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This article first appeared in Issue 27 which was published in March 2023. To find out more about the print magazine and subscriptions, hit the button.👇

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By Sam Phipps

October 14, 1936. The Pathé announcer does his usual plummy, jaunty thing: “In Glasgow, the Germans show 60,000 Scotsmen how it’s done… how they (the Germans) will stand up to one of our best international elevens is the question that adds the mustard sauce to a tasty dish of football.”

The venue is Ibrox and the “it” is the Nazi salute. Scotland, as hosts, are under no pressure to follow suit and decline to do so, though “loud applause” is reported among the crowd for the German gesture.

Only a few minutes’ footage is available on YouTube but it is still startling to see the swastika flag over the stadium, and the big crowd, albeit below capacity. In fact, around 44,000 attended that day, including 500 Germans who had arranged a cruise ship to take them on to Dublin for a match against the Irish Free State a few days later.

A question adding a bit more mustard sauce might be: why was Scotland playing this friendly, almost four years into Adolf Hitler’s regime, with conscription and rearmament well underway and persecution of Jews and other minorities even more vicious under the recently passed Nuremberg Laws?

The simple answer is because the SFA invited them. England had hosted Germany at White Hart Lane the previous December, despite protests from Jewish people, trade unions and anti-fascist groups, and within a fortnight the Scottish association extended their own invitation.

By the time of the Glasgow match, the Berlin Olympics had also taken place, again in the face of widespread opposition around the world, ultimately handing Hitler a major propaganda coup.

By the mid-1930s few people were unaware of the nature of Nazi Germany. Those who advocated that sporting contact be maintained, or even stepped up, ranged from the sympathetic to the optimistic or wilfully ignorant.

Somewhere on this spectrum were the likes of Anthony Eden, foreign secretary from 1935 to 1938, who argued that an international football match was a good way to show “we are not the effete and degenerate people we are misrepresented as being by our totalitarian rivals”.

Everything that applied to England’s game against Germany in 1935 — a football association intent on “keeping politics out of sport”, a largely compliant mainstream press and an active though ultimately unsuccessful protest movement — would hold true for the Scotland game.

The only real difference is that the Third Reich had been going almost a year longer by the time the German party touched down at Renfrew Aerodrome on October 11, complete with a red swastika on their plane’s tail.

On April 22, 1936 Hitler congratulated the British ambassador to Berlin and his wife — in a typed and signed letter — on the birth of their son the day before. That baby was my father.

One family story has my grandmother throwing a bunch of flowers, also from the Führer, from her bed in the maternity room to the street below, although this is disputed.

Beyond doubt is that my grandfather was an early and astute observer of Hitler’s character, militarisation and consolidation of power. After their first meeting — he had arrived in the German capital in October 1933 — Sir Eric Phipps wrote: “It was disquieting to feel such power in the hands of so unbalanced a being.”

In a dispatch to London in January 1934, he noted: “Nor do I see anything to show that Hitler will fall in the near future... he will in all probability continue the rearmament of Germany until his security is such that he can afford to display openly what now he still condescends to conceal.”

A year later he wrote: “Let us hope that our pacifists at home may at length realise the rapidly growing monster of German militarism will not be placated by mere cooings.”

The most entertaining — as well as sinister and prescient — of his reports describes a visit to Hermann Göring’s vast estate outside Berlin.

“Our host as usual was late, but eventually arrived in a fast racing car driven by himself. He was clad in aviator’s garments of India rubber with top boots and a large hunting knife stuck in his belt.”

Göring proceeded to lecture the assembled diplomats and politicians on the joys of the primeval German forest. Then a group of cow bison were driven towards a large box containing a bull. Cinematographers and photographers were on hand to capture a glorious mating but “the bison emerged from his box with the utmost reluctance, and, after eyeing the cows somewhat sadly, tried to return to it.

“The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naivety of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary’, his wife’s mausoleum and swans… all, or so nearly all… Germanic.

“And then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might someday be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.”

Barnett Janner, the Liberal MP for Whitechapel — the predominantly Jewish area of east London that would see off Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts in the Battle of Cable Street only ten days before the Ibrox game — had told one newspaper: “The great mass of English football followers regard the Nazi persecution of Roman Catholics, church people, and Jews as a violation of the rules of sportsmanship.”

And Walter Citrine, TUC general secretary, had appealed to the government: “That team that will come over here to play is as directly representative of the Nazi government as the Ambassador in London here.”

He decried the disbandment of non-Nazi sports organisations and the way police and taxes would be used to protect a “gang of organised bullies” at the risk of “decent British… Trade Unionists getting battered by our police”. He was referring to the 10,000 German fans who came to London as part of the state-orchestrated trip.

A week after the England game, my grandfather wrote how the Nazis were “slowly but surely tightening their hold on German sport”. He continued: “It is one of the more important objectives of Nazi policy to develop the health and strength of the nation, and sport is also valued for the unifying influence which it exercises on Germans of different classes and from different states.”

He cited a notorious handbook by Bruno Malitz that extolled the benefits of “gymnasts and sportsmen fighting against Jewry” and the pride that stemmed “in being allowed to fight under the swastika”.

“Sport must be recaptured… and used as a weapon for the genuine building of a nation…. We Nazis want to educate the people through sport,” Malitz wrote. He also claimed 3.3 billion enemy soldiers had faced Germany in the First World War.

My grandfather noted that if the trade union leaders had been in possession of the book “they would have had a stronger case” in stopping the England game.

As it was, they faced a backlash from politicians and much of the press. The Daily Mail referred to the TUC’s “clumsy efforts” to “stop all but Marxists playing on British grounds”. The Conservative minister Lord Mount Temple, at the first Anglo-German Fellowship dinner, which was held after the game and attended by several MPs, denounced the TUC for its “stupid” attempt to sow discord.

The home secretary was too lenient on protestors, he said. “I would have told them to mind their own damned business... The Germans have always been our good friends. They always fought fair in the war, and I hope we did the same. If another war comes... well, I must not say what I was going to say. I hope the partners will be changed.”

Daniel Gray’s Homage to Caledonia cites a letter by William MacDonald to the Daily Worker. It typifies sentiment in some quarters in the run-up to Scotland’s game.

“The Nazis… have the insolence to send a team of propagandists on to Glasgow, a socialist city noted for its love of freedom and democracy… in the interests of peace and safety the magistrates of Glasgow should urge an entire veto of the match… Our slogan and that of the trade unions should be: ‘No truck with the Nazi murderers’. If an impudent attempt is made to proceed with the match, I can visualise in Glasgow the mightiest protest demonstration of our time.”

But on the day there was little if any disorder, partly because of a big police presence, as in London.

The German party landed three days before the match, staying at the Central Hotel and attending a show at the Pavilion. The next morning, they trained at Ibrox, where the Rangers and Scotland goalkeeper Jerry Dawson poked fun at the visitors by painting a small black moustache on his upper lip and pulling his hair over his right eyebrow.

It was widely suspected that the German ‘amateurs’ were being paid after their humiliating loss to Norway at the Berlin Olympics, according to the sport historian Andy Mitchell.

The start was delayed for 18 minutes after the Germans were held up in traffic. The team came out in the Nazi colours of white shirts with red collars and cuffs, and black shorts, with a Nazi eagle badge. They then lined up and gave the straight-armed salute to the stand before turning and saluting the opposite side, and saluted again for each national anthem.

Their salutes were mirrored by the 500 or so German fans, which is said to have bemused the Scottish reporters. The team had also brought two large Nazi flags, which flew over the stand with one Union Flag.

Scotland were expected to win easily but all the flair belonged to Germany, the hosts scraping a 2-0 win with a second-half brace by Celtic’s Jimmy Delaney.

The next day’s Scotsman praised Germany’s “swift, accurate passing movements… of real beauty to the football connoisseur”. The visitors only faded in the closing stages when, “playing to the British code of conduct”, they tired after what it called “many severe joustings”.

The Times agreed: “The quality of the Germans’ play surprised everyone. Not only were the visitors as good as the Scots at keeping the ball on the ground, but in the first half they were actually superior.”

Match reports also remarked on the impeccable courtesy and fair play of the visitors. But it is the Scotsman’s comments about the context of the game and the arrest of two protestors that jar most today.

“The German Chancellor and his Propaganda Minister have accomplished few things to more purpose in their efforts to foster friendship between their people and those of this country than by their assent to the football match between... Scotland and Germany yesterday,” it stated.

As for the two men, they were detained in Govan police station on breach of the peace charges after holding up a large red banner in the crowd at half-time.

“The inscription referred to the Jews and Hitler. Police officers immediately made their way to the spot, but before they reached the men the banner had disappeared from sight. The police, however, were able to effect the arrest of the men. The banner was taken possession of,” the report assures readers.

Meanwhile, in what looks like another propaganda coup, the following day’s Scotsman gave a roundup of German press reaction to the game. This was suspiciously gushing in its praise of Scotland’s players, so unlike the verdict of British newspapers.

“The Scots played wonderfully,” the Berliner Tageblatt reported, while Deutsche Allgemaine Zeitung said: “Every Scotsman proved himself to be an artist at the game.”

Three days later, Germany were trounced 5-2 in Dublin, failing to reproduce the “scientific football” that had been on display in Glasgow, according to the Times.

It was not the last of Germany’s matches against British or Irish teams. In May 1938, a few months after the Austrian Anschluss, England beat them 6-3 in Berlin. The visitors, Stanley Matthews and all, gave the Nazi salute on that occasion, reportedly under duress from the British ambassador. He had given the instruction in the dressing room before kick-off, to avoid offending the hosts. It wasn’t my grandfather though — he had been moved on to Paris the previous year.

The question of sporting boycotts has always been fraught. Few nations, certainly not the UK, have an immaculate record when it comes to military aggression or human rights. But it is still hard to believe Russia was allowed to host the 2018 World Cup four years after annexing Crimea. Some friendlies make even less sense. These Germany games are among the starkest examples — another is Scotland’s 1977 visit to Santiago, where they played Chile in the Estadio Nacional, which had been used for the detention, torture and murder of General Pinochet’s opponents a few years before.

As Brian Glanville has written: “International sport is no pacifier of nations, and the specious efforts of certain governments to use it for propaganda have made it still more of a divider.”

I never knew my grandad. He was 60 when my father, the youngest of six children, was born, and he died weeks before the end of the war he had seen coming, and in which another son was killed. My grandmother outlived him by more than 40 years but never spoke about those times.

The few photographs I have seen show a formality of dress straight out of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; he often wore a monocle. In these images he is usually in work mode but is known to have remained dapper at all times.

On the cover of his diary, Our Man in Berlin, published in 2008, he stands dressed in full regalia, brocade and all. Opposite him, angled slightly away, is Hitler, arms crossed, head bowed, in tails and white tie. Chilling, to say the least.

In contrast my dad William, a silversmith, shunned formality — and in some ways authority. One T-shirt he wore not long before he died featured the Banksy image of a chimpanzee with the slogan: “Laugh now, but one day we’ll be in charge”.

I am grateful to Andy Mitchell of Scottish Sport History and Richard McBrearty at the Scottish Football Museum for their help with this article.

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By Alison McConnell

Plenty of water has slipped under the bridge since 2019.

The Covid pandemic may well have been the most remarkable episode of recent times but the problem is that when it has come to major tournaments, Scotland have been self-isolating for the last seven years. In that period two European Championships and a World Cup have come and gone, each one commercially bigger and bolder than the ones that went before.

Not only that, but the disparity of growth in the women’s game across Europe has been equally notable. It was not so long ago — July 2017 — when Caroline Weir netted the only goal in a European Championships tie against Spain as Scotland took their first (and to date, only) win at a major tournament.

The Spaniards have kicked on and then some in the last decade, cementing their place as World Champions and establishing themselves as the force to be reckoned with in the women’s game; they are currently ranked first in FIFA’s rankings.

Scotland struggled to continue their ascent after the back-to-back success of making the 2017 Euros and the 2019 World Cup. If the expectation was that the nation was bearing witness to significant cultural change, to a bold new era with a women’s team taking centre stage, it floundered on the back of that 2019 tournament.

It feels like a different time. 18,555 supporters turned up to wave the team off from Hampden on the back of a pre-tournament friendly against Jamaica. Feature articles and opinion pieces were penned about the sea-change in mood towards the women’s game, to women’s sport, to what it meant, to what it would mean to the generation coming up behind them. The attendance that night was more than four times the previous record crowd of 4,098. Such was the buzz around the team and their achievements that even 20 minutes after kick-off, supporters were still trying to get into the national stadium.

Interest since then has, in the politest of terms, tanked. An insipid Euros campaign when a bad smell from the World Cup and its subsequent fall-out followed Shelley Kerr’s squad did not help. Scotland finished third in a group they had entered as favourites and completed the campaign with Lisa Evans suggesting there needed to be “more professionalism”. Off the field, the players started legal proceedings against the SFA before an 11^th-hour agreement was eventually brokered nine months later. Few were privy to what the grievances were within the camp.

Then came a World Cup play-off campaign that took Scotland to the brink of Australia only for them to stumble in the play-off final at Hampden. Strain your ears hard enough and the Republic of Ireland’s songs of celebration will still be echoing deep in the bowels of the national stadium, such was their sheer glee that night as they qualified for their first major tournament at a wretched Scotland’s expense.

The next opportunity flitted through the fingers again. It came on a freezing night in Finland almost two years ago as Pedro Martinez Losa’s side lost their nerve and lost the game to find themselves once more out in the cold as entrance was denied to the European Championships.

That failure brought Melissa Andreatta to Hampden’s door. A breath of fresh air in many respects, the Australian is chirpy, upbeat and exudes a determined positivity in all exchanges. The evidence in her favour so far is substantial; having inherited a demoralised squad, she has steered them through this qualification campaign unbeaten and top of their group.

Their relegation from Nations League A meant that regardless of how good their journey was, a play-off route would be necessary to make it to Brazil next summer.

So, here they are. Scotland take on the Czech Republic tomorrow evening before hosting the return leg at the Marbill Coaches Stadium in Paisley on Tuesday night. There is a drive to fill the ground, substantially smaller and more intimate than Hampden, surrounds that can offer the jolt of energy that could carry them through this semi-final play-off tie.

