press that anything was in the works, no protracted negotiations in the media. And Burkinshaw, a former miner from Barnsley with a strait-laced public persona, had hardly been the most likely candidate for such a display of flamboyance and audacity. While Brian Clough’s subsequent £1 million capture of Trevor Francis would be totally in character, Burkinshaw had led Tottenham back to the First Division on the back of judicious signings from Scotland or England’s lower divisions. Colin Lee, a forward who scored four goals on his Spurs debut after a £60,000 move from Torquay United, was his kind of deal.
Burkinshaw, 43, had been sacked as coach of Newcastle United and relegated and promoted in his first two seasons in charge at Spurs. Suddenly he was a pioneer; someone who would stroll into a Las Vegas casino, dinner jacket draped over his shoulder, and throw down a wad of cash on red. Admitting that he ‘never expected to get the pair of them’, Burkinshaw added, ‘It proves that Tottenham think big and want to be the best club in the country.’ Burkinshaw acknowledged that the impoverished state of both Huracan and Villa’s Racing Club contributed to it becoming ‘the easiest deal I have ever done’. And he added, ‘Sometimes we undersell ourselves. Our game still warrants tremendous respect abroad. Both players wanted to come to England and can’t wait to get on with the job.’
Within five days of the deal being completed, Ardiles and Villa were bound for England for the first time. They were given a taste of the kind of winter of industrial unrest that awaited them in Britain when they were stranded for a night in Madrid by the same work stoppage of Spanish and French air-traffic controllers that was wrecking the plans of thousands of British holidaymakers. Having at last made it to London, they were taken to White Hart Lane to see the stadium, finalise contracts, meet team-mates and then be introduced to fans and photographers on a sunny Monday morning. Then came lunch, a medical and the first press conference, aided by a translator.
‘Everyone has been marvellous,’ said Ardiles, whose wife was expecting their second child. ‘I would like the baby to have double nationality. I think London is a beautiful city and England a very beautiful country. I know about the Queen, the Thames river, Manchester, Liverpool, the Beatles and,’ he added, apparently unaware of the Irish Sea, ‘George Bernard Shaw.’
The state of the British economy, ubiquitous even in the minds of sports hacks, featured prominently in the exchanges. Questions such as, ‘What do you know about the crippling tax system we have here?’ were balanced by, ‘Are you impressed by our relatively low rate of inflation?’ To the latter, Villa responded, ‘Yes, one year’s inflation here is equal to one month’s inflation in Argentina.’
The following day, the duo returned to Buenos Aires to prepare for a more permanent trip. Their transfers had in part been made possible by the European Economic Community ruling in February that a player’s nationality was not a lawful reason to prevent a club signing him. Football was ordered to follow the principles of the Treaty of Rome, which allowed for workforce fluidity between member countries. Clubs should be allowed two overseas players, Brussels decided, and the Football League duly approved the measures at its annual general meeting early in June, adding that players from the Republic of Ireland would continue not to count as ‘foreign’. That ruling effectively ended England’s 47-year ban on overseas players. Approval for work permits would still be needed for players from outside the EEC, but on that score Burkinshaw had stated, ‘The Department of Employment told me last week that there wouldn’t be any problem.’
The English sporting media were happy to offer their endorsement of the new arrivals. ‘All we need now is one or two foreign managers,’ said David Miller in the Daily Express. ‘Ardiles might just persuade us to ask why we have so few comparable stars. The answer is that for 15 years English soccer has crushed intelligent players under a mountain of defensive caution, intimidation and weak refereeing.’
The Guardian quickly became besotted, writing in its season preview that ‘there has been something in the air at White Hart Lane’ and putting it down to ‘two Argentinians, one small and dapper, the other tall, handsome and of the build one would expect to see spread across the centrefold of Playgirl.’ Yet Cliff Lloyd, the long-standing secretary of the Professional Footballers’ Association, saw warning signs for his members. ‘It is a situation that cannot be dismissed lightly,’ he said. ‘There is, of course, nothing to stop Common Market players coming here, but I am surprised Spurs say they have been assured there will be no problem about signing these Argentinians.’
A few days after Tottenham had completed their shopping, Haslam made a signing of his own for Sheffield United, spending £160,000 on uncapped River Plate midfielder Alejandro Sabella. That prompted PFA executive committee member and soon-to-be-chairman Gordon Taylor to warn, ‘If the trickle of foreign players becomes a flow it would be detrimental to our members.’
Within two weeks, the Football League management committee had sanctioned the Ardiles-Villa-Sabella signings, on the same day that Southampton paid £50,000 for Partizan Belgrade right-back Ivan Golac, a Yugoslav international. Sports minister Denis Howell promptly hinted that transfers from outside the EEC could be halted. ‘What we have to establish is some kind of principle,’ he said. ‘There is no guarantee that players from outside the Common Market will get work permits. Tottenham made no proper attempt to clarify the position before they signed the Argentinian players and the government have not yet received the official attitude of the FA.’
John Grant, the employment under-secretary, was even more explicit. ‘No further permits will be issued for the employment of overseas footballers until we have urgent government discussions with the football organisations concerned,’ he said. With football, for once, appearing to have a more progressive attitude than government desired, England manager Ron Greenwood complained about the authorities’ ‘head-in-the-sand attitude’. He said, ‘They’ve granted three registrations and it’s about time they granted 33 if necessary.’
Southampton manager Lawrie McMenemy warned that he would be ‘very disappointed’ if Golac was denied a work permit. In the end, the player, who was studying agricultural engineering, was signed as a non-contract player to avoid him being registered as foreign. Instead, the 28-year-old son of an army colonel was given a six-month student visa while the red tape was negotiated.
Manchester City were next to put their cat among the PFA’s pigeons when chairman Peter Swales announced he had negotiated the signing of Poland’s World Cup midfielder Kazimierz Deyna from Legia Warsaw. Yet the further comments of Lloyd can hardly have given McMenemy or Swales cause for optimism. ‘It only needs a club to enjoy success with foreigners in their team and the rest will jump on the bandwagon,’ he warned with a logic that could not be disputed. And, sounding not unlike those who had spoken against the influx of immigrant workers in other industries over the previous three decades, he added that ‘every job taken by an overseas player will mean less (sic) opportunities for our own’ and suggested that ‘we could be caught up in something that is detrimental to the game in this country’.
