‘The whole commercialisation of footballers is still in infancy. Nobody yet realises the millions of people out there, all fanatics, all untapped, all interested in anything to do with a famous footballer.’
An associate of Tottenham Hotspur’s Martin Chivers, quoted in The Glory Game by Hunter Davies, 1971
‘Part of Liverpool’s success in the 1960s and 1970s was built around the socialist ethic of collective effort with equal wages and no prima donnas. Liverpool supporters warmed to this all-red “political correctness”. There was no room for anyone thinking he was above anyone else.’
Andrew Ward with John Williams, ‘Bill Shankly and Liverpool’, in Passing Rhythms: Liverpool FC and the Transformation of Football (2001)
There was plenty of good football to see in the English First Division of 1971-72, and yet an increasingly troublesome minority were coming along to the games not to watch but to goad and fight with elements of the other team’s support. For some time the problem had been sufficient to provoke questions in the House of Commons. ‘I am somewhat tired of making statements on this subject,’ declared sports minister Denis Howell in October 1969, ‘because, personally, I do not believe that this indiscipline and crowd hooliganism has very much, if anything, to do with sport in general and football in particular. It goes much deeper than that.’
Violent incidents at football matches were increasing steadily: menacing rowdiness by groups of fans in or around the ground, rucks on the special trains carrying fans to games, the rituals of antagonistic chanting, weapons other than fists employed, including missiles thrown at the pitch or the officials. On Friday, 20 August 1971 Anfield played host to Arsenal versus Manchester United, since United were banned from playing their first two home matches of the season – punishment for those violent elements having thrown knives into an away section at the end of the previous season.
Young men banding into gangs for the express purpose of fomenting violence was not some new breed of disgrace in postwar Britain. ‘Youth culture’ had thrown up a number of variants already. But by 1971 a new sort of problem attached to football was uncomfortably clear. The question was aired publicly, in newspapers, in the House of Commons. How could grown men carry on like so? Where did this aggression come from? How could the exercise of authority, or self-respect, have sunk so low? Sociological studies were soon trying to find ‘the roots of hooliganism’ within wider social problems, such as adverse economic conditions. Most hooligans who made themselves available for interview resisted that explanation. They spoke of loving a piss-up and a punch-up. Braggadocio or not, this was the language of young men who prized toughness above all else, and made it the price of admission to a gang, a self-sustaining homosocial group that didn’t recognise any supposedly wiser or disapproving heads. The gang was the model, its bonds strengthened by a hatred of rival gangs, exemplified by defence of territory. The great stage for this, then, was awayday. In April 1972 Manchester United’s travelling fans, the ‘Red Army’ or ‘Stretford Enders’ (self-styled ‘best fighters in the land’) came to London for an Arsenal game and ran amok in north London. If a lot of ‘hooliganism’ was swagger and front and exhilaration, real violence certainly happened, and a real solution was required.
Under Shankly Liverpool had built among staff and players a way of doing things, a ‘Liverpool way’ founded on continuity of staff and a commitment to fostering best practice. Behind Shankly and Bob Paisley were Ronnie Moran, head of youth development Tom Saunders, and chief coach Reuben Bennett. It was a machine operation of sorts, and that machine began to put hours into Kevin Keegan, as willing and apt a vessel for the process as could be imagined.