Should they successfully negotiate these two games, they will play the winners of Sweden and Lithuania. One suspects Andreatta’s mortgage could go on the Scandinavians going through. It will raise the bar considerably. Ranked eighth in the world, they are one of the heavyweights of the women’s game. They took the bronze at the last two World Cups and have been involved in every iteration of this competition.

There will be ample time to worry about them if and when it happens. This week it is all about the Czech Republic. And Andreatta has been bullish about the challenge that lies in wait.

For a squad whose track record suggests they struggle when the pressure is on, the Australian has not opted to shy away from it but urged them, rather, to embrace it. Players of the ilk of Caroline Weir and Erin Cuthbert are well used to playing under a microscopic gaze given their club demands but as a collective there has been a sense of this team being inhibited when tournaments come into sharp focus.

“We don’t need to fear anyone,” insisted Andreatta. “A lot of that (mental) work has been done. The foundations of belief and confidence have been laid. Now it is all about looking forward and using one of our super strengths which is optimism. It is hard work, commitment and sticking to what we have been doing which will put us in good stead.

“We know we are ready and we believe we can surpass what is needed to get the outcome that we desire.”

Big tests lie ahead. The biggest ones for Andreatta so far.

Tickets for Tuesday’s second leg against the Czech Republic are still available here

Been waiting for right moment to support the best football writing in Scotland?

Over 1,500 articles and hundreds of photographs and illustrations later, we’re still here. To celebrate, over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing some of our favourite pieces for your delight.

And if you’ve not sampled Nutmeg in print yet, please do give us a try — there’s nothing quite like the escape that pages can bring.

This article first appeared in Issue 6 which was published in December 2017. To find out more about the print magazine and subscriptions, hit the button.👇

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By Alan Pattullo

Every so often, around twice a decade or so, I find myself plucking Fever Pitch from the shelf, normally finishing Nick Hornby’s fan’s memoir in a single sitting. A most recent re-reading, unintentionally timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of its 1992 publication, reminded me of the author’s cruelty towards Ian Ure. And I say reminded because I recall being perplexed, as well as slightly miffed, at this treatment when first devouring the book a quarter of a century ago.

Statuesque, flaxen-haired and a regular attendee at club functions, Ure is someone I happily associate with Dundee’s glory years. He would automatically be named were a greatest-ever Dens Park side to be selected. Indeed, he already has been. When Jim Hendry wrote Dundee Greats, published in 1991, Ure was one of ten players included. The chapter detailing Ure’s achievements makes clear what an impact he had at Dundee. He was a bouncy haired Colossus in the heart of the defence as the Dens Park side won the Scottish title in 1961-62 and then reached the semi-final of the European Cup the following season, going down 5-2 on aggregate to eventual champions AC Milan.

Since it was the first readily available book I knew of about the club, I raced through Hendry’s tome (Ure’s own memoir, Ure’s Truly, was, even then, long out of print). When Dundee Greats came out, Dundee were playing the likes of Montrose and Stirling Albion in Scottish football’s second tier. So it’s hardly surprising I was agog at such tales as Ure helping resist surge after surge of Cologne attacks in a European Cup preliminary-round tie in Germany. Dundee, with goalkeeper Bert Slater deployed out on the wing after suffering concussion, were fighting to defend an 8-1 first-leg lead against the German champions and tournament favourites, and defend it they did, losing 4-0 in trying circumstances, before going on to beat Sporting Lisbon and Anderlecht.

Ure’s legendary status was only enhanced in my mind when I learned where he had gone after Dundee: to Arsenal and then Manchester United. Not only this, but when he left Dundee for Highbury it was for a world-record transfer fee for a centre-half. Then, when the time came to head to Old Trafford, this too broke the world-record fee at the time for a centre-half.

So you can imagine my confusion when, only a few months after being properly introduced to Ure through Hendry’s book, I read Fever Pitch, succinctly summed up by Irish writer Roddy Doyle in a review as “funny, wise and true”. If it was so true, if it was so wise, then how was I supposed to deal with the conflicting portrayal of Ure as a hapless scuffer, one who, Hornby seems to suggest, was indirectly responsible for the author’s stint in therapy when he was in his thirties.

It’s not even as if Hornby makes mere passing, critical mention of the defender. He’s there in the first section, as the author reminisces about his formative days following Arsenal, and he’s there, unbelievably, in the very last sentence as Hornby signs off what is an otherwise enjoyable and deservedly acclaimed memoir with another kick in the goolies for Ure. Describing Arsenal returning to their old, inept ways the season after winning the league title in the final seconds against Liverpool at Anfield in 1989, Hornby muses that all that was missing was “Ian Ure falling over his feet and my dad grumbling away in the seat next to me.”

It’s a surprise to imagine Hornby at such a crucial, exhilarating moment as composing the last line of a work that would go on to win the inaugural William Hill sports book award being compelled to have another go at Ure. It’s not as if he hadn’t already administered something of a kicking. In the edition I have to hand now, purchased in the three years since Hornby’s work was upgraded to a Penguin Modern Classic, Ure’s first mention comes on page 14, when it is stated as if a matter of record that he was “famous only for being hilariously useless”. Ain’t so at Dens Park, Nick.

Hornby does concede that Ure, who was brighter than your average footballer, shone when appearing on Quiz Ball, a television panel show where players from clubs such as Arsenal were pitched against those from other teams. But then a few paragraphs further down comes another punch in the stomach. Making brief mention of the playground phenomenon of Soccer Star stickers, Hornby remembers swapping Ure for Geoff Hurst, scorer of a hat-trick when England won the World Cup. “Extraordinarily,” he writes, “the stickers were of equal value.”

Four pages later, Ure’s part in Third Division Swindon’s opener in their famous 1969 League Cup final victory over Arsenal at Wembley is discussed. Writes Hornby: “The goal was one of the most calamitously stupid ever given away by a team of professionals; an inept back-pass (by Ian Ure, naturally), followed by a missed tackle, followed by a goalkeeper (Bob Wilson) slipping over in the mud and allowing the ball to trickle over the line just inside the right-hand post.”

Ure then appears to slip Hornby’s mind for a dozen or so pages before, in a passage explaining how television coverage of the 1970 World Cup suddenly opened people’s eyes to Pele’s quality, the author sneeringly notes that “people of my age and a good few years older knew more about Ian Ure than they did about the greatest player in the world”.

Okay, so four or five derogatory mentions in a book that is more than 200 pages long does not constitute a witch-hunt. Nor can it detract from a seminal work that has sold well over a million copies, been deemed a modern classic and also made into a film.

But that’s cold comfort for Ure, who once calculated that, in his entire 16 years as a professional footballer, he earned what John Terry did between Monday and Wednesday in any given week towards the end at Chelsea — around £60,000. It’s also cold comfort for Ure’s two daughters, who, it transpires, leapt to protect their father’s reputation a few years ago in that very modern way — by leaving comments online, at the end of an article on the Arsenal Collective, a fans’ website. The author of the piece in question — entitled In Defence of Ian Ure, published in November 2011 — was not a remorseful Hornby, plagued by decades’ worth of guilt. He, instead, has gone on to greater things.

Rather, it was another Arsenal supporter, Dave Warriston, who penned this latest piece. His intentions appear laudable: he genuinely seems to want to rescue Ure’s reputation in the eyes of Arsenal fans. But if this constitutes a defence then I’d hate to be the subject of one of his hatchet jobs. He accepts the critical acclaim Ure accrued in Scotland with Dundee but claims the defender lacked footballing nous, something Jack Charlton, one of his centre-half peers, “had in spades”.

Ure, Warriston adds, was found wanting against quicker, more skilful English strikers. He also questions whether Ure, who attended the rugby-playing Ayr Academy, was ever truly part of the dressing room culture of the day — a ridiculous suggestion, since Ure, in the view of those I’ve spoken to who played with him, was the epitome of a clubbable teammate, and was invariably first at the bar after games.

Warriston argues that Ure might have been better served staying in Scotland and joining Rangers. This is not an opinion entirely without foundation. Even Alan Gilzean, who followed Ure down the road from Dens Park to London, has proposed this, once offering to me the view that Ure would have become a legend at Rangers, whose play hinged on strong, commanding centre-halves, their first task being simply to clear their lines.

But it’s still another wounding read, including a reference to what Warriston considered Ure’s “finest hour” at Arsenal — a 7-3 win over Dunfermline in the Quiz Ball final of 1967. He wraps up his article by drawing a comparison between Ure and agricultural heavyweight boxer Jack Bodell since they “always seemed one moment from disaster”. No wonder both Ure’s daughters, already stung by the barbs contained in Fever Pitch, were roused to action.

With admirable restraint, “M Ure” delivers an elegant rebuke to Warriston in the comments section, following another post, from a Dundee fan, who complains the piece has shattered his memories of Ure — “to me he will always be a great player for Dundee and Scotland”.

But it’s the contribution from someone so close to Ure that really stops you in your tracks. It reads like a prayer in places. “Ian Ure is my dad,” she writes. “He doesn’t speak up on behalf of himself but does for others, so his history and long tales will often be written by others. I, and many of those he played with, have and will testify to different versions of the above.

“While it really doesn’t matter (it’s a game) it is sad that Nick Hornby, in particular, disregards the facts of one or two specific occurrences that others, actually there on the pitch, would disabuse them of. There are many other inaccuracies above, but it only matters to me. I’m glad to say that it doesn’t matter to my dad, since he knows what he does.”

This heartbreakingly poignant reply was posted in February 2013. Twenty months later, in October 2014, a “V Ure” weighs in. “Ian Ure is also my dad. Would like to second M’s comments and congratulate her on being polite. A couple of points… Ian being a ‘grammar school boy from a rugby playing school who was presumably never quite part of the dressing room culture’…. you know this how, Dave? And your assumption that he might have had a ‘more enjoyable career if a less lucrative one’ (playing for Rangers and then Ayr United) had me pissing my pants laughing on so many levels.”

All the above is why I’m in Glasgow, with a folder full of loose-leaf printouts of Warriston’s article, a dog-eared copy of Fever Pitch, and the hope that Ure, who recently turned 78, won’t be offended by my wish to talk, not about Dundee and European Cup runs, as usually happens when we meet, but about Arsenal, and misdirected back-passes in the mud at Wembley.

If you knew Ure as a player, you’d still instantly recognise him now, all of 50 years on. He’s a head taller than most people in the city centre pub where we arrange a lunchtime rendezvous, but not as tall as the shelves of whisky bottles lining the wall behind the bar. After a bowl of soup, a toastie and a couple of pints, we’ll later sample what’s in a tiny percentage of those hundreds of bottles.

After some preamble, we get to the matter at hand. Ure was working as a social worker at Barlinnie, the maximum-security prison in Glasgow’s east end, when Fever Pitch was published.

He had finally hung up his boots in 1974 after an unrewarding stint — both parties would agree — at St Mirren, where Ure played just a handful of games. He then succeeded Alex Ferguson as manager at East Stirlingshire but left within a year, following a bust-up with the board about player bonuses for a cup clash at Berwick Rangers.

It wasn’t the first time Ure spoke up for others, nor was it the last. “The directors expected wonders after Alex Ferguson left but without paying anything — he had got them to sixth in the Second Division and that was great respectability,” recalls Ure. “They wanted to win the league. It was farcical.”

An enjoyable stint in Iceland, as manager at FH Hafnarfjaroar, followed. Ure helped lay the first grass pitch on the island while there, literally sowing the seeds, perhaps, of Iceland’s current success. However, he did not go back for a planned second year following a chance meeting in Ayrshire with an old friend, who suggested Ure should consider social work as a career.

Ure was in his mid-thirties. Even though he’d played for Arsenal and Manchester United, at the highest level, he needed to continue earning. He had already taken a temporary job during the Iceland off-season, working at a child assessment centre in Darvel. One of his tasks was taking children to the children’s panel in Ayr. It was on one of these trips that he met his pal, who explained there was a shortage of older, more experienced social workers, and Ure fitted the bill. “I needed to work, I needed money,” Ure says. In the end he was a social worker for far longer than he was a footballer. “I was getting kind of desperate in the mid 1970s; what was I going to do with the rest of my life?”

So Ure, whose two Highers were not enough to get into university 20 years earlier, was sponsored to go to Glasgow’s Jordanhill College, emerging with a degree in social work. He started work at Barlinnie in the early 1980s. Some responsibilities, such as compiling social inquiry reports, were not to his liking. Ure hated having to judge others. Mostly he was sticking up for the disenfranchised and dispossessed. “You would interview prisoners who had gripes,” he explains. “You listened to what they had to say and took their complaints to the governor.”

It might be why one of his daughters, in her comment below Warriston’s article, mentions Ure speaking up on behalf of others more often than he ever did for himself. He clearly had more pressing concerns than what an Oxbridge graduate had written about him in a book that was blamed for contributing to the gentrification of football. Suddenly, it seemed, the middle-classes were attracted to the game, interest already piqued by the 1990 World Cup.

While the book took hold, selling huge numbers, it didn’t impact on Ure’s life in the west of Scotland, where he was simply trying to earn a living and look after his family. “I have not read it,” he says. “Nick Hornby, is that his name? Would you believe they wanted me to go on some television programme with him? I got a call years after I finished playing, it must have been shortly after the book came out, wanting me to go on with him. I told them to shove it up their arse.”

It’s easy to see why the producer of an edgy Channel 4 late-night discussion show from the time might have had the idea to pitch Hornby against Ure, ply them both with alcohol and watch the sparks fly.

Ure wonders what age Hornby was at the time of the Swindon game that so traumatised him, questioning the veracity of someone so young at the time. “He must have been about ten or something,” he says. The author was 11 at the time of the final, which was his first trip to Wembley. “I don’t know why he criticised me there,” continues Ure. “The park was unplayable. It was a bog.” YouTube footage of the game supports this claim.

“Did he criticise me for that game? I must read the bloody book. We should have won that game 10-1. We murdered them, pounded them. We only scored with three minutes or something to go. We had been one down. We got the equaliser and I thought: ‘That’s it. We will get them in extra time.’ That guy Downsborough, the keeper, I have never seen a display like that in my life. He’d dive to his right and the ball would hit his heel, it was incredible. I will never forget his name — Downsborough. We could not get the ball by him.”

