Bill Nicholson. Brian Scovell
out, a ‘bung’.
Each year he would meet the chairman and he would offer him a modest increase, which he always accepted. He didn’t have an agent, or a lawyer, to handle his affairs – he did it man to man. Steve Bell, his son-in-law, said: ‘I never knew how much he was paid, but I was under the impression for much of that time he didn’t earn more than a working man’s salary.’ Bill wasn’t concerned about money, only about how his team performed in front of their fans. He wanted the fans to be excited so that Tottenham’s anthem, ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah’, kept ringing out loud and clear.
As today’s moneymen move in from all around the world and take over the clubs, they want victories and profits, not so much style and class – although if their teams all played like today’s Barcelona side, their reputations would be enhanced. But just as Hungary beat England 6-3 at Wembley on 25 November 1953 to change attitudes about the game, another date emerged to open the eyes of the faithful – Wednesday, 27 May 2009, when Barcelona beat Manchester United 2-0 in the Olympic Stadium in Rome in the final of the Champions League. Josep Guardiola, the young Barcelona coach, spoke of ‘the how being important’. Award-winning sports writer Paul Hayward, now with the Observer, wrote: ‘They [Sir Alex Ferguson’s men] collided with a side substantially more literate in the art of moving and retaining the ball at an intoxicatingly high tempo.’
Tottenham’s Arthur Rowe gave push and run to the world, his successor Bill Nicholson refined it to a new level, and now a generation later it is being played by Barcelona. They are the trendsetters, the ones to copy. Bill was the man who urged Keith Burkinshaw, one of his most loyal successors when he was in charge at White Hart Lane between 1976 and 1984, to buy Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa in 1978. Tony Galvin, one of the many players Bill discovered, said recently: ‘He loved Ossie. When Ossie managed the side his team talks consisted [of] only a few words – push, push, attack, attack!’ Arsène Wenger believes in beautiful, winning football too and once said: ‘Life is important on a daily basis because you try to transform it into something that is close to art. And football is like that. When I see Barcelona, to me it is art.’
Contrast that with today’s managers in England with their image rights and their insistent quest for trophies. Some spend more time promoting themselves than coaching at the training ground, so much so that they are bigger names than the artists on the field. Bill was reluctant to give too many interviews to the media after being let down by one journalist who quoted his off-the-record views about a certain player and he probably found it hard to understand the phrase ‘image rights’. To many people, his image was that of a dour, uncommunicative man – but that was a totally false impression. He was cautious about the press because he was more interested in the way football was played than in personalities and their public comments about each other.
Those who knew him well recognise that he was a man of principle and a family man, who was deeply loved and revered. His whole life was conducted in the right way, without courting controversy and without trying to outwit the tax authorities. There is a generation of Tottenham fans who idolised him and it is doubtful that there is another manager in the history of English football who equalled, or bettered, his close affinity with the paying customers. As he often said, ‘The fans pay your wages so don’t let them down.’ Unfortunately the fans don’t pay the players’ wages these days, only part of them. The rest comes mainly from television but also sponsorship, corporate entertainment and other sources.
Nearly all of today’s top managers and players use their image rights to reduce their tax bill. If they earn more than £300,000, they can be taxed at 31 per cent, and 20 per cent under that amount. A manager in the top third of the Premiership can make around £1.5m a year from his image rights. It is looked on as a tax-efficient way to conduct their affairs, but recently the Inland Revenue has been investigating the matter. When it was revealed that Joey Barton, a former jailbird, had earned £675,000 in image rights at Newcastle, they stepped up their inquiries. Had Bill Nicholson been offered image rights, he probably would have turned it down because of his innate honesty; he never cheated anyone and deplored cheating on the field. Today’s managers keep talking around the subject, or even lie. They are similar to politicians and they waffle instead of informing the public, the people who help sustain the game with their cash and their vocal support.
There was no press officer when Bill was manager and his telephone number was easily obtained but he rarely granted interviews over the telephone, telling journalists: ‘I might be available after training, or after the match.’ He was the last manager who said, on occasion, ‘no comment’ when asked a question by a journalist. If a transfer deal was finally concluded, he would confirm it, but not before.
These days, there are three press officers at White Hart Lane and like most of their colleagues at the other leading clubs, they organise the manager’s and players’ interviews to suit the club. Brian James, the former Daily Mail football correspondent who went on most of Tottenham’s trips under Bill, recalled: ‘He was wary of us, but the ones he got to know were the “Okay Men” and he’d talk about football with you. He didn’t tolerate sloppiness and he was very emotional about the game. If he saw a player making an obvious mistake, he would be upset about it. He was a hard taskmaster. I think he had a sense of humour because we sometimes heard him guffawing about something. He wasn’t going to be the star, but he wasn’t that sort of person.’
Some of Bill’s successors make money from their image rights, although their image has been trampled on. A number of managers including Harry Redknapp and Sam Allardyce of Blackburn Rovers have had their affairs investigated by the Crown Prosecution Service. Brian Clough, one of the few who shared Bill’s views about fair play on the field, only missed prosecution because he was terminally ill. Don Revie was an outstanding manager, but he was corrupt.
Recently a Premiership higher-up asked me: ‘How many managers today are like Bill Nicholson?’ It was hard to think of any, apart from perhaps Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger. Bill was one of the last Corinthians in modern-day professional football. After his death in 2004, hundreds of messages were sent to the club and one supporter, David Richardson, said: ‘They say the game now lacks honesty and integrity. It’s true, but understandable. Bill Nick so cornered that market in those virtues that there was none left over for anyone else.’ David Pleat, who managed Tottenham between 1986 and 1987, said: ‘Conscientious is the word I would use to describe Bill. He was one of the very few managers who put his club before himself. Many of today’s managers want to make as much as they can from the game. They’re greedy.’
Today’s rich club owners want properly trained and qualified coaches, often from abroad, which is why fewer English managers are being chosen. Towards the end of Bill’s playing career in 1955, he coached Cambridge University to gain experience and earn some extra money. A number of others did the same but today’s top players are millionaires and don’t need to go into coaching to earn extra cash on the way to becoming a manager. The supply of talent is decreasing at a rapid rate.
Bill had two great inspiring educationalists helping his career: the athletic coach Geoff Dyson, with whom he worked in the Army in Udini, Italy in 1945–6 and Sir Walter Winterbottom, founder of the FA Coaching scheme. He learned a lot about fitness from Dyson and from Winterbottom, the thinking way the game should be played. Bill detested the offside game that so many clubs still employ – pressing up to the halfway line to catch out opposing players. He regarded it as tantamount to cheating. Cliff Jones said: ‘I can’t remember seeing us doing that. Bill wanted to play it simple and quick, and get the ball forward.’
Another Spurs manager, Terry Venables (1987–91), took the offside tactic to a new level and at one game, an opposing manager observed: ‘I see you’ve chalked up 18 free kicks from it today and it must be pretty frustrating for the crowd.’ Terry said: ‘Oh no, our crowd were clapping. They love it.’
Keith Burkinshaw believes Spanish football is the world’s best, far superior to England’s £2 billion Premiership, which paid out £1.2 billion in wages (the agents took £66m) in the season 2007–08. ‘You know why?’ he said, ‘Because their players are extremely fit and they use all the pitch. They use space better than we do and they get far more