The players’ routine was well established: report to Anfield, get on the bus to Melwood, get stripped and ready, whereupon – as team captain Tommy Smith would recall, amusedly – ‘We got fit and played five-a-side, five-a-side . . .’ Shankly was fiercely focused on a handful of principles: giving and receiving the pass, instantly controlling the ball, being aware of your place in the game, and making yourself an option going forward. The five-a-sides were more than just a competitive kickabout (though Shankly was always tracksuited and looking to get in the game). The desired outcome was that everything be faster and sharper, each player twisting and turning on the turf like a boxer. It was typical of Shankly that Liverpool fans were permitted to observe proceedings at Melwood, though they saw little in the way of magic. The point was that the courtesy cemented Shankly’s remarkable communion with the support, of which Keegan became especially conscious on train journeys between London fixtures: Shankly ‘would bring fans into our carriage and talk to them all the way home. When we kidded him on about the supporters disturbing our rest, he would roar: “That is who you are playing for, boys. Those people are what this great game is all about.” ’
Next to Paisley and Moran, Shankly was not so much a trainer of players as a motivator. After three games in the number seven shirt Keegan was assured by Shanks that he would soon be playing for England. It was partly power of positive thinking, but a perfectly reasonable prediction, too. A goal in a win over Leicester, Keegan barrelling home a Toshack header, pointed to the prospect of the two making a useful collaboration. With other teammates, though, there was an edge. Keegan’s irrepressibility saw him attempting an occasional wisecrack during Shankly’s orations at Friday team meetings. For this he was dubbed ‘Andy McDaft’ by Tommy Smith.
The skipper, nicknamed ‘Smidge’, son of a Liverpool docker, had survived the post-Watford cull of 1970 to become the rock of the side. Indeed, Shankly had said of Smith that he wasn’t born so much as ‘quarried’. He was known to intimidate on the park, and also around Anfield, where he pointedly ensured that no player got above themselves. Keegan, accordingly, crossed his sights. Keegan, in turn, felt that Smith was ‘the club bully’. In due course they came to blows at Melwood one day, Keegan not backing down, showing himself tough enough, though he would admit to feeling relief that the fight was broken up by others.
With Shankly in his corner Keegan had all the support he really needed. There was, though, a small matter between the two that blew up at an early stage. ‘Good players don’t get injured,’ was one of Shankly’s homilies, and Liverpool could get remarkably uninterested in players who made themselves unavailable for selection. In advance of a game at Stoke, however, Keegan felt a niggle in his left foot, such that he declared himself unfit, and Shankly let him know he thought this was feigned. Keegan, though, felt the insult to his marrow and walked out of Anfield directly; only a talking-to from his dad got his head straightened sufficiently to return. Shankly, the man manager, seemed to realise that he had run into something irreducible in Keegan: he pretended nothing had happened, proposing instead that the club do something about the clutch on Keegan’s recently acquired Ford Capri. It gave them both a laugh, a story, for later years. And yet, a real issue about Keegan’s amour-propre had been made clear.
Keegan’s first season was one in which Shankly was uncommonly desperate for silverware. They entered the Cup Winners’ Cup as a result of Arsenal’s double but drew Bayern Munich, managing a goalless draw at Anfield but losing at Bayern. Toshack was out with injury for a while. Then after Christmas came a slump in form. But once Toshack was repaired, his partnership with Keegan began to look like a really potent pairing of little and large: Toshack holding the ball up or knocking it down; Keegan anticipating and darting about in order to latch on, or else dive fearlessly into low headers of his own. Keegan had made a big difference to Liverpool.
In April of 1972 they thumped Manchester United at Old Trafford, and went on to run Derby to the wire for the league title, which would have been theirs if they had beaten Arsenal at Highbury on the last day. It was to no avail: Toshack suffered a disallowed goal two minutes from time. But the travelling fans could see Keegan busting a gut. His first Liverpool season ended trophy-less, then. But he hadn’t joined a club groaning with silverware – he wasn’t under pressure that way. He had made a fine start, and intended to bring winning ways of his own to bear. In the summer of 1972 he got engaged to Jean Woodhouse. She moved west from Doncaster to digs in Liverpool, found work as a tax collector in Bootle, and resolved to pass her driving test. It was serious.
Keegan’s first run-out in England colours came soon enough, albeit at under-23 level: a game against Scotland at Derby’s Baseball Ground on 16 February 1972, two days after he turned 21. The pitch was a horrendous mud heap, but the game a decently fought 2-2 draw, Southampton’s Mick Channon scoring a brace for England. Scotland’s replies both came from Kenny Dalglish, whose performance was rated by watching experts as a thing of notable grace in bog-standard conditions. One such was Shankly. ‘Christ, what a player!’ he told a confidant. Afterwards, Norman Giller of the Daily Express, hanging about in hope outside the changing room, collared Dalglish to get his opinion of that poor pitch. ‘Nae comment,’ was all Giller got for his efforts. ‘Well done,’ observed Giller’s fellow pressman Ian Archer of the Glasgow Herald. ‘You got two words out of him, which is a record.’