As for Swindon’s first goal ten minutes before half-time, the one described by Hornby as among the most calamitous ever conceded by a team of professional footballers, Ure is honest enough to admit culpability. “We had a mix-up,” he says. “Bob Wilson and I ballsed it up. I gave him a dodgy pass-back. I should have either kicked it out of play or else played it outside his right-hand post.”

Ure also lost possession high up the pitch en route to Swindon’s third in extra-time as Arsenal threw caution to the wind in an attempt to get back into the game. But Ure didn’t deserve to be persecuted for one poor performance on a day when others, too, fell short. It wasn’t representative of his Arsenal career. Nor are Hornby’s words, which pack an extra charge because of their eloquence, necessarily the feelings of all those who stood on the North Bank. “I don’t remember the guys on the terracing thinking that way about me,” ponders Ure. “I thought I was one of the stalwarts.”

He was one of the stalwarts. Now a member of the Arsenal 100 club, a band of brothers who have made 100 or more appearances for the club, he can watch games at the Emirates whenever he wishes. Ure, who lives in Kilmarnock, goes down when he can and reports warmth from fans.

Which is as it should be. Because Ure, who played 168 times over six seasons for Arsenal, put his health on the line for the club. A career-threatening knee cartilage injury sustained early in his second season left him, he estimates, just 75 per cent — at best — the player he was at Dundee. It’s a main factor in why he became a figure of fun in a Penguin Modern Classic.

“Not bad for a lad from Ayr, eh?” he says, with a smile. It certainly wasn’t. For Ure to end up playing professional football at all was something of a miracle, never mind winning 12 Scottish caps and playing for two of the biggest clubs in the land. Dundee aren’t one of those. But they were the best footballing side Ure reckons he played for.

He ended up at Dens through fate as much as anything. “I had no remote contemplation of ever making a living being a footballer,” he says. “Seriously, I never gave it a moment’s thought. I was at Ayr Academy wondering what to do with the rest of my life.”

He’d been happy growing up in Ayrshire, playing cricket and rugby as extensively as he did football. The invite to a trial at Dundee was a surprise. Ure describes himself as a makeweight — the club’s eyes were really on Alan Goldie, who was the star of Ayrshire boys’ club football. They both made their way to Dens. After one week’s training, Ure was asked back. He agreed because it meant another fiver in his pocket. But still he entertained no real hopes of being considered good enough. After this second week manager Willie Thornton was for letting Ure return to Ayr. But trainer Sammy Keane, whose instinct was renowned, was adamant: sign him, he told Thornton.

“It just shows how things happen, I could have drifted into the ether,” says Ure. Four years later he was a league champion, five years later he was playing in a European Cup semi-final and then, after six, he signed for Arsenal, the club he followed as a boy. But then the luck, if that’s what it was, ran out.

Three league games into the 1964-5 season, Arsenal were hosting Aston Villa. “It was a tackle,” recalls Ure. “It was innocent. I still remember it. It was the big guy, Tony Hateley, who was playing for Aston Villa at the time. I can still see it. As I tackled him there was a sudden impact and I thought: ‘Oh, that feels different.’

“I’d never had one like that before. My knee never felt like that. In those days, instead of taking you off, which I wish they had, they came and gave it a spray with some deadener, the ‘magic spray’.

“That was the beginning of a four, five-year cycle,” says Ure. He is referring to the post-and-pre-game routine that involved a mix of powerful medication, aspirations (injections drawing fluid from the knee cap) and pressure bandages. All his trousers had splits up the seam to accommodate rolls of dressing.

A young Nick Hornby, looking on from the stand, would have had no inkling of the discomfort Ure was enduring, of course, and neither would most other Arsenal fans. They certainly did not know about the painkillers being pumped into his body. Ure later discovered that it was medication more often used on racehorses. If you look up Butazolidin you’ll discover it’s long been banned for human use in the United States and the United Kingdom and has been linked with bone marrow loss. Ure has already overcome one battle with cancer.

So there’s some necessary background when Hornby writes, as he does several times, of Ure’s supposed incompetence as a footballer. The target for such mockery is forgiving. Ure even displays some empathy and confesses to haranguing players on the terraces at Somerset Park as a boy. “That was just his impression,” says Ure of Hornby. “I used to have hates against players I watched for Ayr United. You get these things in your mind and it’s hard to shake.”

Of course he accepts he had poor games, like any other footballer does. But the perception of him as slow and accident-prone hinges on an injury that left him operating at little more than half his capabilities and finally forced a knee replacement operation in 2008. He was playing under a handicap for almost his entire career in England.

He remembers hearing about the Arsenal club doctor, Alan Bass, who was also an eminent Harley Street consultant, showing Ure’s X-rays to groups of students. “He used to point out my right knee’s X-rays and ask students: ‘How old do you think is the man whose knee this is?’” says Ure. “Most of them said about 70.” He was in fact in his late twenties.

So the fact that Ure played on at Arsenal until 1969 is something of a miracle. However, not as much of one as being declared fit enough to sign for Manchester United. The Old Trafford club had won the European Cup just over a year earlier but the shoddy nature of Ure’s medical was indicative of a club in rapid decline. There was not even a doctor present, only Jackie Crompton, the trainer. Ure was told to hop on a bed and bend each knee to 90 degrees, which he could because of the anti-inflammatory pills he was popping like sweets each day. “Arsenal must have thought Christmas had come early getting £88,000 for a cripple,” he says.

Ure made 47 league appearances in two seasons at Old Trafford, before falling out with compatriot Matt Busby, who had returned as manager, and joined St Mirren, his arthritic knee again passing undetected. “You did not advertise your state of health,” he says. “If you did, that was you.”

Ure tells it as it is. We settle for a couple of drams before we leave. “With a dob of ice!” he requests. Someone at the bar wonders whether that really is Ian Ure. It is, I say proudly. But my pride can’t match that of Ure’s two daughters, Mandy and Vikki, whose stout support of their father helps melt away all other criticisms in his eyes. Mandy is an associate professor of fine art at Kingston University, while Vikki is a chef in a hotel on the Crinan Canal.

“His history and long tales will often be written by others,” wrote Mandy, in that well-pitched, devastatingly effective website reply to Ure’s critics. She’s right, of course. This is just another of those long tales. It’s written with an intention to help restore a balance tipped so firmly against her father by a book. Ian Ure spoke up for prisoners, and others, on enough occasions. He should know there are those who speak up for him.

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Their 0-3 exit at the hands of Brazil followed a deflating 0-1 defeat against Morocco, which itself followed a barely-inspiring 1-0 win against Haiti. Steve Clarke’s side being sent home having failed to reach the knockout rounds was dispiriting, but the numbers attached to that fact were somehow even worse. They had less ball possession than Panama, fewer shots per match than Curaçao, fewer shots on target than Saudi Arabia, and conceded as many chances against as Uzbekistan. I called them the single worst coached team at the tournament.

Three months is a long time in football though, and Scotland began Sébastien Pocognoli’s post-Clarke era with… another harrowing 0-3. Which, yes, admittedly, does sound very much like all the air coming out of a balloon — because it is — but I’m actually here to tell you it wasn’t all as bad as it probably felt. Scotland have a pretty exciting coach, with pretty fun ideas, and while you didn’t see much of it in his first two games you also didn’t see none of it.

So let me just quickly hand-waive Switzerland out the way for you. Going down to ten men, and then immediately 0-1, against an experienced international operation is pretty much fatal. You’d hope for more, and a team familiar with what their manager wants them to do could rally, but two games in you just have to take it on the chin and move on. As an aside though, Pocognoli has said that Jack Hendry’s red card “actually belongs to all of us” and, while I get what he means, it wasn’t my brain that fell out to make me push Dan Ndoye over.

The one crumb of comfort is that said red card came as a result of a high press, the likes of which this nation has never seen. Johan Manzambi’s flick around Lewis Ferguson completely splits Scotland open, but only because at that moment there are fully seven blue shirts trying to stop Switzerland passing the ball through their own defensive third. Compare that to the World Cup, where there often weren’t even seven blue shirts trying to stop opponents in Scotland’s defensive third, despite the entire team being camped in it.

It’s a good lesson for the team to learn about protecting themselves when their blood is up, but it’s also valuable for the nation. This is a great example of the risk/reward under this manager.

I won’t bore you with the history lesson, but Pocognoli’s Union Saint-Gilloise were great fun, and ending their 90-year wait for a league title marked him out as one of the most exciting young coaches in Europe. His move to Monaco was a bit of a bust, sure, but that was a circus from top to bottom and actually showed his flexibility as a coach despite the bad results. It’s unfair to say he’s rebuilding his career in this job, when ‘getting back on track’ would probably be more accurate, and it’s clear already that he wants that ferocious underdog mentality he had in Belgium.

And it’s been visible, in truth. Scotland were all over the place in the first half against Slovenia, but their first major chance arrives in the 50th minute with a long punt up field. They don’t win the header, but they do then immediately crash the second ball, which was a key element of Pocognoli’s Union. Ollie McBurnie, Billy Gilmour and Lewis Ferguson all flood the area around the loose header and successfully force a turnover, giving Scotland six players around the ball at the top of the pitch as well as forward momentum.

Then here’s the crucial bit: they don’t actually manage to make a chance from this recovery. Robbie Ure has his back to goal, a defender up his arse and can’t get turned, which sees the ball pinched off him. Oh no, you’d think.

But because of the principles Pocognoli instills in his players — even at this early stage — the momentum with Scotland is still to go forward and not to back off, and McBurnie is able to steal in on the ball as it’s being won back by Slovenia, and get in on goal to score. Which, of course, he absolutely should do here, and his new manager should have started his campaign with a win.

Likewise, in the 77th minute, a hasty clearance is immediately pounced upon by Gilmour who, instead of recycling possession and waiting for support, immediately feeds Kieron Bowie in the box. Annoyingly, Bowie seems as shocked by this fact as everyone else is, and scuffs his finish. Another great chance created purely from the forward momentum you get from simply following the ball into deeper positions.

And this is to say nothing of the decent set-piece chances Scotland carved out, with no fewer than seven headers in the box and McBurnie extremely unfortunate not to score from a late corner. Again though, this shouldn’t come as a surprise, given Pocognoli’s Union had the highest proportion of set-piece goals in the league the year they won it. Seventeen scored in total that season, without even cheating and including penalties. It’s morose in the extreme to say a disappointing 0-0 draw and a 0-3 drubbing is “exactly what the future looks like”, but the style of play is already there or there abouts.

Which brings me to the absolutely fanciful…

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Scotland’s total attendance across men’s club football in 2025/26 was six million, once again putting it top of the UEFA charts for attendance relative to population.

The European Club Talent and Competition Landscape report, released last night, also shows record Scottish transfer spending this summer, extensive use of loan players and comparatively limited playing time for teenagers.

Looking at the top flight only, crowds totalled 4.1 million, which is an all-time record - as anticipated by the SPFL in may. Scotland ranked seventh for total top-flight attendance, behind only England, Germany, Spain, Italy, France and the Netherlands, with an average crowd of 17,903.

Adjusting average weekly crowds for population puts Scotland first, with about 19.37 top-flight attendees per 1,000 residents. Scotland’s weekly per capita figure is around 1.92 times the next best nation, Norway, who were at 10.11 per 1,000, followed by Portugal on 10.03 and the Netherlands on 9.77.

A per-capita figure of 19.37 compares with the 18.36 reported by the SPFL in a collaboration with myself just two years, an increase of around 4.7%.

It is often assumed that Scotland’s high per-capita ranking is solely driven by the crowds at Ibrox and Celtic Park. But actually, when completely removing Celtic and Rangers home attendances - while allowing all other nations to keep their top two teams - the Scottish top-flight would still rank 4th in Europe for attendance per head.

Across all men’s competitions, Scotland’s total attendance was about 6 million, which is an incredible 1,082 admissions per 1,000 residents over the full season! This is approximately 32% higher than England’s 823 per 1,000. These figures obviously count repeat visitors throughout the season, so it isn’t six million different people - but it’s still hugely impressive for a country of 5.5 million.

Outside the Premiership, the lower-league total ranked 11th in UEFA’s report, with the Scottish Championship alone contributing about 500,000.

Looking at individual clubs now, and Celtic were one of only 19 European clubs to exceed one million home league admissions, ranking 13th with 1,112,508 and averaging 58,553! They were the only club outside the top five leagues to record 1m+ home league attendances, as this graphic shows:

Adding domestic cups and European matches increased Celtic’s total to about 1.465 million. When adding all competitions for all clubs across Europe, and the ‘one million club’ jumps from 19 to 36 clubs - including Rangers.

Glasgow is a top five European football city in terms of attendance at league games last season.

Transfer Spend & Premiums Paid

UEFA’s reports states Scottish clubs spent a record €82m (£70m) during summer 2026 and received €87m (£75m) from sales, according to UEFA’s provisional transfer figures. As per their annual report, we know that Celtic spent £31.6m this summer, with media reports estimating they received around £50m in sales, with Rangers receiving an estimated £12m, and Motherwell a reported £8m.

On a Europe-wide scale, spending reached a frankly ridiculous €10bn, despite a World Cup-delayed start to any spending. Europe had a record August with more than €3.3bn, a third of the summer total, spent in the last two weeks of the window! The €10bn summer total is up 8% from the previous year and when including January, the 2026 calendar-year figure reaches €11.7bn across all divisions.

English clubs committed €4.6bn during the summer, more than the next eight European markets combined. Deals involving at least one English club accounted for 52% of worldwide transfer value. The boom is largely due to continual inflation of football transfer fees, as the actual number of transfers across the leading 20 leagues increased by only 0.3%.

Those transfer fees measure clubs’ transfer commitments, rather than the cash changing hands between clubs. The way so many clubs are spending incomprehensible fees, paid in installments, means that the transfer market is becoming a paper transfer of money, to be paid in future. UEFA warns that growing reliance on player sale profits, deferred payments and financing against future transfer receipts leaves clubs exposed if prices or market liquidity weaken.

UEFA’s comparison of transfer fees with modelled Transfermarkt valuations estimated Scottish and English buyers paid a 21% premium, compared with 9% globally. Saudi clubs had the largest premium, at 28%.