Manchester City’s Scottish international midfielder Asa Hartford suggested that there was a need to ‘safeguard the future of our own young stars’756 yet former Derby manager Dave Mackay argued, ‘I think that this is one of the bravest strokes that’s ever been pulled in English football. Bring in all the best players and make it harder for our professionals. Most of them are getting fortunes in wages; let them work for it.’757 Ardiles would develop a philosophical acceptance of his situation, having arrived in England unaware of the history he was helping to create: ‘I think all processes of change start off like that. The first thing that has to shift is the cultural preconception.’758
There had, in fact, been various foreign players in the Football League before 1978. Walter Bowman, a Canadian of Swiss heritage, played for Accrington Stanley in the 1890s before Tottenham made German Max Seeburg the first European-born foreigner to play in the League in 1908. A small handful followed until Arsenal attempted to sign Austrian goalkeeper Rudy Hiden in 1930. His work permit was denied and when the Gunners instead went after Dutchman Gerry Keizer the following year the FA declared that all incoming foreigners would have to fulfil a two-year residency before being eligible for English football. Thus, the borders were closed, although Manchester City famously signed German goalkeeper Bert Trautmann, who had fulfilled residency requirements by spending four years in England as a prisoner of war.
Players from colonial countries continued to perform in England, by virtue of the 1948 Nationality Act, which offered right of entry to citizens of the Commonwealth. Among a steady stream of South Africans to arrive were Bill Perry, scorer of the winning goal for Blackpool in the 1953 FA Cup Final, Charlton Athletic forward Eddie Firmani and Leeds United winger Albert Johanneson. But a broader opening of the borders as a way of attracting crowds had been dismissed by Football League secretary Alan Hardaker in 1972 when he stated, ‘The import of foreign stars would weaken the domestic game like water dilutes good home brewed whisky and if the dreaded foreigners were allowed in we would be in the same mess as France and Italy.’ Writing in Football Monthly, columnist Leslie Vernon referred to Hardaker’s comments as ‘gross ignorance’ and pointed out that crowds in those countries were increasing.759
There was no doubting the breakthrough moment that Ardiles and Villa represented. And, despite the dissenting voices from the PFA, there was no real suggestion at this stage that these events would herald the kind of overseas takeover of England’s top flight that, three decades later, would be cited among the biggest reasons for the national team’s lack of achievement. Besides, English football was already populated by plenty of players not qualified for England, thanks to a large contingent of Scots, Irish and Welsh. In 1972, one-sixth of top-flight professionals were said to be from Scotland, while Football Handbook studied one Saturday in October 1978 and reported that only two of 22 First Division clubs fielded a full team of Englishmen. On average there were 3.4 non-English players in each starting line-up. That season’s FA Cup Final between Arsenal and Manchester United would feature only seven Englishmen among the 22 who started the game.
Greenwood felt the Argentinians’ arrival ‘gives the new season a tremendous boost’, while the assessment of one of his West Ham protégés, Frank Lampard, a year earlier had been, ‘Our football is going through a funny stage at the moment and I’m not sure it’s a very good phase. There is not much individual flair coming on the field from our players, whereas if foreign players came over here that would change.’760
The general level of acceptance and excitement shown towards the players by fans was an interesting phenomenon, not entirely in keeping with the British public’s usual approach to strangers in their midst. As The Sweeney’s DI Jack Regan said on hearing of a foreign colleague’s problems getting through the airport, ‘Oh, well that’s par for Heathrow, innit? Fortress England. If Hitler was alive, they’d give him a job out there.’761
In his chronicle of the decade, Alwyn W. Turner observed, ‘There was still a strong legacy of suspicion aimed at mainland Europe, a reluctance to get too involved … Britain might have been late in joining the EEC but the same was also true of English football clubs entering the European Cup, or the Eurovision Song Contest and even the slapstick television game show Jeux Sans Frontieres.’762 Reports such as that in The Times in mid-decade claiming the rabies frontier was moving 30 miles closer to England every year didn’t help.
But, as Laurel Forster and Sue Harper noted in their introduction to British Culture and Society in the 1970s, ‘The 1970s in Britain was a decade of immense complexity in almost every sphere. There were numerous contradictions.’763 One of those, it appeared, was that football fans, used to having their sport denigrated as being backward in comparison to the supposedly more sophisticated Europeans and South Americans, took sufficient pride in the arrival of Ardiles and Villa to put aside the xenophobia that was a more typical response to any suggestion of ‘foreign invasion’ in other walks of life.
Portrayals of foreigners throughout the 1970s never strayed too far from the template outlined by writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais via the words of Terry Collier (see Chapter 6). In Fawlty Towers, it may have been the exasperation of John Cleese at his Spanish waiter’s failure to comprehend his instructions that provided many of the laughs, but Andrew Sachs’s simple, if well-meaning, character played to stereotypes and ended up making life hell for the country’s foreign waiters, who now had self-styled comedians screaming ‘Manuel!’ at them from over their Saturday-night lagers.
And between 1977 and 1979, ITV aired three series of Mind Your Language, in which Barry Evans played an English teacher hired to teach foreign students at night school. His class included a series of perceived national archetypes: a loud, womanising Italian chef; a Spanish bartender with a total inability to grasp the English language; and a pair of female au pairs – an efficient, hard-working German and an amorous and beautiful French girl. Endearingly, Ardiles managed to sound as though he was auditioning for a role in the show every time he referred to his new club as ‘Tottingham’.