The goalscoring prowess was a mark of how Dalglish had found his first-team spot at Celtic as an inside forward. League goals were coming easy to him, including a hat-trick against Dundee: he would have 23 by season’s end. His first chance of pro silverware went begging, though, when Celtic took a 4-1 beating off unfancied Partick Thistle in the League Cup final, and Dalglish won plaudits – but no self-satisfaction – by scoring the elegant consolation. Over in Malta for a European Cup game against Sliema Wanderers, Dalglish was told by Stein that he had been selected for the national squad by Scotland’s new boss Tommy Docherty. He got his first full cap as sub in a 1-0 win over Belgium in a European Championship qualifier.
Celtic motored towards a seventh consecutive Scottish league title; the Scottish Cup was added in May with a 6-1 whalloping of Hibs; and yet the key test for the club, the standard they had set themselves, was the European Cup. They made it to another semi-final after a fine lobbed goal by Macari got them past Ujpest Dozsa. Inter Milan, the old enemy, awaited, and the tie was decided by a penalty shoot-out, Dalglish unable to participate since he had been replaced by Dixie Deans, who fired Celtic’s first penalty far over the bar – a miss that proved decisive.
Despite the disappointment, the Celtic players felt they had achieved enough to merit a cash bonus – a grand, perhaps. They got nothing. Macari, feeling fairly confident, sought a meeting with Stein about a new contract. He got a £5 raise on his £50 a week. That was decent money in Glasgow; but in England you had footballers earning 10 times that at clubs sporting not a shred of Celtic’s successes. The hard truth was that footballers just got paid better down south. As of September 1971 Celtic had a new chairman in Desmond White, who gave no sign of wanting to put more of the club’s turnstile revenue onto the pitch or into the players’ pockets.
Dalglish was not yet pressing his case in the manner of Macari: he remained focused on his self-improvement. His presence off the pitch was recessive; he still lived with his parents, drove a modest car, and ruled himself out of the heavy-duty drinking sessions into which likelier lads such as Dixie Deans tried to draft him. If he did join the lads on the regular Monday night jaunts to Joanna’s Disco, invariably he dropped a shoulder early doors. He was comfortable, though, at the Beechwood Bar near Hampden Park, where the Celtic squad would eat lunch. Stein and Fallon had adopted the Beechwood as it was only down the road from their homes in King’s Park. The landlord was Pat Harkins, and his teenaged daughter Marina helped out round the place on occasions. She caught the eye of Dalglish, an interest that was returned, and shortly after her 17th birthday the two had their first date, Dalglish giving it the works – a Disney movie, The Million Dollar Duck, followed by a fish supper.
Scotland were booked to tour South America in the summer of 1972 and Dalglish – along with teammates Macari, McNeill, Murdoch and Johnstone – got the summons from Tommy Docherty. Jock Stein, though, thought the trip too far, the itinerary too long: he wanted his boys properly rested in close season. And so the Celtic cohort stayed put in Glasgow – except, that is, for Macari, evidently keen on asserting himself. Out in Brazil among a Scotland squad bristling with players who now plied their trade in England – ‘Anglos’, in the parlance – Macari picked up that scent of how much better remunerated were the men down south.
November 1972 brought Dalglish’s first goal for Scotland, two minutes into a World Cup qualifier versus Denmark: George Graham squared from the left and Dalglish swung a left peg to convert. The qualifying group was an oddity, just three teams and winners take all, but Scotland were now well set to go through and Dalglish was repaying Docherty’s trust. The following month, however, Manchester United poached Docherty, having found Frank O’Farrell to be not quite the substitute for Matt Busby they had hoped Jock Stein would be.