Those valuations are estimates, and Transfermarkt can be off with how it values players, but it shows that the Scottish clubs, mainly Celtic and Rangers, do tend to overpay for the players they bring in. English clubs sold their players at an estimated 7% premium over transfermarkt valuations, with the BBC finding earlier this month that Premier League clubs paid around £20m more on average for players bought from other Premier League clubs than for those bought from abroad.

Number of Signings & Manager Changes

Scottish clubs fielded an average of 32.4 players, 7% more than ten years ago, which ranked 17th across UEFA’s associations. Motherwell used Scotland’s fewest players and Aberdeen the most.

Average time already spent at a Scottish club before the season was only 1.2 years. Dundee United had the shortest average tenure and Celtic the longest. That limited continuity helps explain the recurring task of building a functioning team from substantial annual recruitment.

Scottish clubs averaged 12.6 senior arrivals during the summer, an increase of over 4%, with the 12.6 number broken down into 4.8 transfers involving fees, 4.4 free transfers and 3.3 loans. Only Italy’s first and second divisions averaged more incoming summer loans among the 20 leagues compared.

Across the full season, Scotland had the highest average number of inbound loans in Europe at 5.7 per club. Loanees played 15% of league minutes, against an average of 9%, only Türkiye’s top tier played more loanees, with 16% of league minutes going to loan players.

Scottish clubs also ranked third for outbound loans, behind only Italy and England, averaging 18.6. That number includes 7.9 first-team players and 10.7 involving academy players, with the number inflated by any player that went out on more than one loan spell in the season.

UEFA records 738 coaching changes across Europe, with a whopping 63% of clubs changing coach last season. In Scotland there were 14 managerial changes, up from nine, averaging 1.2 per club. Two-thirds of clubs in the division changed coach, which seems a huge number - but Scotland’s average ranked only 17th in Europe

Youth Minutes & Squad Rules

Craig Mulholland, the SFA’s new chief football officer, has a nervy few months ahead as he waits to see if the clubs will vote through his proposals to increase minutes given to Scottish youngsters.

The UEFA report backs up his argument, as it showed that Scotland spends a smaller share on youngsters and gives them a smaller share of minutes than the European average.

Under-20s (of all nationalities) accounted for just 4% of Scottish transfer spending, while half of the money went on players aged 24-28, and 44% spent on those aged 20-23. Only 2% of transfer spending went on players aged 29 or older, and it was notable that in Rangers’ recent victory at Celtic Park, 27-year old James Penrice was their oldest player in the starting XI. By contrast, Celtic had six players older than Penrice from their eleven starters.

Across Europe, players aged 23 or younger accounted for 56% of spending, showing that for Scottish clubs to maximise their trading models, they have to buy even younger before selling at peak market ages of 22 or 23.

U20s of all nationalities received 4% of league minutes in Scotland, which was below the report’s 6% average. Only six of the 20 leagues featured had lower shares than Scotland’s 4%; England, Spain, Italy and Poland on 3%, with Greece and Türkiye on 2%.

Locally trained players of all ages accounted for 33% of Scottish league minutes. This is one of the lowest figures in Europe, with only Greece, Portugal and Türkiye giving a smaller share of minutes to players produced in their own country.

Scotland’s figure comprised 7% for club-trained players and 26% for players trained elsewhere within the association. For this measure, players can be of any nationality, so as an example Paul Nsio, currently on loan at St. Mirren, would count as association trained - despite not being eligible for Scotland.

Scotland was also one of 19 associations without a specific domestic squad-size limit and one of 24 associations that have no home-grown rules at all (30 leagues have one). Mulholland will hope to see a footnote in next year’s report stating that Scotland will be implementing new youth-playing-time rules from 2027/28. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will be the case as I don’t think our clubs will vote it through.

It is a decade since issue one of Nutmeg dropped from letterboxes across the land. When we launched, we had no idea how long the magazine would last. Print, went the consensus, was yesterday’s news.

Over 1,500 articles and hundreds of photographs and illustrations later, we’re still here. To celebrate, over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing some of our favourite pieces for your delight.

And if you’ve not sampled Nutmeg in print yet, please do give us a try — there’s nothing quite like the escape that pages can bring.

This article first appeared in Issue 2 which was published in December 2016. To find out more about the print magazine and subscriptions, hit the button.👇

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Illustration by Duncan McCoshan.

By J David Simons

A few years ago, I was asked if I would contribute a story to the Football Memories project, a partnership between Alzheimer Scotland and The Scottish Football Museum, along with BackPage, the publishing company that made the initial request to me. These organisations had found through practical experience that images, memorabilia and anecdotes about football clubs, players and matches have the ability to stimulate the memory of male sufferers of dementia.

The idea therefore behind the Football Memories project was to construct a database of stories that could be used by family members or volunteers visiting Alzheimer’s patients in the hope of re-connecting them with their memories and their forgotten selves. I was delighted to participate in the project especially as I had one particular football memory I wished to lay down in print. What I didn’t realise was the impact my recollection would have on my own life.

When I was a child growing up in Glasgow, I always wanted to be a goalkeeper. I don’t know why. Goalkeeping is not the most appealing of the footballing positions to children, most youngsters preferring the adulation showered on the scorer of the winning goal, the net bulging, the crowd going wild in celebration, the Lawman arm held aloft in acknowledgement. Such adoration is rarely directed towards the goalkeeper. He is often a lone figure prowling his area, the undervalued protector quietly going about his task, his success seldom appreciated, his failure there for all to see and mock.

Glasgow, of course, is well known for its two famous football clubs — Rangers and Celtic — with most children being forced by parental or peer pressure to choose one or the other. I elected for Rangers for no other reason than I preferred the blue of their strip to the green of Celtic. I soon became familiar with the various well-known personalities connected with the club. The legendary manager, Scot Symon, famous players such as Wee Willie Henderson, Slim Jim Baxter, captain John Greig and, of course, their goalkeeper Billy Ritchie.

And so it was with great excitement that my ten-year-old self settled down to listen to live radio coverage of the Rangers v Dundee Scottish Cup Final on April 25^th 1964 at the national stadium, Hampden Park. My enjoyment of the occasion was to be enhanced by the fact that I lived less than a mile from the ground, so that every time a goal was scored, I could rush to open the front door and hear the roar of the crowd.

But there were no roars to be heard from the 120,000 supporters for the first 45 minutes of that final. It was 0-0 at half-time, thanks to the Dundee goalkeeper, Bert Slater, making wonder save after wonder save to fend off the Rangers attack. My childhood imagination was fired up by Slater’s heroics as I pictured his diving efforts to defend the Dundee goal. It wasn’t until well into the second half that Rangers eventually went in front, a headed Jimmy Millar goal from a corner when Slater’s sight of the ball was impeded by a Gers forward. Dundee fought back, however, and quickly equalised through a wonderful volley from Kenny Cameron.

Again the Rangers onslaught came, and again Slater thwarted his opponents’ efforts. Just 90 seconds before the full-time whistle, Rangers finally managed to break through and Millar scored again. A Ralph Brand third came against the dejected Dundee players a minute later. Rangers had triumphed 3-1, but Bert Slater had won my heart and allegiance in a game that would become known as ‘The Bert Slater Final’. From that day on, I became a Bert Slater fan and a dedicated Dundee supporter.

For a ten-year-old boy living in the west of Scotland, it was probably not a good idea to support a football team 80 miles away on the other side of the country. The chances of actually seeing my new-found hero Bert and my new team play were very remote. Neither was there an opportunity to watch him on the small screen as only the most important matches were televised in those days. My support of Bert and Dundee was therefore confined to following their progress in the sports pages of the daily newspapers.

However, fate was soon to lend a helping hand. Some 15 months after The Bert Slater Final, I read that the Scottish League were playing against the Irish League and had named an international side with four Dundee players in the team, including the goalkeeper. Finally, I had found my opportunity to see my hero play.

The date of the match was Wednesday, September 8^th 1965. A midweek fixture on a school night. Unfortunately for me, it was to take place not at Hampden Park just down the road, but several miles away at Ibrox Stadium, the home of my former team. There was no chance I could ask my father to take me. He was a busy doctor always back late from his surgery or from patient visits during the week. I therefore began pestering my mother as soon as I was home from school that day. The conversation went something like this:

“I’m going to the Scotland game tonight.”

Laughter from my mother. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s the only chance I’ll get to see any Dundee players.”

“Don’t support a team on the other side of the country then.”

“I’m going to go.”

“It’s a school night. You’re not going anywhere.”

“I’m going to go.”

“I’m not letting a 12-year-old boy go off to a football match on his own.”

“I’m going to go.”

“And how are you going to get there?”

“I don’t know. By bus.”

“And how will you pay for that? And to get into the ground?”

“I’ve got the birthday money Grandma gave me.”

“You’re not going.”

“I’m going to go.”

And so the conversation went in circles until my mother, losing her patience, said: “All right. Just go then. See if I care.”

Rather than take this as a challenge I wasn’t in any way expected to accept, I chose to take my mother’s words literally as the required permission I sought. “All right, I will then.”

I rushed to my room, changed out of my school uniform, pocketed my birthday money, and stormed out of the house. I imagined my mother thought I would be back within the hour, hungry and chastened, ready for supper.

The only geographical information I knew about Ibrox Stadium was that it was located somewhere in an area in the southside of Glasgow known as Govan. Fortunately, buses with that very name on their destination boards passed nearby my home so when one came along, on I hopped, too scared and embarrassed to ask the driver if he could let me off at the stop nearest the stadium. Instead I hoped the bus would pick up other passengers going to the game which luckily it did. I followed these supporters with their scarves and rosettes boasting the national colours when they got off the bus and walked to the ground.

I paid my entry fee at the turnstile and entered the stadium. As I tried to find a decent viewing position within the crowd on the terracing, a helpful adult told me I would be better off in the boys’ enclosure down at the front. Off I went to mingle with other lads my own age, no doubt there with their fathers further back in the crowd. It was a cool, late summer’s evening, and I was standing a few feet away from the glorious green of the pitch, alongside the tunnel from which the players would emerge. I couldn’t believe what I had done. I was a tiny soul among thousands of strangers, miles away from home. As the teams jogged out to the roar of the crowd, I was beside myself with the thrill, the fear and the audacity of it all.

Scotland won 6-2 that night. I don’t remember anything of the game but I returned home deeply satisfied with my adventure despite the punishment that was sure to come. My parents had been frantic with worry, my father driving up and down the bus route looking for me, my mother ready to phone the police if I hadn’t returned soon. Such was their relief at seeing me back safe that I actually escaped being disciplined for my actions. But I wouldn’t have cared anyway. I had successfully run away from home to see my hero.

The years passed, I finished school, I went to university, graduated in law, worked for a while at an Edinburgh legal firm before deciding that I would like to have another adventure before I settled down. I would go off to travel at a time when taking a gap year was not the norm it is now. I began my journey in Spain, spending some time with my friend Jenny who had a house in the tiny village of Orxeta, up in the hills behind the coastal resort of Benidorm. Jenny worked during the evenings in Benidorm and I would often drive down to meet her at a bar in the town after she had finished her shift and we would go off to late-night taverns to drink wine and listen to the music of the flamenco guitarists.

On one such evening when I arrived at the bar, Jenny was not off her shift yet. The bar owner mentioned that a family had just come in from Scotland and I might want to chat with them while I was waiting. The parents must have been in their early 40s, and they were there with their two teenage daughters. I did the polite thing and went over to talk to them.

The mood was relaxed and easy, and we hit it off immediately. Names were exchanged, beers were drunk, the conversation was convivial and after about half an hour, I asked the father of this family what he did for a living.

“I’m a golf club professional,” he replied.

“A professional golfer?”

“No, no, I’m not good enough for that. I’m attached to a golf club where I give lessons, help design the course. But I did use to be a professional footballer.”

“Oh really. Who did you play for?”

“Watford. Before that, Liverpool. And Dundee.”

“What position?”

“I was a goalkeeper.”

“A goalkeeper for Dundee?” It took a few seconds for the words to sink in. “You’re not Bert Slater, are you?”

He laughed. “How did you know?”

“You were my childhood hero,” I said. “I once ran away from home to see you play.”

And so I told Bert the story I have just told you. It was a fabulous night, all the more special because I had been given the chance to get to know the man before I realised who he was. If I had been told I was going to meet my hero from the outset, I would have been the fawning, stuttering fan. Instead, we had already established a sort of friendship before I made my discovery. Several more beers were drunk, football stories were shared, and Bert and I hugged each other goodbye. It was one of the best nights of my life.

When I came to write my contribution to the Football Memories database, I googled Bert to see if I could find out what had become of him. Sadly, I learned he had died in 2006 at the age of 70, evoking for me yet again memories of that wonderful evening I had spent with him and his family in Spain back in 1978. Later, during the course of writing my article, I wondered if I could track down details of the game for which I had run away from home to see him play. Thanks to the magic of the internet and to the devotion of some superfan who had created a website dedicated to the history of Scotland’s international football games, I found the match. Scottish League v Irish League. Wednesday, September 8^th 1965. Ibrox Park. Kick-off: 7.30pm. I scanned the Scottish team sheet for the name of my hero. I couldn’t believe it. Bert Slater wasn’t listed.

I stared at the page. A Dundee goalkeeper certainly represented Scotland that night. But it was not Bert Slater. Instead, it had been Ally Donaldson. There had to be some mistake.

I googled Bert again and tracked down a timeline of his career. By September 8^th 1965, he had already left Dundee for Watford and would have therefore been ineligible to play for the Scottish League side. This was impossible. If you had put me on a witness stand and asked me to swear on my mother’s life that I had seen Bert Slater play that evening in Glasgow, I would have said without any doubt: ‘Yes, of course.’ I felt the heat rise to my face in utter embarrassment. I had been so convinced that Bert Slater and not Ally Donaldson was in goal that I had even told Bert himself I had seen him play. I discovered later through my research that Bert never represented Scotland throughout his career so he would have known that night in Spain that I had been mistaken. Yet, gentleman that he was, he had humoured me, allowing me to cling on to that cherished memory of my childhood.