International influence had become an increasing part of British life in the 1970s, with millions taking package holidays to the Continent and French-style wine bars and Italian coffee shops becoming a feature of many high streets, even out in the provinces. ‘And yet,’ stated historian Dominic Sandbrook, ‘exceptionalism – the belief that Britain was different and should steer its own course free from continental entanglement – died hard.’764
The manner in which the British public saw themselves in relation to their nearest foreign neighbours had been put to the test in 1975 in the referendum that asked the simple question, ‘Do you think the UK should stay in the European Community?’ The campaign was low-key on both sides, with one of the most memorable elements being the celebrities, including football figures Sir Matt Busby, Jock Stein, Don Revie and Derek Dougan*, who were recruited to urge people to vote ‘Yes’. The voting took place shortly after Leeds United’s defeat against Bayern Munich in the European Cup Final. When the French referee inexplicably ruled out Peter Lorimer’s goal, one pro-Europe MP commented, ‘My God, there goes half a million votes.’765
When Edward Heath had led the UK into Europe on the first day of 1973, The Times reported that only 38 per cent of the public were in favour, but by the time of the referendum two and a half years later, the voters’ national inclination towards the status quo now weighed in favour of the pro-European campaign. The Common Market had been given enough time to become the devil people knew and, besides, did anyone really have a clear idea of what difference it made? As Monty Python’s Flying Circus star Michael Palin noted in his diary, ‘Neither decision I think involves the downfall of our nation. Once a decision is taken it will all be absorbed into the system and the country will carry on working (or not working) as it always did.’766 The voting turnout ended up at 65 per cent – as opposed to 78 per cent in the first general election of 1974 – and the ‘Yes’ campaign scored a convincing victory with 67 per cent of the vote.
Dalglish. Johnson. And Johnson, a ball into acres of empty space for Heighway. And Heighway, a brilliant cross back … [crowd erupts]. McDermott it was who finished it, and what a classic goal. Tottenham in remnants.
Granada TV commentator Gerald Sinstadt, Liverpool v
Spurs, 1978
While foreigners had either been tolerated as economic partners or laughed at as television caricatures, they were now being accepted as football imports by most fans. In September 1978 a compromise was reached where ‘overseas players of established international reputation, who have a distinctive contribution to make to the national game’ would be allowed in by the Department of Employment, provided clubs could prove they could not find a player of similar standard in Britain. Even after the resulting ratification of the Golac and Deyna transfers, Ipswich Town’s early-season signing of Dutch midfielder Arnold Mühren and, most unlikely of all, Birmingham City’s recruitment of the wild-haired Argentinian right-back Alberto Tarantini, the number of foreign players was still too low for them to be perceived as a threat to the fabric of the English game.
There were plenty of on-field stereotypes at play, though. The view prevailed that the true test of a footballer was his ability to slog through the rain on a cold winter’s night, something assumed to be beyond anyone brought up with the sun on his back. Everton manager Gordon Lee said, ‘I would like to see their reactions to playing on a wet and windy mid-winter evening when they are trailing 2-0 away to Blackburn Rovers.’767
Ardiles’s response to the meteorological argument was that ‘we have winters in Argentina too’, but West Bromwich Albion forward Tony Brown warned, ‘The big test will come when they go out and play in the snow or on a mud-caked pitch. It’s not easy to play fancy football on a dodgy surface.’ Brown, no mean craftsman himself, was hardly alone in believing that an elevated degree of ball skill amounted to ‘fancy football’ – and unrelated to results. One of the decade’s biggest selling music acts, Slade, had even released a single earlier in the year containing a pay-off line to the chorus that went, ‘Stop your fancy footwork now and give us a goal.’†
Lee, whose Everton team had been the top flight’s leading scorers in the most recent season, had stubbornly insisted after the World Cup that ‘we have nothing to learn from the continentals’. By mid-season he was even more entrenched in his views. ‘When I sign a player, I want to find out all there is to know about him, down to what toothpaste he uses. I could not possibly hope to know that by snapping up somebody who had impressed me in the World Cup finals. I am challenging for the League title with my present squad. What are Tottenham doing with their imported players?’768
And when Dennis Tueart had stated, ‘Only a small number of foreign players would last the pace of a full season,’769 he was expressing another common concern about anyone not reared on the traditional English love of laps of the field during training. Liverpool full-back Phil Neal voiced it when he said, ‘I think the thing the Argentinians find difficult is keeping up their work rate, getting totally involved in the game.’
Even the new arrivals’ Tottenham team-mate, Glenn Hoddle, needed convincing. ‘The thing that has really hit them over here,’ he said after a month of the season, ‘is the pace of the game. Ossie, particularly, doesn’t find it easy to get back and cover.’770 Which sounded a bit rich coming from a player who admitted that he and Burkinshaw frequently clashed over the amount of defensive work he needed to do.
Among fans, those able to put aside any jealousy that it was not their club making such game-changing transfers were generally excited by the arrival of visitors who seemed no less other-worldly than the alien played by Robin Williams in the series Mork and Mindy, which reached British television screens that year. The newcomers were rarely subjected to the kind of abuse that created the gauntlet run by the growing number of black British players in professional football.
In fact, crowds flocked to see them. After one third of the season, Tottenham averaged the highest away attendance in the country, their figure of 37,289 placing them well ahead of title-chasing Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and Everton. One teenaged girl was seen on television saying of Ardiles, ‘He’s such a cuddly little man. I’d go anywhere to see him play.’
Just as Britain limped through economic crisis and loss of power on the international political stage during the Seventies, so English football was not exactly overflowing with self-esteem after failing to qualify for two successive World Cups. Sure, Liverpool had just won back-to-back European Cups, but even Scotland’s failure in Argentina had been felt keenly by supporters of the First Division. The Scots may never have been likely to justify manager Ally MacLeod’s hype that they could actually win the tournament, but with names such as Liverpool’s Kenny Dalglish and Graeme Souness, Manchester United’s Joe Jordan, Gordon McQueen and Lou Macari and champion Nottingham Forest’s Archie Gemmill and John Robertson they were expected to make a greater representation on behalf of English club football. Defeat to Peru, an embarrassing draw against Iran and a face-saving 3-2 win against Holland, remembered for Gemmill’s brilliant individual goal, had resulted in exit at the first stage. West Bromwich Albion winger Willie Johnston had gone home even earlier, found to have taken a cold treatment containing a banned drug.
English clubs could not afford to entice players from the richer domestic games in Italy, Spain and Germany, but they could at least boast now that members of the best footballing nation in the world wanted to play in the First Division. Ardiles had even turned up spouting stuff like, ‘We consider that football-wise England is the great country.’ Such flattery helped immunise Ardiles and Villa against any lingering antipathy towards Argentina from the 1966 World Cup or the brutal battles between that country’s leading club sides and European champions Celtic and Manchester United in the World Club Championship.