Docherty’s first target for acquisition was Macari. Liverpool were interested, too, Shankly offering Macari £180 a week plus 5 per cent of the transfer fee. But in January Macari signed for United, bagging £200 a week and his 5 per cent of a Scottish record transfer fee of £200,000. Stein had done good business. But the Macari move suggested that clubs in a hurry to get somewhere looked to buy quality players off the shelf rather than develop them within their own ranks. And Desmond White’s Celtic were not buyers; rather, they suddenly looked like a selling club.
Celtic’s season was good but not ideal. In Europe, Dalglish scored a composed brace in a 2-1 home win over Ujpest Dozsa, but Celtic were done 3-0 in the return. He bagged a trademark low thumper in the League Cup final against Hibs but Celtic lost; and he scored against Rangers in the Scottish Cup final, too, yet Rangers pinched that 3-2. The consolation was sizeable: in the league Dalglish scored 41 times, the last at Easter Road on the final day, a 3-0 win that secured the title over Rangers by a point. Dalglish was a star now. Sportswriter John Rafferty hailed him as ‘the very epitome of the old fetch-and-carry inside-forward’.
On 14 February 1973 Scotland’s new boss Willie Ormond led the side into the Scottish FA’s centenary match against England at Hampden Park. Ormond’s team, however, was a largely ‘Anglo’ selection, with five players from Manchester United alone, and captain Billy Bremner at Leeds. There were only two domestic league players, with Dalglish the sole Celtic man. Keegan had got a couple of starts for England in World Cup qualifiers against Wales, but for this game Mick Channon took Keegan’s place in a forward line alongside Allan Clarke and Martin Chivers, and the three of them filled their boots. On a brutally frosty surface Scotland were seen off 5-0. The Hampden Park crowd – routinely hostile to any players they saw as not pulling their weight for Scotland, and to Anglos especially – made their displeasure felt.
In his first forays with England, Keegan had soon learned just how different were its requirements to the Liverpool set-up he knew – how club men had to fit themselves into the unfamiliar format of a national team, sometimes in the manner of square pegs. Keegan, though, liked to play his preferred game, and the England dispensation had him hankering for Liverpool and Shanks. Still, he was proud to make the big step up and wear the shirt: it was Sir Alf Ramsey who picked him first in November 1972, for a side still captained by Bobby Moore – umbilical links to England’s World Cup victory six years previously.
Making the acquaintance of Moore was to have a galvanic effect on Keegan’s fortunes, for reasons only tangentially to do with football. In the TV era, the game now offered considerable opportunities for players who had the right profile and were keen to exploit it. Moore had done much careful cultivating of his image, and wasn’t ashamed of that. ‘The song says: Who wants to be a millionaire?’ Moore wrote in his first memoir. ‘Well, I do. And don’t you too?’ Keegan, by now a recognisable figure to local and national press, was certainly interested, and wanted the attention.
Years before Keegan wheedled an extra fiver a week out of Shankly, Moore was ‘one of the first to ask West Ham for more money’, and was proud of that fact. He had the extra assets of a newspaper column, endorsement deals, other bits of business outside football (the resultant revenues directed through Bobby Moore Ltd); and he evinced a love of the finer things that a boy from Barking, Essex, might spend his money on: a white Jaguar, a wardrobe of sharp suits, above all his purpose-built home, ‘Morlands’, in Chigwell, with its porch of white classical pillars.
Moore, seeing Keegan was a coming man, advised him to get his business affairs in good order. As Keegan recalled, ‘He told me: “You’re going to get lots of offers, I had three businesses myself. I had a nightclub. Didn’t do well with it. I had a leather business. Didn’t do well. I had a sports shop next to the West Ham ground. Did well with it. Always stick to what you know.” ’ Moore had an endorsement deal with the toy maker Mettoy, and put in a good word such that Keegan soon had his printed signature on a line of plastic footballs for kids.