The impact on me of this incident has been profound. For a start, it has made me doubt the accuracy of all my memories. Suddenly, the past for me became extremely shaky ground and remains so to this day. And what do we know of the influence of the internet on the culture of memory? Without instant access to all this electronic information, there is no way I would have been able to track down details of that particular football match. Not only was I able to find the game, I was eventually able to buy the official programme on eBay which again confirmed Bert had not played that night.

Without the internet, my running away from home to see my hero would have remained a family anecdote, its veracity never questioned. So what is memory? What is truth? With the ability to confirm our recollections through the collective memory that is now the worldwide web, our past has become more verifiable, and therefore will our histories become more accurate, more truthful? Or does it really matter that I misapprehended things that evening back in 1965, as long as I can restore to some Alzheimer’s patient the buried memory of that great goalkeeper Bert Slater?

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This article first appeared in Issue 1 of Nutmeg which was published in September 2016. To find out more about the print magazine and subscriptions, hit the button.👇

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By Neil Forsyth

In the autumn of 2000 I was working for an advertising company off Tottenham Court Road. My job was to trawl through a labyrinthine suite of software and retrospectively confirm if clients’ adverts had been broadcast in the correct slots. I didn’t know how to work the software. My boss was called Brownie. He didn’t know how to work the software either.

The days ticked by. After unproductive mornings, Brownie and I would retire to the Fitzrovia pub in Goodge Street before a short, frantic stop at the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet next door.

If you thought the mornings were unproductive, you should have seen the afternoons. Drowsy from lager and wontons, I spent them writing for football websites and diligently conducting business on behalf of the South London Tangerines, an ambitious Dundee United supporters’ club that I’d recently formed with other misplaced Dundonians. Sometimes, not often, I’d ask Brownie if we should perhaps ask for some assistance in working the software and he’d furrow his brow and say, “Tomorrow, Brucie.” He called me Brucie after the entertainer Bruce Forsyth.

It was on one of those empty afternoons that I set about tracking down the members of Dundee United’s 1982/83 Scottish Premier League-winning team. Most were still in the game and easy to find. Ralph Milne was harder. Eventually I found a community website for Nailsea, a small town outside Bristol. It stated that former footballer Ralph Milne ran a local pub called the Queen’s Head. The Queen’s Head’s telephone was answered by someone with a Dundee accent. I asked if it was him.

“Aye,” said Ralph.

In his autobiography What’s It All About Ralphie? (Black and White Publishing, 2009, co-written with Gary Robertson) Ralph relays this phone call and how “at first I thought it was a wind-up by someone on the capers.” But, he clarifies, it was “the start of a bond I’ve kept with the South London Tangerines.”

A few weeks after the call, a dozen of us visited Nailsea for the weekend. We rolled into Ralph’s pub and formed a half-circle of appreciation around him. It was a little awkward, as we talked of the train journey down and Broughty Ferry. And then someone said, “Here Ralph, tell us about the goal at Dens.”

And Ralph relaxed, smiled and briefly put down his pint.

Ralph Milne grew up in the Douglas council estate on Dundee’s eastern wing. A football prodigy, he’d already turned down Aston Villa when Tangerines manager Jim McLean sent word he’d be visiting the Milne household to sign the 14-year-old Ralph on schoolboy terms.

Ralph’s father hung up the phone, panicked and ran to the off-licence. When the abstemious McLean arrived it was to the sight of a kitchen table straining beneath a carry-out as varied as it was vast. When the bewildered McLean left with Ralph’s signature, the youngster asked his father, “Fuck me Dad, what was that all about with the drink?”

Ralph made his United debut aged 18 against Celtic, netted from 25 yards and was briefly the youngest-ever scorer in the Premier League. He was two-footed, rapid and instinctive. Playing wide or through the middle, hanging low over the ball, he was a searing attacking force in a team heavy with ability. This was the United of Hegarty, Narey, Malpas, Gough, Bannon, Sturrock et al, and Ralph comfortably held his own in the club’s most successful team.

Under the borderline despotic leadership of McLean, United had won their first trophies, the Scottish League Cups of 1979 and 1980, and Ralph arrived in time for the most important one of all: the Scottish Premier League title of 1982-83 and the European years that followed.

Off the pitch, his relationship with McLean deteriorated into a blizzard of fines which at one point saw Ralph work labouring shifts to pay his mortgage. On it, he created an anthology of moments that United’s fans of that vintage still cling to.

There was the 4-0 European Cup victory over Standard Liege when Ralph scored two in what many believe was the best individual performance in the club’s history. There was a late volley at Parkhead which kept United in the 1982-83 title race, a goal against Morton when he beat four players from the halfway line and another against Rangers at Hampden when he outpaced their whole defence. In all, 179 games, 45 goals, including a club record 15 goals in Europe where Ralph thrived on being given more space to build up speed and dart late into the box.

For United, and for Ralph, those were the good times. And the goal at Dens was the best.

It came on the afternoon of the May 14, 1983. It was the final game of the season and a win for United would bring the club’s first (and, let’s face it, probably only) Premier League title. Standing in the Queen’s Head 17 years later, Ralph talked the rapt South London Tangerines through the goal. This was Ralph’s Everest, his My Way. I know the words because I’ve heard them so many times. Bit parts are played by Paul Sturrock (Luggy), Davie Dodds, Billy Kirkwood and the Radio Tay offices behind Dens.

“Two minutes before, Luggy had knocked it in the corner for me and I said, ‘Luggy, do you think I’ve got a fucking motorbike?’ So next time he hit my feet. I turned round and I had Doddsy on my left and Kirkwood on my right. Now, Doddsy’s left foot is for standing on and if I’d given it to Kirkwood he would have hit some poor c**t in Radio Tay. So I just hit it, and the rest is history.”

The next day, we battled through hangovers to play a team of former Bristol City players led by Ralph. He stood chatting to spectators on the touchline before the ball finally came too close to ignore. Ralph took a touch, swept it 50 yards to a teammate at the far post, then returned to his conversation. As far as I know, that was his last game.

We brought him to London for our end-of-season awards. He handed out the prizes and sang Suspicious Minds on the karaoke. The next morning he said he’d seen Jesus in the steamed mirror of his Travelodge while lying in the bath. I said Jesus was probably telling his friends that he’d seen Ralph Milne in the bath.

We went back to Nailsea and played a local side at Bristol City’s Ashton Gate before going on to a pub to celebrate Ralph’s 40^th birthday. Brownie, who was a Charlton Athletic fanatic, came on that trip. He was keen to discuss Ralph’s short stay at the Addicks in the late 80s. Ralph told Brownie that it had been a nightmare. Brownie agreed, with a caveat. “To be fair Ralph, you didn’t look well.”

United sold Ralph to Charlton for £125,000 in January 1987, his battle of wills with McLean having been fought to an exhausting draw. The player who McLean had announced as “potentially the most exciting in Scotland” had ultimately defeated the manager’s varied attempts to have him accept his deadening discipline. In a last throw of the dice that gives an insight into his desperation, McLean charged a hypnotist with sorting out Ralph’s attitude, only for the session to be ruined by Ralph repeatedly dissolving into laughter due to the hypnotist’s resemblance to Worzel Gummidge.

As a result, Ralph had found himself slipping in and out United’s team. He was unfit and unfancied. He didn’t go to Rangers, who had chased him for years, or the big English clubs who had made intermittent enquiries, or Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forrest against whom Ralph had scored two goals in McLean’s testimonial. Instead he went to Charlton who were in the English First Division but cash-strapped, playing their home games at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park, and endangered by relegation.

Ralph arrived mentally drained. It didn’t help that United then drew Barcelona in the UEFA Cup and he was forced to watch their famous victories over the Spaniards in a London hotel room. And it didn’t help that, by his own admittance, his drinking was steadily escalating.

Ralph played for Charlton at Wembley in the final of the short-lived Simod Cup before his season ended prematurely with a shattered cheekbone. He flew back to Scotland, picked up his parents, and took them to America for a month. It was a bucket-list trip. His father was dying from terminal cancer.

The 1987-88 season started and Ralph was out of favour. In a particularly Ralph touch, he writes in his book of his mystification at the lack of game time, then talks at length of the “AK47 battery-operated water-pistol” he had taken to patrolling the training ground with and using at will against both players and club staff. Even when a coach, then manager Lennie Lawrence, then the club chairman demanded he refrain from the aquatic violence, Ralph indignantly refused, pointing out that “I bought it in America and it’s very precious to me.”

Escape came through a loan spell at Third Division Bristol City. Ralph scored a volley on his debut and it was the start of a resurrection. In his book, Ralph partly puts this down to the fact that while in Bristol he took to drinking in the afternoons rather than the evenings because — and he’s genuine in his warning — you can’t be a top-class athlete if you’re not getting enough sleep.

City’s manager Joe Jordan showed unflagging belief in Ralph, as the team vied for promotion and Ralph’s form returned to historical levels. He had been there less than a year, but news of his revival spread. Ralph spotted Aberdeen’s manager Alex Smith at a match and word reached him that the club were preparing a bid. With his son now living in Dundee with his ex-wife, Ralph would have welcomed the move and when Jordan called him into his office in November 1988 he believed it had arrived. Jordan said he’d accepted a bid. Ralph thanked him and said he was ready to go home.

Jordan said he wasn’t going home, then added, “You’ve got to call Fergie.”

In 2002 I left advertising for journalism and Ralph was the only contact I had. It won me my first commission. The magazine Four Four Two told me to take Ralph back to Old Trafford and see what happened. Ralph and I met at the train station and got a taxi to the stadium. He located his name on the museum’s wall of former players and pointed out his proximity to his friend Frank Kopel. In the lift a steward said, “You used to play here, didn’t you?” and Ralph said yes, he was Ralph Milne, and a silence descended.

In the dressing room, Ralph told a story about arriving on his first day and being given a peg between Paul McGrath and Norman Whiteside. “What fucking chance did I have?” he laughed. And then we went to the pub — an Irish bar in Deansgate where Milne, McGrath and Whiteside had once conspired to lose afternoons — and Ralph drank and told lots of stories.

I submitted the article and the editor sent back a raging missive. “This reads like the Morning Star obituary for the thwarted career of the Undersecretary of the Boilermakers’ Union” (you remember the bad ones). He wanted me to twist the knife. I wouldn’t, so he did, but Ralph never read it anyway. In hindsight, I’m not sure if he wanted to go back to Old Trafford at all.

At a League Manager’s Association dinner in the early Noughties, Alex Ferguson was asked who his worst ever buy was. “Ralph Milne,” he answered. “I only paid £170,000 but I still get condemned for it.” It was a clever answer, an easy laugh and with little judgement attached. The truth would have been more uncomfortable for Ferguson.

Ralph played 23 games for Manchester United, scored three goals, and indeed cost £170,000. There were many, many worse buys during Ferguson’s 27-year Old Trafford tenure. A brief selection: Bebe (£7million, seven games), Wilfried Zaha (£15m, four games), Massimo Taibi (£5.4m, four games), Zoran Tosic (£7million, four games), Dong Fangzhou (£3.5m, one game), Djemba-Djemba (£3.5m, 39 games, 10 cars, 30 bank accounts, one bankruptcy). But infamy sticks and Ralph became “Fergie’s worst signing”.

To be fair though, he wasn’t his best. In his book, Ralph’s account of his time at United is endearing. His surprise when Jordan told him about United’s bid never abated — he seems to have spent his two and a half years at Old Trafford in a state of shock. Later he would tell the Manchester Evening News that he would have signed for the club even if it meant “sweeping the terraces”. This self-deprecation shouldn’t have been warranted. Ferguson was right in judging that Ralph had the ability to be at Old Trafford, but Ralph’s mind was elsewhere.

He had joined a Manchester United that today feels archaic. Ford Escort club cars, the old Cliff training ground, no European football because of Heysel, and Ferguson under pressure from the fans as he tried to patch together a winning team.

Ralph was played out of position on the left after Ferguson told him his left foot was “better than Strachan’s”. He started well, scoring his first goal against former club Charlton, then another in a Boxing Day victory over Clough’s Nottingham Forrest (Ralph recalls ensuring he “didn’t over-do it with the drink” the day before). A week later, on New Year’s Day, Ralph played in a 3-1 win over Liverpool that bought Ferguson another few months. In the seven months that Ralph was at United that season, he played 22 games, scored three goals and Fergie thanked him for helping young left-back Lee Sharpe settle in behind him.

Another archaic aspect of United at that time was the industrial drinking culture. McGrath and Whiteside would both ultimately be sold because of their part in it, and club captain Bryan Robson was as keen an advocate as any. Inevitably, Ralph became willing collateral damage.

Amongst many other examples, his book details a hazy trip to the Cheltenham Festival with Robson and Steve Bruce, a pre-season tour of Japan where Ralph holed up in a karaoke bar with Mark Hughes and Neil Webb, and endless food-free “lunches” with McGrath and Whiteside. McGrath got the call from Ferguson to say he’d been sold while drunk with Ralph at Robson’s house.

The new season started and Ralph was shuffled out of the team, with Sharp pushed forward to left wing. Ferguson was in trouble. This was the era of the infamous “TA RA FERGIE” banner and the face-saving Mark Robbins goal against Nottingham Forrest. Ralph was injured for five months, had an unsuccessful loan spell at West Ham and was then bizarrely given a third year at United.

That season saw him barely make the reserve team, his life increasingly dictated by drinking and gambling. He left United in the summer of 1991. There can’t be many Manchester United players who leave the club and have their house repossessed a couple of months later.

His reputation in Britain somewhat tainted, Ralph played for Sing Tao in Hong Kong for a year, training at Happy Valley racecourse and drinking in a Scottish bar called Mad Dogs where he never had to pay. Just in case his lifestyle was threatened with improvement, Frank McAvennie rolled into town to play for a rival club and dutifully join Ralph in Mad Dogs.

In 1993, Ralph came back to Bristol where by now he had a second son. There was a brief, three-week spell in Northern Ireland at Derry City, which was largely spent in a bar with fleeting teammate Luther Blissett, and then it was done. Ralph was an ex-player at 32. And then his Dad died. Ralph was without both his “best pal” and his livelihood.