This was all somewhat surprising given the typical stance of British fans to overseas opposition. While television viewers might have been laughing at comedic stereotypes, there was very little humour among terrace-goers when their teams were up against ‘foreigners’. National anthems were usually a cue for crescendos of booing in British grounds, which meant journalist Christopher Davies was astonished to find how polite the Argentinians were towards their visitors during the World Cup. ‘The fans were silent through the Hungarian national anthem and even applauded at the end as a mark of respect,’ he wrote. ‘When I commented to an Argentine journalist how unusual this was for me, he merely commented, “Only British fans show no respect for other countries.”’771
Ipswich manager Bobby Robson had no qualms about signing 27-year-old midfielder Mühren for £143,000 after his pay dispute with Twente Enschede. ‘I became so frustrated with trying to sign players in England, where I was quoted ridiculous prices,’ he said. A few weeks later, Robson was predicting that ‘we are going to see more [foreign players] coming in because managers can’t get the players they want here’.772 And McMenemy suggested that overseas players ‘have better techniques than British players because they work harder at them as young players’.773
If the newspapers could have had their way, there would have been several signings every week. In the competitive world of tabloid journalism, no back page was complete without a story relating to the signing of some international star or other. Arsenal manager Terry Neill helped their cause by admitting that he was ‘looking around in Holland and other parts of Europe’ when asked about a rumoured £500,000 approach for the stylish, versatile Ruud Krol, captain of Ajax and Holland. The twins, Willy and René van der Kerkhoff, both veterans of two Dutch World Cup campaigns, were the next names to be linked with the Gunners.
In late August, Birmingham’s Jim Smith reported that he had reached an agreement to sign Dirceu, a left-sided midfielder in Brazil’s World Cup team, for £425,000 from Vasco da Gama. ‘He is willing to come,’ Smith chirped. Yet he didn’t. Nor did any of Arsenal’s supposed Dutch targets. Another of Argentina’s champions, midfielder Rene Houseman, reportedly turned down a move to Middlesbrough.
For a while, the most glittering prize potentially on offer was Johan Cruyff, Europe’s finest footballer of the decade. Having achieved three European Cup triumphs with Ajax, inspired his brilliant Dutch team to the 1974 World Cup Final and enjoyed five seasons at Barcelona, Cruyff seemed tantalisingly available. He had left the Nou Camp and signed up for some exhibition games with the New York Cosmos. Yet his agent, Dennis Roach, broke the hearts of potential First Division suitors when he told the Daily Mirror’s Nigel Clarke, ‘Johan feels that at 31 he no longer wants to get involved in that level of football.’
Remarkably, Tarantini preferred the bottom club in the First Division, Birmingham, to Barcelona or the New York Cosmos. ‘I have always wanted to play in England,’ he said through his interpreter. ‘My ambition is to play at Wembley.’ The interpreter even managed to keep a straight face.
From his PFA office, Lloyd continued to protest about loss of jobs, an argument Daily Express columnist Alan Thompson called ‘fatuous’ and ‘about as watertight as a colander’. He argued that ‘if 100 foreigners came in 100 players ill-equipped for the First Division would drop to the Second and so on. The Football League would get better.’
A renowned wheeler-dealer like Derby’s Tommy Docherty was reluctant to miss out on all this activity and offered £250,000 for Norberto Alonso, River Plate’s No.10, who had missed the World Cup through injury. The deal fell through when the player was reported to have asked for the same amount for himself. By the end of the 1978-79 season a handful more deals would be completed. From Yugoslavia, forward Bozo Jankovic and goalkeeper Petar Borota signed for Middlesbrough and Chelsea respectively, while Bristol City signed Dutch winger Geert Meijer and Finnish midfielder Pertti Jantunen.
Of course, it was only the elite few managers who could think about making the equivalent of ‘booze cruise’ trips overseas to see what bargains they could stash in the back of the team bus. The wording of the Department of Employment guidelines relating to players of a ‘particular stature’ saw to that. The days of lower-division teams packed with overseas names were still a few decades away.
Aston Villa centre-forward Andy Gray, who as a Sky Sports analyst would become synonymous with a cash-rich Premier League able to attract the likes of Gullit, Zola, Klinsmann and Bergkamp, was not too far off when he gave his vision of football’s immediate future towards the end of the season. ‘We have around a dozen or so foreign players in the League at the moment, but I don’t believe this number will grow considerably,’ he said, with a foresight that held good until Sky’s money changed the landscape. ‘We’ll see more, of that I have no doubt, but it’s unlikely continentals will come here in any great number. If they do come it certainly won’t be for the money. Our wages still fall behind those of most European countries while our income tax is higher.’774
Unable to translate the debate going on about their presence, the biggest immediate problem for the new Spurs arrivals was adjusting to the rhythms of English life. ‘Sundays were so empty,’ Ardiles recalled, shocked to find that everything closed.775 Tottenham were enlightened enough to provide him and Villa with identical houses next door to each other‡ and provide them with the services of a secretary and an English teacher. ‘Having them together made it a success,’ Burkinshaw recalled. ‘They looked after themselves. It was good for the younger players to see how they behaved. It was a sportsman’s life, not the culture of going out and kicking back the pints.’776 Ardiles and Villa contented themselves with soft drinks and were shocked at the amount of heavy fried food consumed by their team-mates, even on matchdays.
On the day of their Football League debuts, at champions Nottingham Forest, anticipation within football circles was approaching the frenzied levels seen at the front of the newspapers during the summer for the release of Grease, the movie featuring the newest Hollywood heart-throb, John Travolta. The success of Saturday Night Fever months earlier ensured that the 24-year-old’s face, hairy chest or latest girlfriend had rarely been absent from page one. There would be no on-screen premiere, however, for Ardiles and Villa. Brian Clough’s champions against Tottenham’s imports would be a game that in the modern age would dominate any Super Sunday, and several preceding days, but building work at the City Ground meant that Forest had to ask the cameras to stay away. ‘The safety of the spectators must come first,’ Clough explained.