The existing glamour figure at Liverpool, chief beneficiary of endorsement opportunities, was Steve Heighway, a presentable fellow whose game was lit up by flair. Heighway, though, had noticed Keegan’s desire to cut a bella figura in the fashions of the day (‘flared trousers, huge collars and platform shoes’). He read this as an index of a deeper desire to be noticed. ‘Kevin’s ambitions were far beyond what mine were,’ Heighway later observed. ‘He was far more confident in his ability than I was and believed he could achieve anything that he set out to achieve.’
To make himself into a business, though, Keegan needed business associates. The first man he trusted to run his affairs was Victor Huglin, boss of a Liverpool carpet warehouse. But Huglin’s clout only carried so far. Keegan began to run his own fan club out of the Liverpool junk shop of a man called Lennie Lisbon (‘Lennie the Junk’) and formed his own company, Nageek Enterprises. In November 1972 he released a pop single: a rather plodding, mournful number about the pressures of fame, entitled ‘It Ain’t Easy’. He had secured a ghosted newspaper column for the Daily Express, and was exhibiting great readiness to jump in his car and open supermarkets countrywide.
None of this was what Bill Shankly usually permitted of his players. ‘Shanks didn’t want Kevin spending all his time opening shops,’ Ian Callaghan recalled. And yet teammates could sense that the gaffer was more or less turning a blind eye to Keegan’s extracurricular activities. Shankly ‘never said a word to Kevin’, in Steve Heighway’s recall. ‘But then he always treated him like his adopted son.’ That attitude would surely have been sharply different had off-field fripperies begun to take a toll on Keegan’s performances in red. But Keegan gave Shankly no such cause for concern – or, to put it another way, he was not George Best.
Best had taken Bobby Moore’s example to another tier in his successful modelling career, his string of fashion boutiques and endorsements for hair tonic, chewing gum and ‘Stylo Matchmaker’ boots. But Best’s incentives weren’t really money or material things. His true tastes were traditional working-class Belfast, itemised by novelist and Best biographer Gordon Burn as ‘the bird, the boozer, the puzzle book and the gee-gees’. If this added up to an ideal life for a certain type of lad, it wasn’t what Best’s image was meant to be selling. Moreover, one of those pastimes was becoming consuming – and it wasn’t ‘screwing’, as he charmingly called it. Rather, Best’s addiction to alcohol was about to swallow up everything else, his ambitions dissipating as the monotonous habits of the drunkard took charge.
In May 1972 Best had repaired to Marbella and briefly threatened retirement. That November, in a nightclub fracas, he fractured a girl’s nose. The press could smell that he was going off the rails. His decline made a vacancy for a new pop star sort of footballer, one who knew better how to stay out of bother. That same November Keegan signed with agent Paul Ziff and the sports PR firm Public Eye Enterprises, stepping up the promotion of his personality for commercial purposes. ‘My name is everything I’ve got,’ Keegan would write, with the zeal that marked him out.
Liverpool led Division One from mid-September 1972 until mid-February 1973 when back-to-back defeats saw them slip to second. But Keegan scored a winner over Ipswich that got them back on top, where they stayed. When his strike five minutes from time sealed a 2-0 win against Leeds at Anfield on Easter Monday, the job was all but done, for Arsenal could overhaul them only on goal average. The following Saturday, a 0-0 draw with Leicester was sufficient for Liverpool to win their third league title under Shankly, Keegan’s first piece of career silver.
The chance for a second followed hard upon, as Liverpool faced Borussia Moenchengladbach in the two-legged final of the UEFA Cup. The first game at Anfield in early May was washed out, and Toshack, lately sidelined, had not been picked to start that one. But he was recalled for the rearranged tie, and it was his dependable flick from a cross that allowed Keegan to hurl himself headlong and open the scoring. Toshack next knocked on an Emlyn Hughes header for Keegan to net the second, and Larry Lloyd headed in a Keegan corner to make it 3-0. It finished like so, Keegan even missing a penalty, which didn’t seem so crucial until the return leg when Borussia – a far sterner proposition at home, directed by midfield supremo Gunter Netzer – went 2-0 up in the first half. But Tommy Smith led a rearguard action, the Germans ran themselves out, and Liverpool got home.