In 2005 Ralph moved back to Dundee, largely because of his mother’s failing health. I would see him whenever I was home, and my memories of the early part of that era are fond ones. For example, for the 25^th anniversary of the Premier League win, Davie Dodds held a function in his Dundee pub and I found myself in a room full of heroes.

Ralph had returned to Dundee in a blaze of glory — settling into a flat, getting a job, becoming a celebrated fixture in Broughty Ferry’s pubs and making “wee cameos” in the bedrooms of starstruck Dundonian women. His company was as rewarding as ever.

There was his 50^th birthday party in a packed Broughty Ferry hostelry where Ralph worked the room like Sinatra and Dave Narey stood silently in the corner like Clint Eastwood. There was a pre-season friendly for United against Newcastle where Ralph chose to stay in the social club and I picked him up afterwards.

There was his autobiography launch at the Waterstone’s in Commercial Street. I met Ralph beforehand in the Hansom Cab pub. He was with his childhood friend Andy McPhee, a loyal, kind man who played, often with great difficulty, a steadying role in Ralph’s life. Ralph signed my copy, “To Neil, who amazed me sometimes.”

When United played a pre-season friendly against Barcelona they held a Parade of Legends at half-time. No Legend enjoyed it more than Ralph. He strode majestically onto the pitch and soaked every second from the ovation. It was a last hurrah.

By now I had known Ralph for a decade. There had been a thread to our meetings, to my glimpses of his life, but I ignored it. It was easy to do so, until the Dundee Evening Telegraph quietly reported that Ralph was in Dundee’s Ninewells hospital. By the time I spoke to him he was discharged and defiant, summarising the medical advice as “Stick to beer.”

But things started to change and darken. There was talk of fallings out, mutterings of pub barrings, and (later dropped) assault charges. There was no job. Ralph had a combustible relationship with his new girlfriend which culminated in a brutal, drunken and frankly exploitative interview in a Scottish tabloid in which the couple were photographed looking sad in front of a table full of booze.

Meeting Ralph in this period was a different experience. A little sadder, and tinged with guilt. Every round bought came with a chaser, a lurking thought and an accusation to the self: You’re making this worse.

In 2013, Ralph was the subject of an episode of When the Floodlights Fade, a documentary series on former Manchester United players for the club’s TV channel. Ralph took the film crew to Douglas and talked with genuine warmth and a welcome pride of his time at Old Trafford. The programme ends with Ralph interviewed at Broughty Ferry harbour with his friend Andy.

Andy and Ralph talk vaguely about Ralph having recently been through hard times. “Things can only get better,” says Ralph, then adds, “D-Ream.” And then he thanks Andy for his friendship and says: “I’ve got no regrets, I’ve had a great life.” It’s an unsettling moment. He’s only 51.

In the summer of 2015, 15 years after I phoned the Queen’s Head pub in Nailsea, my mobile phone showed a missed call from Ralph. I live in the countryside and have to go outside to get a signal, so I walked my dog and called Ralph back. He was in ebullient mood. As I walked over fields, we talked about how long it had been. Ralph said it had been years. There was more to it than that, but it had and I felt guilty.

He was calling because he had a pension maturing later that year. “Big money,” he said. He and his girlfriend wanted to go to New York, where I had lived for a period, and he wanted hotel recommendations. He was funny and lucid. I told him how good it was to hear from him. He said he would visit me. A few weeks later, I received a text from Andy McPhee. It said: “He’s not hurting anymore.”

And that was it. Ralph was dead.

I tried to help him. Not nearly as much as others I’m sure, but I did try. Ralph was right that we hadn’t spoken for a couple of years but he didn’t know, or had more likely forgotten, that when he was hospitalised the first time myself and others put together an escape plan, to a specialist English clinic, that Ralph didn’t take. It was too late. Maybe from me it was too little. But addiction is a state of mind where friends look like enemies and help looks like a trap. It’s hard to know your role in the story. What’s clearer is that it’s just all so fucking sad.

Ralph told me a story once. Over a pre-match meal in the 1990s, his manager asked if he could do a job that day on the left of midfield. Ralph, who had presumed he wasn’t playing, gratefully agreed, but when he got to the dressing room the number 12 jersey hung waiting on his hook. “He must have smelt the drink off me,” Ralph flatly concluded. The manager was Sir Alex Ferguson, the club Manchester United.

He told these stories unprompted, offering them as trinkets to grateful and perhaps guilty pub audiences, myself included. But it’s not those stories he should be remembered for and it’s not those stories which caused a shrine to be built by strangers at Tannadice after his death. It wasn’t those stories that saw the stadium packed for the next home game for a sorrowful minute’s silence. And it wasn’t those stories that saw Ralph’s tearful old teammates come to the funeral without cars so they could give their friend the send-off they knew he’d have wanted.

The outpouring of appreciation for Ralph’s life was because of more wholesome treasures, and it is for them that he will rightfully be remembered. All those runs, all those goals, European nights under the lights. And, more than anything, Ralph will be remembered for the afternoon of May 14, 1983. You should look it up. It’s on YouTube, just search ‘Ralph Milne league winning’.

Narey plays the ball out of defence to Sturrock. He slides it on to Ralph, who barely looks at the ball as he glides across the rutted, end-of-season grass. He looks instead at the goal, and the positioning of Dundee’s goalie Colin Kelly. Thirty yards out, Ralph coils and flicks his left foot. The ball rises and rises as Kelly flaps hopelessly beneath it. Behind the goal, a penned mass of flesh and tangerine watch as, almost too late, the ball dips down into immortality and Jock Brown shouts “Absolutely unbelievable!”

As half of the ground erupts, Ralph lifts his arms, smiles and turns southwards. Then a thought flashes over his face and he turns to look at United’s fans in the main stand. He’s looking for a man who ran through the streets of the Douglas council estate to buy a carry-out because Jim McLean was on his way round. He’s looking for his Dad.

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By Craig Easton

“EASTY!” I hear my name reverberating down the corridor just as I put my hand on the players’ entrance door. I pause for a couple of seconds before stepping through into the bowels of the old corner stand at Tannadice Park — this is the last thing I need. I pass Steven Fallon, one of my teammates, on his way to the kit room. “Easty, the chairman’s looking for you,” he says, with a pat on the shoulder and a look that says: All the best, mate. All I can do is nod as I make my way to the foot of the stairs that lead to Jim McLean’s office.

It’s not even been 12 hours since I endured the full force of a ‘hairdryer’ from the manager and Jim’s younger brother, Tommy, after our “disappointing” Scottish Youth Cup victory against Ayr United the previous night. Merely progressing to the next round of a competition isn’t always enough when you wear the tangerine and black. Most of the team felt some heat from the gaffer for contributing to an average performance; however he turned the dial up to maximum power for me. I had been playing consistently well for the reserves, had recently broken through into the first team, and was pushing for a permanent place in the side so, obviously, more was expected from me when turning out for the youth team. I understood that. It comes with the territory and I had been relishing the extra responsibility when playing with my own age group.

I had actually thought I had a pretty good game, and so did my dad, who certainly doesn’t do false praise. However, putting across any opinions on my performance at that particular moment would’ve been a very bad idea. I would keep that to myself. Just accept the heat. Most of it was a blur and consisted of me attempting to look the manager in the eye without being disrespectful. At one point, I recall him screaming that I could “shove my music up my arse!” as he strode over to the dressing-room ghetto blaster to eject and throw my Oasis mixtape in my general direction. As I half flinched, I noticed that it bounced off the bench and didn’t shatter so I took that as a win and suppressed a small smile as the pelters continued. That tape had some killer B-sides.

Now my brain’s going into overdrive as I make my way along the narrow corridor. I’m thinking that the chairman’s going to double down on last night’s bollocking after conversing with his younger sibling. Or is it something else? I’ve not really missed curfew. There was that time a couple of weeks ago when I fell asleep at my girlfriend’s/future wife’s parents’ house. But surely I wouldn’t have been stuck in for randomly being a couple of hours late back to my digs? Nah, Tony and Marie were pretty cool about that. And they also didn’t mind us going on the occasional youth-team night out after a win. On the other hand, Jim McLean has eyes all over the city. As Maurice Malpas — player coach and United legend who survived The McLean Years™ — likes to say: “Dundee’s a village.”

“Eeeastaay!” the second shout breaks off my chain of thought four steps into my climb, and I look up to see the chairman leaning over the bannister at the top of the stairs. He’s dressed in his usual attire: white shirt, navy and silver tie, grey dress trousers and loafers. Immaculate as always. Our eyes meet just as he finishes his second summons and he says, “Hurry up, I need to see you in my office for a minute.” Here we go. Just take it on the chin, Craig, I tell myself, you’ve heard the stories — bigger and better players than you have had the Wee Jim treatment and survived to tell the tale. In fact, you should be honoured.

“Come in. Hurry up, close the door behind you,” he says, as he walks about 15ft to his leather chair behind his large wooden desk in front of the window that overlooked the main entrance to the stadium. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in his office. If his door was open, and it often was — sometimes strategically now that I think about it, then the chairman would often shout you in when he’d notice you passing by. Sometimes it would be just to have a bit of banter, check how you were settling into your digs, but often there would be questions. Where you were staying; who you were sharing a room with; if you had a girlfriend; if you were working hard in training. All questions he already knew the answers to but he asked them in a way that you knew he knew, and he was making sure you knew he knew!

On other occasions, it was after a game in which you knew you’d played well and while there would be an acknowledgement of that, the main reason would be to remind you that you were still nowhere near the first team. He’d ask what you thought of players that played in your position, what they did well, and if you thought you could either play alongside them or eventually take their place. Did you have what it took to be a Dundee United player? Tough questions for a 17-year-old to answer, but I had a mantra of sorts that I recited to myself during each of those early forays into Jim McLean’s office.

It was something that the first-team goalkeeper, Ally Maxwell, had said to a group of us youth players during a lunch break not long after we had signed as apprentices. Maxy had just finished his fish and beans and was holding court with four or five of us. He was telling stories from his time at Rangers, imparting football wisdom and basically shooting the shit with kids who hang on every word a first-team player says, when the chairman burst out of his office to put his plate in the dishrack.

“Thank you, Maureen, that was lovely,” he said to the cook. Then Maxy shouted over: “Is that you chairman, are you not having seconds today?” There were a few nervous looks around our table. We were all wondering what Maxy was thinking. When the chairman’s about, surely you keep your head down. The whole point is not to attract his attention, isn’t it? “Aye well, you’d know Maxwell. How many cups of coffee and slices of toast have you had the’day?” the chairman shot back. “I’m just talking to these young pups, chairman, giving them some advice. Sydney said he saw you with a plate of biscuits earlier,” Maxy replied.

Cue more nervous looks and everyone turning to stare at Syd. “Is that right?” The chairman stopped and his eyes settled on Chris Devine, aka Syd, our youth team’s top goalscorer who was “blessed” not only with a surname that warranted the obvious nickname but also with a rear-end similar in scale to King Kenny’s. Syd laughed nervously and held up both hands. “You’d know eh, Syd?” the chairman chuckled. “By the size of your arse, you’ve been eating them as well!” and then he disappeared through the adjoining door between his office and the kitchen.

When the laughter died down, Syd slumped in his chair and turned to Maxy. “Cheers for that, you absolutely killed me there.” We were all thinking the same thing: you can’t be having banter with Jim McLean! Maxy’s reply was simple. “Why not?” he smiled. “He’s only a man. He actually likes it when you have a laugh with him. Look him in the eye and talk to him, and he’ll respect you more for it.” Those words didn’t only resonate with me then but I have utilised Maxy’s piece of advice on almost every occasion when I’ve had to converse with anyone in a position of status above my own: “He’s only a man.”

However, on this occasion, the chairman asked the one question I dreaded over them all: “How do you think you played last night?” Oh no. Where do I go here? Do I sit with the fence right up my backside and stammer, “Erm, I wasn’t great chairman… alright… I mean, I suppose I could’ve done better, but… alright.” That’s a cop out, the answer I think he wants to hear, especially if he’s of the same opinion about my performance as the manager. Even though Tommy isn’t my favourite person right at this moment, he’s shown he has belief in me to play in his first team and, of course, he has my total respect. If I say I thought I played well, am I undermining his opinion? This is a minefield… I take a deep breath. He’s only a man. Shit. Here I go, Maxy. “I thought I played well, chairman…” He cuts me off before I can embarrass myself with embellishing that comment. “So did I,” he says with a smile. “But you need to work on your body position when you receive the ball from one side and you want to switch it out quickly to the other.” What? Did he just agree with me there? And was that a smile? Before I can process his response any further, he’s on his feet rolling a Mitre out from under his desk. I remember stupidly focusing on the ball and thinking, “Does Jim McLean always keep a football under his desk?”

He’s standing with a tasselled loafer-shod foot on top of the ball, pointing to an imaginary player. “See when the right back has the ball and you start to angle off to receive, you already need to have a picture in your head about everything else on the opposite side of the pitch. At the moment, you’re sometimes getting the pass with your body too square on and it’s taking you three or more touches to get it out your feet to switch the play,” and he demonstrates the somewhat laboured technique that I’ve been utilising thus far. I was a wiry, tenacious player such that I didn’t mind contact. So when I received the ball under pressure, more often than not I could manipulate it and my opponent while maintaining possession and usually complete my intended pass, but admittedly somewhat less economically than it could’ve been done.

“If you have the picture in your head and time your movement, you can take the pass with your left foot, then you can switch the ball with your right in two touches, every time,” he says, beckoning me to the far wall, then passing me the ball as he tucked the bottom half of his tie into his shirt. He gets me to play it in to him to demonstrate what he was talking about. I didn’t pass the ball in hard enough on the first occasion. “PLAY IT IN TO ME WITH PACE!” he demands, and then after a couple of demos we swapped places.

I took in every detail of what he was saying and I remember thinking: Wow. Actual Jim McLean has just taken time out of his day to give me a personal coaching session. In his office. It was surreal. All of a sudden, he says, “You’ve got to keep working on that,” rolls the ball back under his desk and sits down. “I heard oor Tom gave you a hard time last night, is that right?” he asks with a knowing grin. I answer with a shrug of my shoulders. “Yeah, but it’s alright, I know I’m in and about the first team now, so I should be better.” “You can fucking handle that,” he says. “He wants you in that first team and he wants you to stay in it. You’re doing okay, keep working hard. And by the way, if Tom asks, don’t tell him you were in here.” “Eh… okay, thanks chairman.”