At least the blackout meant Arsenal fans were spared the sight of their local rivals hogging the opening weekend’s television coverage. The Gunners adopted a somewhat sniffy and superior attitude to the Spurs adventure. Neill claimed to have relinquished his first option on the Argentinian duo, while the match programme against Leeds United found chairman Denis Hill-Wood saying, ‘We felt they would not fulfil our chief requirements and, furthermore, must represent something of a gamble.’777
By a quarter to five on that first Saturday of the season, most observers were prepared to back Tottenham’s judgement. ‘The gains dwarfed the losses as English soccer assessed the first 90 minutes of Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa,’ wrote Harry Miller in the Daily Mirror. Spurs had held the champions 1-1 and Villa had dummied Peter Shilton to score their equaliser. Four days later White Hart Lane had its first proper look at its new heroes, who were introduced on page seven of a match programme that, overall, adopted a somewhat low-key and matter-of-fact approach to their entrance – although the advert for the club shop did feature a picture of the pair laden down with a selection of merchandise. Club secretary Geoff Jones had reported that ‘the telephone has been ringing non-stop’ since the signings were announced and 47,892 turned up for Spurs’ first home League game. But it was Aston Villa, rather than Ricardo, who stole the show with a 4-1 victory. The bookmakers who had taken enough money on Spurs to have brought their title odds down from 66-1 to 33-1 before the season began were as happy as the visitors.
The failure to hold on to two Argentinian-inspired leads against Chelsea meant three games without a win and provided a further dose of realism. Another was administered by the old warhorse Tommy Smith in Tottenham’s next match, a League Cup tie at Third Division Swansea City, where player-manager John Toshack had embarked on a programme of surrounding himself with former Liverpool team-mates. Helping to guide Swansea to promotion in this season would be Ian Callaghan, Phil Boersma, Alan Waddle and Smith, the ‘Anfield Iron’ himself. Within a minute of kick-off, Smith clattered into Ardiles with what Burkinshaw described as a ‘terrible tackle’. Speaking after his team had gained an unconvincing 2-2 draw, the Spurs manager said, ‘It could have broken his leg. That is what is wrong with the game in this country; people deliberately trying to put people out of the game.’
Smith was as uncompromising with reporters as he had been on the field. ‘What does he expect? This is not a kids’ league. He can’t expect to bring expensive players from South America and expect them to be given the freedom of the pitch.’ Recalling the incident with some relish in his autobiography, Smith delighted in saying, ‘Ardiles went up in the air like a Guy Fawkes rocket and came down just as ignominiously. The Vetch roared its approval. Ossie lay on the ground as if he had been hit by a bag of hammers.’778
With Ardiles lying prostrate on the Vetch Field pitch, Smith had bent down and announced, ‘Welcome to English football.’ Yet the real welcome followed four days later when Ardiles, recovered from Smith’s attention, went with his new team to Liverpool. ‘We softened them up for you,’ Smith had told his former boss Bob Paisley.779 What followed came to be acknowledged as the signature performance of one of English football’s finest teams.
The deep wound of losing the League to Forest in the previous season clearly hurt Paisley’s team; judging by the way they set about re-establishing the normal order of things at the start of 1978-79. They had already wrecked the Ipswich debut of Mühren before looking irresistible in a 4-1 win against Manchester City. The third goal was the best of all. Steve Heighway and Jimmy Case combined to give Terry McDermott room to cross from the right of the box; the spinning figure of Kenny Dalglish helped the ball on to Graeme Souness and he pushed it beyond City’s covering man with his first touch before firing in low with his left foot. ‘The match was Liverpool’s at a purr,’ Barry Davies told BBC viewers as the players left the field. ‘To talk about a machine is an insult, unless you are talking about a Rolls-Royce.’
When Anfield welcomed Tottenham and their Argentinians, the vehicle Liverpool resembled was a juggernaut. Dalglish turned neatly to fire past Barry Daines and even a reshuffle caused by a 24th-minute injury to Emlyn Hughes couldn’t spare the poor visitors. The second goal arrived when Case’s off-target shot fell to Dalglish. A simple third resulted from McDermott delivering a long cross from the right to Ray Kennedy, who rose like the target man he used to be. ‘We set out right from the whistle to humiliate as much as we could,’ Neal remembered, citing the team’s ‘great pride in English football’ as their motivation.780
In the second half, David Johnson followed up a saved effort to score the fourth, and the fifth went in when Dalglish slipped the ball to the onrushing Johnson after more exquisite build-up play. Phil Neal made it 6-0 with a penalty, and then came the magnificent seventh. It began with Liverpool on the defensive, the ball headed out of their own area into the path of Dalglish near the edge of his own penalty area. With one touch he pushed it diagonally right to Johnson, just inside his own half. One touch to turn inside, then Johnson sliced another long diagonal pass with the outside of his foot to Heighway marauding down the left wing in the shadow of the stand. His first-time cross, hit without breaking stride, was met by the airborne McDermott with a thumping header from just outside the six-yard box.
After the stunned cheers had died down, a crescendo of applause swept across Anfield as if acknowledging a concert-hall virtuoso. There were no more goals; and quite rightly. As when Brazil scored their wonderful fourth in the 1970 World Cup Final, to have scored again would have been an anticlimax. ‘It was the most compelling performance I have seen from the best team I have ever seen,’ wrote John Keith in the Daily Express. ‘It was such perfection that any moment you felt that fantasy would end and the reality would send you tumbling down to earth with a thud.’
There had been no such release for Spurs. Ardiles would recall that ‘it was as if that first game at Forest had been a mirage’.781 The Guardian’s Patrick Barclay suggested that if Burkinshaw had spent his money on ‘a time machine and had fielded instead of Ardiles and Villa the entire Double-winning side of 1961, the result would probably have been no different’.