A crowd of 250,000 welcomed the team back to the city, and Shankly outdid himself in praise of them, ‘the greatest fans in the world’. Keegan was now familiar enough with Shankly’s actorly, preacherly style, but on this occasion the boss surpassed himself. ‘The reason we have won,’ Shankly told his congregation, ‘is because you believe and we believe – it is faith.’ There was something to that, if not quite so much as Keegan’s goals and Smith’s thou-shalt-not-pass defending over the two legs.
A triumphant season’s work, then. And yet with regard to the fruits of his labour, Keegan felt ‘bitterly disappointed’. His bonus reward for 10 months of graft in which he had made a substantial contribution to putting two trophies on the table was £2,000 – £400 after top-rate income tax. Keegan was only just beginning to reckon with the tax liability from his first season in Division One, and didn’t care one bit for the size of bite that the government was taking from his pay packet – its cold-water effect on the thrill of doing well and bettering oneself.
Among the footballing profession Keegan’s views were in the majority. The young Tottenham defender Steve Perryman had different and ‘very strong’ views on tax (‘It’s got to be paid’) – or so he told the author Hunter Davies, who had spent the 1971-72 season at close quarters with Bill Nicholson’s Spurs team for a book-length study entitled The Glory Game. Three-quarters of Perryman’s teammates, however, were inclined to vote Tory, albeit in an ‘apathetic’ manner, and most intended to send their children to fee-paying schools. While footballers remained uniformly the products of working-class upbringings, most didn’t plan on keeping to their station in life. Once they had set themselves to achieving certain ambitions, it was no small thing to tell them they shouldn’t.
In his 1977 memoir Keegan would muse that he thought Bill Shankly could have been ‘a great socialist leader’. No doubt he was gesturing to Shankly’s working-class manners, his wit and popular touch. But motivating a team of elite sportsmen to defeat rival teams of elite sportsmen bears no relationship to the game of politics. Shankly himself conceded as much: ‘The socialism I believe in is not really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day.’ Keegan, while respectful of the working-class solidarity to which Shankly was gesturing, did not want to live in that world – at least, not every day. If Shankly’s Liverpool had been in any real sense a ‘socialistic’ enterprise committed to ‘equal wages and no prima donnas’ – as some academics would later fantasise – then Keegan would likely have walked out of that club forthwith.
Come the summer of 1973 Keegan was bumping into George Best a fair bit, and he took careful note of how the older man was managing his career. He noted Best’s curious aloneness, and how he seemed to have stumbled into the state of everyone wanting a piece of him. Best had just opened a Manchester nightclub called Slack Alice’s, a roaring success, where he set about drinking the proceeds. Keegan’s first memoir would feature a chapter entitled ‘Lessons from Bestie’ in which – while stressing his respect for Best the player – Keegan made clear a top professional shouldn’t squander his talent as a barfly, and that any contract a man entered into ought to be honoured. ‘As soon as I was in demand to attend functions or endorse products,’ Keegan wrote, ‘I set out to conduct myself differently from Bestie. I tried to learn from his mistakes. If I said I would go somewhere then I went.’
In November 1973 Stylo the bootmaker decided Best was no longer a suitable front man, and replaced him with Keegan – keen, reliable, high profile, and a pro. Six months later, Best was finished at Manchester United, his career effectively shot at 27 – that age of rock-star notoriety at which Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all died.
Thirty years later – after scarcely imaginable tides of cash had coursed through British football – Keegan would tell the Guardian: ‘For us, it was never about money. At Liverpool the best-paid player was Tommy Smith, and he only got 30 quid a week more than me.’ But ‘never about money’ was just not credible. In 1973 football was beginning to offer some vertiginous examples of personal gain. That August, Ajax agreed the transfer of Johan Cruyff to Barcelona for 60 million pesetas, or £1.6 million. Cruyff’s annual salary would be nigh-on half a million pounds. Many readers of the back pages of the Sun and Express surely shook their heads and called that crazy money, while considering it nice work if one could get it. Keegan quite possibly saw Cruyff’s deal as a not unrealistic aspiration.