There were many more visits to Jim McLean’s office over the following five years of his tenure and I wasn’t the only young player who felt the butterflies every time I was summoned. We didn’t know it, because we didn’t discuss it at the time, but he was having these little pep talks with almost every one of us. Often there was the fear that the experience may not be one you were going to enjoy, however it invariably consisted of being given a combination of advice, coaching points, motivation or a kick up the arse, the latter two of those being very similar. There was always a bit of banter or a question that had you scrambling or laughing nervously. Something that would test you. However, myself and the other young players of the time almost always left his office feeling like he cared. Yes, whisper it, Jim McLean cared about us. But he didn’t want that to become common knowledge. He would give us praise, with the caveat: “Don’t let on to anyone I told you that, I’ve got a reputation to live up to.”

I’m not naive enough to misapprehend that the version of Jim McLean we experienced was a chairman who, while still intent on controlling the culture and impacting the future talent of the football club he built, was a few years removed from the tough, exacting, innovative manager who players equally feared and respected. And there were enough glimpses that added meat to the bones of the tales told by United legends at awards dinners to keep us all on edge. The way he would sit menacingly in the front row of his glass-fronted executive box, positioned directly behind the dugout, before blowing the door wide open like a tornado and rushing halfway down the outside steps to berate an official for a bad decision. Or when he hid behind a tree while “out for a walk” in Camperdown Park to catch Steven Fallon attempting to take a short-cut on the dreaded “Hamburger Hill” run through the forest.

Compared to Dave Bowman, Paul Hegarty, Gary Bollan, Richard Gough et al, myself and the players I came through the ranks with definitely experienced Wee Jim Lite. However, reading and listening to his former charges pay tribute to him, regardless of their position on whether they liked him or not, there is one constant. Every one of them credits him with having a desire to improve them. I was extremely privileged to be among that fortunate fold, and to have one of the greatest football minds of all time take an interest in me when I was attempting to make my mark.

I only realise now how much of a subconscious influence he was and writing this piece has helped me to recognise the way in which he’s shaped many of my personal and footballing values and standards. Ultimately, his legacy lives on not only with Dundee United Football Club, but in all those players who are now coaches and managers in their own right. Ally Maxwell’s piece of advice helped allay my fears and somewhat busted the myth surrounding the great man, which allowed me to form a relationship of sorts. He was only a man. But what a man.

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No Scotsman, no party?

That is the current fear for fans of IK Sirius — the surprise package of this season in Sweden’s top division.

By Monday August 10, Sirius had played 16 matches in the 2026 Allsvenskan, winning 13 and drawing three, to be the only team in the 12 leagues of Europe who play calendar-year seasons to remain unbeaten.

The standout performer in the team — and the league — to that point was Scottish striker Robbie Ure, 22 (below), a product of the Rangers academy, where he was attached from the age of six until 19.

He moved from Rangers to Belgium to join Anderlecht’s reserves, playing one senior game before joining Sirius in March 2025 on a four-year deal.

He scored 11 goals in 30 league matches last year. Then — boom! — he scored 15 goals in his first 15 games this season before being sold to Sevilla in Spain for a Sirius club-record fee of €6.5million (£5.6m).

That was on August 11. At the time of his sale, Sirius had a double-digit points lead at the top of the table. Since then, they have lost three from four.

The first of those defeats was especially painful, against last season’s shock Swedish title winners Mjällby, who hail from what is effectively a village of 1500 people. Sirius were 3-0 up after 34 minutes but lost 4-3 via four second-half goals. The fans started getting restless.

Was this the first sign that with no Scotsman, there will be no Sirius title party after all? That remains to be seen.

Sirius then lost 3-0 at home to mid-table Häcken, and on Monday of last week, August 31, they lost 1-0 at home to Malmo. However, a single-goal victory at Västerås at the weekend established an eight-point gap over second-placed Hammarby.

There is still everything to play for, and still much to admire. In this first instalment of a series that hopes to highlight lessons that can be learned from smaller clubs punching above their weight in Europe, we will consider:

• Sirius’s recruitment policy, which has consistently led to identifying bright young talents that can be bought low and sold (relatively) high. This is partly driven by data.

• The football philosophy of the Sirius manager, Andreas Engelmark, 42, born in Pakistan and adopted by a Swedish couple, and now ploughing a successful furrow developing talent. Aged 26, he became a youth coach at Brommapojkarna, where he worked with players including Viktor Gyökeres and Dejan Kulusevski, before years in MLS with Columbus Crew before going back to Brommapojkarna, then Sirius last year.

• The core principles of Engelmark’s approach, and how in practical terms he implements them.

• The age profile of Sirius’s starting XIs, which are among the youngest in Sweden and indeed across top-flight teams in Europe.

We’ll consider all this with the help of Olof Lundh, a long-time friend of Sporting Intelligence who has spent decades reporting on football, at home and abroad, and is best known these days for this work on TV4.

Sirius’s recruitment policy

The recruitment policy in recent years at Sirius has attempted to focus on buying talented young players relatively cheaply, developing them as quickly as possible and selling at a profit to generate funds to do that again and again.

As Olof explains, one of the tools that Sirius uses is data product Goal Unit. Within that software is GoalUnit Fair Price, which is “a valuation model that estimates what a specific player would realistically sell for — based on performance data, club context, and financial specifics, not just transfer history.”

To stress: Sirius are a small Swedish club with a small budget and zero major trophies in their 119-year history. Sweden’s top league has traditionally been dominated by a few local giants, not least Malmö (24 top-flight titles), IFK Göteborg (18), IFK Norrköping (13), AIK (12) and Djurgårdens (12).

If we are to consider a comparison point in the Scottish Professional Football League, their average attendance of 9387 is closest to Dundee United’s (10,373) for season 2025-26 (source: transfermarkt). While the two clubs’ turnovers are also broadly similar (£11.6m to £10.5m for their last set of accounts), the efficacy of Sirius’ player trading model has allowed them to generate a profit of £2m for the year ending March 2026. Next year’s accounts is likely to be healthier still after the sale of Ure — and could also include a first league title in their history.

Considering the club’s five most profitable sales gives an idea of how their recent trading strategy has helped them.

1. Robbie Ure (Scottish striker). Bought in March 2025, age 21, for €750k from Anderlecht. Sold in August 2026 to Sevilla for €6.50m. Profit: €5.75m. This deal alone highlights how a young man rejected in Scotland was developed by an enlightened club in Sweden, who gave him his chance and then made a lot of money from him.

2. Yousef Salech (Danish forward). Bought in February 2024, age 22, for €500k from Brøndby. Sold in January 2025 to Cardiff for €4m. Profit: €3.50m.

3. Leo Walta (Finnish midfielder). Bought in March 2024, age 20, for €400k from Nordsjælland. Sold in July 2026 for €3.4m to Swansea. Profit: €3m.

4. Malcolm Jeng (Swedish defender). With Sirius since 2021, when he was 16. Sold for €2.5m to Stade Reims in 2025. Profit: €2.5m.

5. Tashreeq Matthews (South African winger). Hired in 2022, age 21, for nothing from Varbergs. Sold in 2024 to for €1.5m to Mamelodi Sundowns. Profit €1.5m.

Other players who have made Sirius profits of €1m+ in recent times include Kingsley Sarfo, Wessam Abou Ali and Jamie Roche.

The football philosophy of Andreas Engelmark

The football philosophy of Andreas Engelmark (below) centres on a clear “spelidé” (playing identity), based around a strong collective culture, player development, scenario-specific training, and an entertaining, proactive style rather than pure survival football.

Engelmark has spoken about a “shared culture as the foundation” of success, with everyone in the squad and on the staff fully buying into the common vision and environment. He has touched upon this in a podcast with Olof Lundh, who also points out that it hasn’t all been plain sailing. As recently as a year ago, Sirius were struggling near the bottom of the table and Engelmark’s job was briefly under threat.

But his methods paid dividends and he retains the view that if any player doesn’t buy into his ideas then “they don’t need to be here”.

Results are necessarily important but Engelmark wants Sirius to be entertaining as a matter of course, and focuses on that above survival.

Sirius’s youthful age profile

IK Sirius’s starting line-ups this season (Allsvenskan 2026) have typically had an average age of around 24, making them one of the youngest sides in the league. Starting XIs have variously been aged 23.4, 23.5, 23.8, 23.9 (multiple times), 24 (multiple times), 24.1, 24.2, 24.3 (multiple times), 24.4, and maxing out at 24.6.

The one other side with a clear age profile younger that Sirius is Engelmark’s former club, Brommapojkarna (aka BP, at circa 23.3). The Allsvenskan overall squad average age is around 25.2 years.

Engelmark’s practical application

Player development is a constant for Engelmark, rooted in his long background as a youth and academy coach at BP. He focuses on technical details, not least positioning and finishing in the box, as well as mental conditioning.

He advocates “purposeful training” in “play-to-win” sessions that aim to rehearse upcoming match scenarios at high intensity.

He also talks about “principles over systems”, not least consistent patterns of movement, positioning and collective behaviour that remain consistent even as the squad, by its nature, evolves all the time.

He has used 4-2-3-1 and an attacking 4-3-3, and analysis of Sirius under him shows dynamic, high-intensity play with quick transitions.

Tactical continuity is key, based on free-flowing attacks; on “system longevity” that can endure via heavy squad rotation; and on a controlled backline, anchored by captain Henrik Castegren and Tobias Anker, allowing a young offence to push forward.

Success? It’s academic

Olof Lundh says: “There are similarities between Mjällby and Sirius but also big differences. Sirius develops players and there is now continuity in this.

“They were away (from the top division) for more than 40 years before getting back to Allsvenskan in 2017 and are now in their 10th season.”

Olof highlights the scouting and data work that Sirius applies in countries across Europe, not least Scandinavia, citing Leo Walta’s acquisition as a prime example — hired from Nordsjælland in Denmark for €400k before being sold to Swansea for €3.4m this year. Olof was not surprised that Sirius sold Robbie Ure, because it was “a price that could be re-invested”.

As for Sirius’s medium and long-term future, Olof describes Uppsala as primarily a city (Sweden’s fourth largest, with a population of around 170,000) known for its educational establishments, especially Uppsala University, founded in 1477. The university is inherent to Uppsala’s culture, and the city does not have sport ingrained in it. While the club’s growing fanbase has been thrilled by this season as unlikely events have unfolded at the stadium Studenternas IP, Olof thinks it’s probably good that the football club can be left to do its own thing and develop in its own way.

And, maybe even win a title this season, Scotsman or not.

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By Stephen McGowan

By the end of tomorrow’s youth development summit in St Andrews, St Mirren chief executive Keith Lasley hopes to witness something as rare and unusual as a full eclipse of the sun. A unanimous show of hands among Scottish football clubs.

Between 9.30am and 3.30pm club owners, chairmen and chief executives will hear SFA chief football officer Craig Mulholland address the nation’s failure in the field of player production, before pitching their own views and ideas. Finger wagging, lectures or browbeating will be discouraged.

Recently promoted from the role of chief operating officer, Lasley has covered every base in Scottish football. He played over 400 games as a midfielder for Motherwell over two spells. Before he became a fixture in Premiership boardrooms, he did some coaching and, at the age of 46, he has been around the block often enough to know that persuading all 42 clubs to agree on anything at all is notoriously difficult.

The interests of Celtic and Rangers are not the same as those of St Mirren or Motherwell, just as the interests of St Mirren and Motherwell are not the same as Stenhousemuir’s or Stirling Albion’s. When club officials gather around the same table the question to the fore of most minds will be: ‘What’s in this for us?’

While a rule compelling clubs to field three under-21 players in every game might enhance Scotland’s hopes of reaching the knock-out stages of a World Cup finals, managers under pressure to reach the group stages of UEFA competitions might see less benefit to them.

In the Champions League play-off defeat to LASK Linz, only three Scots started for champions Celtic in a team filled with expensive Danes, Colombians, South Koreans, Germans, American internationals and Canadians. In their Conference League qualifiers, Motherwell started two, while Hibs started one. Unusually, Hearts won their play-off against Rapid Vienna with six Scots in Wouter Vrancken’s starting XI.

While most seem to agree that players between the age of 16 and 21 see nowhere near enough first-team minutes, doing something about it is fraught with difficulty.

“I feel — and maybe I am kidding myself on — that on the back of recent SFA reports and the new Scotland manager and European results there is a bit of momentum there to maybe find a consensus,” says Lasley, espousing an air of cautious optimism. “We need more of our own young players coming through for a number of reasons.

“So I want to come out that room and feel, firstly, that there is a general agreement that we need to do something here. And, secondly, that we have an action plan. A plan to say, ‘What are we going to do about it?’

“For me, that needs to be systematic. Whether that means mandating so many players in your matchday squad or incentivising clubs in monetary terms, we need one or two things that get all the clubs nodding around the table.

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“One of the problems in Scottish football is the different interests which exist within it. You can have loads of good ideas, loads of reports and then it comes to the crunch and it doesn’t really work.

“Look at most of the leagues around and most have mandated national player involvement rules or incentivisation or rules around how many non-national players are allowed in.

“I don’t want to say specifically what might happen, but I think there is an acknowledgement from everybody, whatever the size of the club, that we are not producing enough of our own players.

“The question is one of how do we get to something that helps with that?”

From the Ernie Walker group of 1995 to the Henry McLeish review of 2010, Scottish football has hosted more think tanks than the Adam Smith Institute.

Lasley sees all the problems first-hand in his working life. Scottish players in the crucial 16-21 transition phase see nothing like enough first-team minutes. Brexit has persuaded English teams, prohibited from signing 16-year-old players from Europe, to fish in Scottish waters instead. Paying minimal development fees, they offer young players and their families life-changing sums, longer contracts and more competitive games than they might get in Scotland.

Visas are another issue. Where England employs a points system to judge whether a player qualifies for a permit, the perception is that it’s harder to be knocked back for a governing body exemption in Scotland than it is to be waved through. Between 1998 and 2013, the old SPL mandated clubs to include at least three outfield players under the age of 21 in their 18-man matchday squad. Many treated the teenagers as ‘shirt fillers’ and the policy was quietly dropped.