In the days of restricted television coverage, the fact that Granada TV had captured it all was a favour to football historians everywhere. Interestingly, the brilliance of Don Revie’s Leeds team had been memorialised by the cameras in a 7-0 win of their own, the dismantling of Southampton in the spring of 1972. Yet those respective performances had very different personalities. For Leeds, who had made a conscious effort to play more expansive and expressive football since achieving their first title, it felt like a collective ‘up yours’. It might have been Southampton on the receiving end, but it was directed at those who could still not look beyond the cynicism of past seasons. And if the Leeds performance had been about justification, then Liverpool’s was a statement of purpose. Consider the signature moments. The circus-like demonstration of trickery Leeds gave late in the game had been to show that they could; Liverpool’s final goal was a clinical, brutal exercise in how to get the ball from one end of the pitch to the other and into the net. Paisley had no personal points to prove, merely League points to win; all part of the relentless pursuit of perfection.
Four days later, Spurs lost their replay against Swansea 3-1 and their new signings wondered what exactly they had got themselves into. Hoddle was not exactly offering effusive support when he said a few weeks later, ‘We are trying to get across to them they should use their talent within the team framework. We don’t want players trying to outdo each other. Other teams look at us and say, “Let’s show these Argentinians we can play.”’782
Yet it was Hoddle’s name that disappeared from the line-up for the next game against Bristol City. ‘I don’t think I deserved to be dropped,’ he immediately told reporters, these being the days when players spoke freely to media contacts without the confines of formal policing by PR departments. ‘I want him to explain his reasons. I tried to see Keith after training. He said nothing to me about being dropped.’ A day later, Burkinshaw probably felt vindicated by a single-goal victory, but James Lawton was unimpressed. ‘What has become painfully clear,’ he wrote in the Daily Express, was ‘their inability to absorb the arrival of two of the world’s most gifted players.’ And, damningly, he concluded, ‘All the merit of their signings will disappear if Tottenham cannot find a place for Glenn Hoddle, one of the few Spurs players capable of operating on the same wavelength.’
Hoddle, a 20-year-old from Hayes, Middlesex, had made a dramatic entrance to the First Division two and a half years earlier when he marked his first start for his club with a stunning goal at Stoke City. He had found the ball dropping towards him as he lurked outside the penalty area and whipped a fierce left-footed half-volley beyond Peter Shilton. He had launched a career that would eventually see him inducted into English football’s Hall of Fame with a citation highlighting his ‘sublime balance and close control, unrivalled passing and vision and extraordinary shooting ability, both from open play and set pieces’. Yet football in the 1970s had never been the most comfortable home for such individual talent, as the newcomers were discovering. Even as he was reporting that Ardiles reached the end of his debut season feeling ‘very disappointed with the football’, Burkinshaw complained, ‘Ricky and Ossie, when they first came here, both thought that once the ball was over the halfway line and on its way towards our own goal it was up to the defence to deal with and nothing to do with them.’783
Along with that kind of reality, Ardiles and Villa were also learning the truth of their new team’s place in the pecking order of English football. It would be hammered home in games such as their 5-0 home defeat against local rivals Arsenal, and a ten-game winless streak that ended two games before the end of the season and condemned them to 11th place in the table.
But as much as results like those against Liverpool and Arsenal hurt the White Hart Lane faithful, the greater significance of Tottenham’s season was the barrier that had been broken; the levels of open-mindedness and tolerance to visitors that had been exhibited by a surprising number of people in and around the game.
And that was worth a tickertape parade of its own.
Take a Jumbo across the water
Like to see America
‘Breakfast in America’, Supertramp (Richard Davies, Roger
Hodgson; Universal Music Publishing Group, 1979)
The way in which Football League players spent their holidays had always offered an intriguing insight into lifestyle and taste. When Shoot! canvassed various men in its Summer Special edition of 1972, it discovered that Denis Law and his wife usually went to Majorca, although a week in Aberdeen was what he really looked forward to because ‘the beaches up there are the best in the world’.
Gordon Banks had been to Majorca in 1971, ‘but not again’ he said, having spent most of his time signing autographs. He was going pony trekking in north Wales instead. Meanwhile, Derek Dougan had been to Ibiza to find half the Ipswich team booked into the same hotel, while Arsenal’s Frank McLintock had ended up in the same Portuguese hotel as Don Revie. Much like the characters in that year’s Carry On Abroad, who could find nothing but fault in their unfinished resort in ‘Elsbels’, it appeared that England’s football community needed some convincing when it came to summers in foreign climes.
As the 1970s progressed, however, a new option appeared; one that promised sunshine in a place where they spoke English, served broadly familiar food, and offered a chance to boost pension funds. In the same summer that Ardiles and Villa were packing their bags for England, so the migration of Football League players to the North American Soccer League reached its peak.
Established at the end of the previous decade and run, for most of its existence, by Commissioner Phil Woosnam, a former Wales, West Ham and Aston Villa midfielder, the NASL had, from its inception, offered a home to journeymen overseas players at the end of their careers. The landscape changed, however, in 1975 when the New York Cosmos signed Pelé, the most famous footballer in the world – the one that even the neophyte American audience had heard of. George Best, who would play for three different American clubs, and Rodney Marsh, the face of the Tampa Bay Rowdies, followed not far behind.§
Attendance around the league soared, with the Cosmos attracting crowds in excess of 70,000 to matches in Giants Stadium. More teams were added and a trickle of English players had now become a veritable flood; mostly either older players who chose a transfer to America over a drop down the English divisions, or those who signed short-term contracts as part of a loan agreement with English clubs. During the summer of 1978, which had seen the NASL expand from 18 to 24 teams, around 130 British players performed on the AstroTurf fields of North America. Trevor Francis and a young Alan Brazil teamed up in Detroit; Charlie Cooke, Tommy Smith and Ron Davies were turning back the clock in Los Angeles, where Best played part of the season before moving to Fort Lauderdale; Keith Weller and Peter Simpson were among the old English contingent at New England; Alan Ball, Peter Osgood and Johnny Giles were in Philadelphia’s garish orange and brown; George Graham was in California; ex-Northern Ireland skipper David Clements wore the tassled jersey of the Colorado Caribou; Steve Kember, Jon Sammels, Kevin Hector and Alan Hinton were north of the border in Vancouver. To name just a few. Shoot! covered the NASL on a weekly basis and most British newspapers dispatched reporters to the season finale, Soccer Bowl.
Leicester City midfielder Steve Earle had decided that, at 32, playing for Detroit Express was preferable to life with Peterborough United, where he had played one game on loan. ‘I was offered more money at Detroit than playing with Leicester and everything was laid on for us – cars and apartments. It was $35,000 to sign on and the basic wage at Leicester was £100 per week; double that over here. It was a better financial deal than Peterborough!’784
Filbert Street team-mate Weller headed to the New England Tea Men in 1978, returning to Leicester for the following English season before settling permanently in the United States, where he was still based when he died of cancer at the age of 58. ‘It was absolutely wonderful what the owners did for you,’ he said in 2003. ‘Anything you needed you got. Everything they promised you got. We had days out and clam bakes, the kids all got on well and we all lived in a nice complex.’785
West Brom’s Len Cantello, who spent the summer in 1978 with the Dallas Tornado before returning to The Hawthorns for his testimonial season, did his best to make the NASL sound like hard work when he said, ‘We train harder than we do at West Brom and it’s tough going in the Texas heat. It’s nearly always in the 80s or 90s. There are 30 games before you get to the play-offs, which is ridiculous. Remember, an away game here can be a few thousand miles.’786
But even if it wasn’t all barbecues and sunbathing, it was still worth it. Osgood was picking up a reported £50,000 per season with a Philadelphia Fury team whose owners included music stars Mick Jagger, Peter Frampton, Paul Simon and Rick Wakeman. Confessing to his hope of a return to the First Division, Osgood added, ‘If it wasn’t for the tax I’d be back tomorrow.’
Marsh, who bade farewell to Manchester City in 1976 and would subsequently characterise English football as ‘a grey game, played on grey days by grey people’, also admitted that his love of football in America was as much financial as philosophical. Pictured at his home in an apartment village on the northern outskirts of Tampa, he explained, ‘I make at least twice as much as I did in England. It is also about 30 per cent cheaper.’787
According to Liverpool and England goalkeeper Ray Clemence ‘a player owed it to his family’ to maximise the earning potential of his career. ‘In this game, with its uncertainties and insecurity, it’s important to look ahead and think of ways to continue earning top money for as long as possible,’ he said. ‘The lifestyle in the States appeals to me and it would be marvellous to play a part in developing soccer into the big-time sport it’s inevitably going to become.’788
It wasn’t only the players who were casting their eyes at distant horizons. Dave Mackay, title-winning manager with Derby three years earlier, announced that he was leaving Walsall for Kuwait, where the Arabic Sporting Club were reportedly ready to pay him £42,000 for taking charge of 17 games over the course of two years. ‘People who know me will appreciate that money really doesn’t mean that much to me,’ he said; an easy comment to make when that much was being thrown at you. ‘I am going because the prospects there are excellent.’789 Former Football League managers Gordon Jago, Ken Furphy and Eddie Firmani were already among the best-known ‘head coaches’ in the NASL, while Don Revie had taken his infamous flight to the United Arab Emirates.
The examples of Marsh, Revie and the rest highlighted the greater opportunities that existed around the world as Britain scrabbled down the back of its sofa to find the money to pay its workers. From 1973 to 1977 the percentage of people in the country who felt they were in a ‘very strong’ financial position had fallen from 18 to 5 per cent; those who described their circumstances as ‘very weak’ doubling from 13 to 26 per cent. In 1975, for the first time since records had been maintained, more people left British shores than arrived: 269,000 compared to 184,000. The pattern was repeated for the next two years and even Jim Callaghan would look at himself in the shaving mirror around this time and say, ‘If I were a young man I would emigrate.’790
‘The middle and professional classes have had their incomes and their values seemingly flung in their faces,’ art historian Roy Strong noted in one of his published diaries.791 By 1975, a married man on average earnings was paying 25 per cent of his salary in tax, while those earning more than £24,000 were taxed at 83 per cent and the super-rich 98 per cent. Arsenal secretary Ken Friar spoke for most clubs when he said he was ‘hoping for some change in the taxation system that would allow us to keep our best players’, discouraging them from ending their careers in overseas tax havens.792
So many citizens appeared determined to leave the country that New Zealand was forced to announce controls on British migrants, while Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher urged the government to cut taxation in order to eliminate the ‘danger of a brain drain such as we have never seen before’.
Kevin Keegan had been football’s obvious manifestation of that danger with his transfer to SV Hamburg. ‘England can’t afford to lose players of his calibre,’ said friend and international team-mate Mick Channon. ‘Our standards must start to drop if some start to go abroad. I can’t think Kevin will be the only player to leave. Football is such a short life that you need to make – and keep – some fair percentage of the cash you earn. I think it is totally unfair to pay the rate of tax we do.’793 Roger Davies had already left Derby for FC Bruges, where he helped his club to the 1977 title, saying that the higher wages and lower tax more than compensated for the higher cost of living.¶
Dennis Tueart became the first current England international to sign a permanent NASL deal in 1978 when Manchester City sold him for £250,000 to the Cosmos, where he would help fill the boots of the newly-retired Pelé. ‘At the time I moved, my England prospects, if not bleak, were not particularly rosy,’ he would explain after his first season in New York. ‘I had to make my living while I’m at my peak and having thought about it I’m sure I did the right thing.’
Tueart, of course, was not the NASL’s typical British recruit. It remained, in relation to its imported players, largely a country for old men. Jim McCalliog, a much-travelled Scottish midfielder who’d been Osgood’s Southampton team-mate and spent a summer at the Chicago Sting, warned, ‘It might sound attractive to young kids who fancy fast cars and a lot of money but my advice to youngsters is simple: forget American soccer until the end of your career. Football in America is Fourth Division standard – no better.’794
Brian Talbot, Graeme Souness and Brazil were among the younger professionals who had competed in the NASL early in their careers as a way of gaining additional on-field experience. Peter Beardsley would be a notable addition. But for them America was merely a staging point on a journey to the top of English football. There was, however, a group of young English players, from the lower leagues or those unable to break into bigger clubs’ line-ups, for whom America proved to be a lucrative final destination. It enabled them to forge long and successful careers, earning the kind of money, recognition and memories of famous team-mates that would have been beyond them at home.
Alan Willey, for example, toiled to establish himself in Middlesbrough’s forward line before heading to the Minnesota Kicks to become the second-highest goal-scorer in NASL history and an inductee into the sport’s Hall of Fame in his adopted country. ‘Could I have been the same in England?’ he pondered. ‘I don’t know. But I would not change a thing. I think I was successful because I was getting a chance to play more. The pace was not as fast as in England and there was not as much pressure in America.’795
Paul Child couldn’t get a game at Aston Villa, but after a couple of years at the Atlanta Chiefs he became something of a legend at the San Jose Earthquakes. ‘I was taken to every function, promotion and press conference so they could show me off,’ he remembered. ‘They put me in situations where I was very nervous; on television, speaking in front of large crowds. It taught me a lot about selling the game.’ It also gave Child the kind of profile and rewards that Aston Villa reserves would never have offered. ‘I caught a lot of people’s attention because I was scoring goals and we were selling out stadiums. I had the chance to play against the best in the world and they pushed me to the next level; to be as good as I could be.’796
Former England goalkeeper Gordon Banks went to the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in 1977 to prove that he could still play professional football, even after losing the sight in his right eye in a car crash in 1972. But despite his redemption and the successful repatriation of Willey, Child and others, British footballers, for the most part, saw the NASL as an opportunity to have their American apple pie and eat it, shuttling across the Atlantic in the summer and returning with suntans and fistfuls of dollars. Generally, English teams accepted it, some of them arranging friendlies against NASL teams as part of the conditions of loan deals. Derby, for example, warmed up during the summer of 1978 by going to the United States to play Minnesota, where Charlie George was based, and New England, who had Gerry Daly in their team. ‘It is far more interesting than slogging away day after day, week after week, running up and down sand hills and playing matches against local clubs,’ said winger Gordon Hill, who would settle in America after his playing career in England.797
At the Football League, Alan Hardaker was growing increasingly concerned at the number of players departing before the end of the English season. ‘What a mess if a hundred first-team players decided to do this,’ he worried. ‘It would embarrass and devalue the League.’798 Nor would they always be back in time for the start of the new home campaign if their American team went deep into the NASL playoffs. When Trevor Francis was able to play for only 20 minutes as a substitute in his return game for Birmingham against Manchester United, the Daily Express warned, ‘This is a far more serious problem to be sorted out than the worry of whether Ardiles and Villa and other foreign imports are good or bad for English football. The League has got to ensure that by 1990 the lure of the golden dollar has not eroded our standards.’
Ken Adam, an English football agent who helped place the likes of Marsh, Ball and Smith with NASL teams, admitted, ‘The loan system was a major pain in the arse. It was not a very practical solution. At some point, one of the sides was going to be pissed off.’ On occasions, as Adam confirmed, the NASL resorted to off-the-books payments to managers in England to ensure that a player was able to remain in the US for the final games of the campaign. The same method was often needed to ensure prompt arrivals at the start of the American summer. According to Adam, even the eventual death of loan agreements did not prevent some unscrupulous English managers finding ways to supplement their income. ‘There were many instances of a player being given a free transfer, but someone getting money as a transfer fee. The Americans were very generous with some of their expenses.’799
By the end of 1978, momentum was building to ban summer placements; including from within the NASL itself, whose players were becoming frustrated by the attitude of some temporary imports. ‘Some players didn’t really look for an opportunity to contribute,’ said former West Brom defender Alan Merrick, who had settled permanently in Minnesota. ‘They just came over for a giggle and to get some spending money. They were just mercenaries.’800
The wearisome trans-Atlantic friction between clubs had gone on long enough, although Alan Ball, a beneficiary of the system, couldn’t understand all the fuss. ‘It doesn’t make sense for the British clubs to want to end the loans,’ he argued. ‘They get their players’ wages paid for them in the summer and the players get the chance to make a few quid.’801 Indeed, no one was forcing the clubs to allow their men to head to the States, although for many it was the only way to keep players from agitating for a permanent transfer that would improve their bank balance.
A club such as Liverpool had no such concerns, of course, so Paisley was able to dictate terms. ‘I am only prepared to let players go to the States if it will benefit them and the club. Ian Callaghan and Tommy Smith were allowed to go after they had done their stint for us. I am convinced that a successful club cannot afford to release a player. If you are successful you are always in competitions … when summer comes your players need a well-earned rest.’802
The loan system’s days were numbered and in the summer of 1979 Andy Gray would look across the water and decide that the League’s ban was for ‘the best interests of our game’. He continued, ‘While it may be selfish to prevent some players earning a well-deserved summer bonus, every effort must be made to safeguard our own soccer. But if there was a ballot among players I am sure they would be against the ban. It is a short career and you can’t blame anyone for wanting to better himself and collect security for his family.’803
Yet not everyone was looking to get out of Britain. Nor was it only the likes of Ardiles and Villa who were travelling against the flow. Birmingham-born Steve Hunt had been another of those players battling to break through in the English game when, as a 20-year-old, he was sold by Aston Villa to the New York Cosmos. ‘The fact that Villa were ready to let me go after I had helped them win promotion from the Second Division really hurt,’ he said. ‘I had a choice between joining the Cosmos or dropping down into the Second or Third Division. I chose the Cosmos and never regretted it for a moment.’
While the likes of Willey and Child remained under the radar of most English fans, Hunt’s success among the global stars of the NASL’s most glamorous team made him an intriguing news angle for British journalists. The fair-haired winger was even named Most Valuable Player in Pelé’s final competitive match, the Soccer Bowl win against Seattle in 1977. By the time he had won another title the following year he was ready to trade Manhattan for the Midlands, coming home to sign for Coventry City in September for £40,000 and turning down what his new manager, Gordon Milne, described as an ‘astronomical offer’ by his American team.
‘I needed to prove to myself that I could make it in the First Division,’ said Hunt, aware that many thought he was mad to exchange his dollars for pounds and swap Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto as team-mates for Jim Holton and Donato Nardiello. ‘Money isn’t everything,’ he said. ‘I could have stayed and secured my future. It’s simply a matter of professional pride.’804