Supporters working themselves into a frenzy over new foreign signings on deadline day have no tolerance for lectures on the need for their teams to blood young players. Neither, you suspect, do managers under pressure to win games in a 12-club Premiership.

“We can’t say, ‘Let’s do another report’ because we have the reports, we know the problems,” says Lasley. “What we need is a timescale from, maybe, the start of next season to get something implemented.

“I don’t think we need to go straight to go. And, with the best will in the world, I don’t think we will. But I want to come out of that room this week with something. An idea. If it’s incentivisation, let’s go and study how we do it, what do we do and what are the options that we can implement from the start of next season.”

Incentives might see central grassroots funding handed down with specific provisos. The money might be allocated on the basis of first-team minutes for young players. Whether that would really make any difference to clubs with multi-million-pound turnovers like Celtic (£143million) and Rangers (£94m) is a tough question to answer.

“I am convinced now that it needs to be systematic,” says Lasley. “If it’s optional measures and you leave them to the players or the managers or the boards at each club then, personally, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere fast. There needs to be more than a new Scotland manager appointment to fix things.

“Having spoken to Craig (McLeish) about this I think that is there among managers. And I do feel it within the clubs as well. It’s the strongest feeling I have certainly felt and while I am not the longest-serving CEO by any means, I do feel as if it’s the greatest consensus there has been.

“I wouldn’t promise anyone that anything will change for sure — I have learned enough to know that. But I definitely feel as if there is at least the recognition that we need to do something.

“What that looks like I don’t know and I don’t want to speculate. But from a St Mirren perspective, we would be fully supportive of exploring that.”

Last year, the 503^rd CIES Football Observatory post ranked teams from 65 leagues around the world according to the percentage of domestic league minutes played by footballers aged 21 or under in season 2024-25.

Owned by the City Group, Lommel SK in Belgium gave 69.4% of their first-team minutes to players under 21. The top-three teams in Europe’s big-five leagues were Strasbourg, Barcelona and Stade de Reims.

The picture in Scotland was less rosy. Top of the table were Dundee, a club who rewarded manager Tony Docherty’s willingness to giving 24.8% of his first-team minutes to under-21 players with a P45. Motherwell were second in the table, with 20.6%, while St Mirren were rock-bottom of the 12 teams with 0.8%.

The Paisley club recently published a new strategy document called ‘Our Progression’, laying out their targets and goals for the future. Intent on being the best community-centred development club in Scotland, giving kids a chance is central to that aim.

“There are two ways of doing it,” explains Lasley. “You either have a system which is incentivised and makes it happen. Or alternatively, it happens thanks to a crisis. That’s what happened to me. It was a Motherwell administration, essentially, that gave the likes of me and Steven Hammell and Stephen Pearson and James McFadden and David Clarkson a chance.

“Some of those guys had half-decent careers and when I look back it was administration that really accelerated that. There is always the chance that we would have made it through anyway. But I think it definitely accelerated the number of us who came through around the same time.

“So sometimes it can be an event like that which forces the issue and then, suddenly, you’re saying, ‘Oh, we do have some good young players.’ Or, in a more positive sense, it’s part of a strategic plan. History shows you that, generally, it is one of the two.”

In contrast with 2002, Motherwell are now one of the clubs St Mirren want to emulate. Selling Lennon Miller to Udinese for a record fee, the Steelmen also made decent money on Elijah Just, Elliot Watt, Callum Ward and Theo Bair. Utilising data, the Fir Park club have made equally impressive managerial appointments and are now using the fruits of that strategy to build new training facilities at Dalziel Park.

“Motherwell have been a shining example in the last couple of years,” says the St Mirren CEO. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but they have raked in substantial sums in the last couple of years. And you have to ask yourself: ‘What other way is there?’”

While St Mirren have nudged season ticket sales up over 4000 and increased commercial revenue, Lasley sees player production as the next step.

“Motherwell have set a really good example for all of the clubs of what best practice looks like and kudos to everyone there. From boardroom to dressing room there does seem to be clear alignment in how they are going about things.

“We are maybe not quite at that stage yet but that is our plan — to try and execute what they do on a similar level.”

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By Stephen McGowan

On a whitewashed wall facing the entrance to St Mirren’s Marbill Coaches Stadium is a black plaque. Inscribed in large letters is the date 27 July 2021, a significant landmark in the club’s history. As the lines underneath make clear, that was the day Buddies fans took ownership of the club and set about safeguarding its future.

A recent study by Off The Pitch, the football intelligence platform which publishes data on club finances, player values and salaries, declared the Paisley outfit the eighth-most financially sustainable club in Europe.

While Celtic’s fixation with sustainability drives their supporters to distraction, the Scottish champions led a top 10 also featuring Brann, Silkeborg, Napoli, Manchester City, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund. St Mirren managed to nudge ninth-placed Serie A club Atalanta and French giants Lille down the list.

“It’s pleasing when you see that,” admits chief operating officer Keith Lasley. “I would be lying if I said it wasn’t. It’s not patting-yourself-on-the-back time, nothing like it, but it is good to see us mentioned in that sort of company. Some of those football clubs are very well established and mature in the way they are run. So for us to be mentioned in that company is pleasing.”

St Mirren’s place in the Off The Pitch top 10 is no accident. Like so many clubs up and down Britain, the Paisley outfit confront rising player salaries, increased operating costs and inflationary pressures on a daily basis. In a never-ending cost-of-living crisis items relentlessly rise in price and, to make supporters aware of the problems the club face, St Mirren recently published a strategy document called ‘Our Progression’.

Their goal is to become ‘the best community-centred development club in Scotland’ after St Mirren Independent Supporters Association (SMiSA) worked in conjunction with Paisley-based social enterprise Kibble to purchase a majority stake in the club from former owner Gordon Scott.

Answerable to the 1624 members of SMiSA, the club subsequently released the strategy document building upon the progress which saw them beat Celtic for their first major trophy in 12 years in last season’s Premier Sports Cup Final.

“Sustainability has to be one of the realities of being a fan-owned club,” explains Lasley. “What we have done in the last three or four years has been success for this football club. Top-six finishes, winning a national trophy and doing that while not losing money.

“The norm in this industry has now become that you lose a significant amount of money operationally. But a fan-owned club that doesn’t have a benefactor to underwrite that loss can’t operate like that. We need to compete on a break-even basis and that, in itself, in this day and age is actually an achievement in itself…

“So, yeah, hopefully on and off the park we have shown discipline and a plan which has borne some fruit.”

From time to time, the harvest has been less fruitful. The price of winning the League Cup was the loss of their previous manager Stephen Robinson to Aberdeen after three consecutive top-six finishes. By the time he left, the club were already battling to steady the ship after a choppy run of results in the SPFL Premiership.

Interim boss Craig McLeish survived a two-legged relegation play-off against Partick Thistle to preserve the club’s top-flight status, securing the job on a permanent basis. The club’s former academy chief has since overseen a significant turnover of staff and a change to the style of play. The robust, direct football of before has been softened and, after three games, Saints sit second in the Premiership with seven points from a possible nine. Only an added-time equaliser from Motherwell stripped them of a 100% record.

“Listen, there have been some tricky times in there,” adds Lasley. “You don’t need to look too far back to the play-off last season and the tricky times we had around then.

“But as St Mirren we are going to have some bumps along the way. It’s never going to be a linear journey. It’s just not, given the clubs we are up against.

“But there is a plan there, there is a real alignment around the plan and the latest document was almost an update on the core strategy.

“I am into my fifth season now and one of the things I identified when I came in was that it was very disparate. It was very silo in nature from the boardroom to the fan ownership to SMiSA to first-team operations to academy operations — and it all felt as if someone had to say, ‘Listen, we need joined-up thinking.’

“A plan, essentially, and a bit of strategy which asked: Who are we? What are we doing? How are we trying to do it and why? And that’s when we launched our first strategy three years ago now called ‘Our Purpose’. We then fast forward into ‘Our Progression’, which is the latest document.

“When everything is going well, a plan is great. The hard part comes when the pressure hits and you lose three games in a row. You need to be strong. And it’s in those moments that a plan is most important.”

Key to the delivery of the plan is keeping supporters informed, a basic trick some clubs find inexplicably difficult to get right. A few miles up the M8 from Paisley, Celtic continue to draw flak for the lack of a two-way conversation with their own paying customers. When an information vacuum develops, people are quick to fill it with scuttlebutt and inaccuracies, and Lasley would prefer to let supporters hear what’s going on from the club themselves via fan engagement events and strategic reports.

“Football is essentially a game of incomings and outgoings. And those outgoings have progressively crept up and up and up. Whether it’s wage inflation driven by English clubs going for the same players as us and making them cost more; or some of the things we can’t control like national insurance rises, utilities, stewarding, police costs.

“You go through all of the costs you need to run a football club and they have all significantly increased. The job at the club then is to commercially keep up. And keep up on the football side of things. Outwith your core operation, things like player trading become so important.

“We want to be ambitious. We are not putting a document out just to say, ‘Aw things are tough.’ We don’t have the backstop of a benefactor, whereas some of the clubs we are competing with in the league do. That’s allowed and it happens but we just don’t have that.

“So, yeah, we need to update the fans on how tough it is getting. But we also want to retain that ambition and fire to keep pushing forward.

“Hopefully that is what the document does. And maybe you do set yourself up for a kick in the you-know-whats by setting out your targets but you have to believe. You have to believe that it’s the right thing to do, and over the medium to long term it will bear fruit.”

Lasley meets Nutmeg in the midst of a transfer window where the club have made nine new signings. As he speaks, speculation continues to surround the future of midfielder Killian Phillips after a strong start to the season and an unsuccessful approach from Aberdeen. For a football CEO, the end of a window can be a busy, unsettling and potentially frustrating few days.

“Every club has their own goals. We had a change of manager with Craig taking over in the summer,” says Lasley. “We knew there would be a big turnover with a change of style, a change of shape and a change of player profile with a lot of comings and goings.

“So we have had a pretty busy summer. We have brought a number in to date and expect to do a little bit more, both ins and outs. Gavin Miller has come in as head of recruitment from Motherwell and has really hit the ground running. Every day it’s about communication with a football board involving me, Gavin, the manager and others — and communication and alignment are key in a window.

“Any decision we make has gone through the same process. We want to make the club as systematic and as process-driven as possible. You need to be ready to react because someone can come in for a player tomorrow. Killian Phillips, for example, has had a great start to the season and we were never rushing him out of the door. He’s a character as well and I think you see that on the pitch.

“We are a development club and we know that our best players are going to get interest and you just need to be ready to deal with that when it comes along.

“But it’s always a balance between the value of the asset and their value to the team and what that might bring you in terms of a higher finish in the league.

“We want St Mirren to be a club which has a plan in place for any eventuality.”

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Nutmeg Issue 41 is out now. Click on the cover image to buy or…

A new issue of Nutmeg magazine is here - 196 beautiful print pages featuring the very best writing and photography on our game.

This is the Captains Issue - hear from the men and women who wear the armband, and from those who follow them across the white line. Leadership. Example. Integrity. Karaoke. These are stories to make you stand on your desk and exclaim: O Captain, My Captain!

Find out more and buy your copy here. Or…

By Alison McConnell

“You think he’s mad now? Wait until we win him over… He’ll. Be. Furious.”

This line from Ted Lasso, from all the way back in the opening episode of the first series, could well apply to anyone paying attention to the latest instalment of the critically acclaimed television drama. Those invested in any passing way in the women’s game and taking note of the daily, accumulative inequities can only be aggrieved.

After a three-year pause, coach Lasso has been enticed to return from his Kansas supermarket checkout to take charge of the fictional Lady Greyhounds, AFC Richmond’s second division women’s team. What isn’t fictional is the serious imbalance that impacts the women’s game and its growth, and the challenges that players are faced with on a daily basis.

Indeed, the very first interaction between Lasso and his team takes place in their crappy dressing room, a cramped space with one shower and one toilet that they share on some days — “but on Tuesdays and Thursdays we get to keep our toiletries overnight” — with the club’s youth academy side.

By the end of the second episode, the women have been upgraded. A successful pitch for the away men’s team changing room means they are left delighted with a place that feels positively luxurious in comparison. Any sugary-sweet intonations, though, are rebuffed with an immediate scene questioning the “long-term viability” of the women’s team. That will resonate loudly on these shores.

For those who baulk at the subject matter, knee-jerking to denounce this fourth season as ‘woke’, the Ted Lasso tone remains; it is light, quirky and fully on-brand. It always was an antidote to toxic masculinity.

For Stef McLoughlin, head of commercial at Glasgow City, bringing these issues into living rooms up and down the country is also notable.

“Making these issues mainstream and making people think about things in a different way is always going to be helpful,” she said. “I have always felt that women’s football has a very values-driven audience which is why I think that showing the inequities is so good.

“That whole conversation about where to play, fundraising for kits and scouring constantly for resources is something that I don’t think too many people really grasp.

“Whenever the Euros is on or in the aftermath of a big tournament like that there can be a flux of activity but the reality is that women’s football attracts quite a cult following. Clubs need to work super-hard to get investment and bring people to the table.

“In episode 3 of this season, there is a conversation about a game being ‘just a friendly.’ It is never just a friendly for women. Failure is never an option for women. There is this constant, desperate need for growth. And this exhausting fight over why it matters.

“The fact that it is the top-performing Apple TV show at the minute brings these conversations to a very mainstream audience. It gives the women’s game the chance to push to be part of mainstream culture. It is a golden opportunity to educate people on the realities involved in the women’s game. Anything that pushes the profile can only be of benefit.”

Most tellingly, it is not just the lack of investment that the show portrays but the lack of belief in the women’s game. There is disparity in the tangibles — the kit, the money, the pitches, the resources — but in the narratives, too. The tentative nature of investors and the constant, draining fight for visibility.

There is also, inevitably, a nod to what any woman who plays football, is involved in football or is an advocate of football absorbs daily. “Welcome back, coach,” a passer-by says to Lasso on his return to the club. “Too bad you’re coaching a bunch of girls. You wanker.”

For those with preconceived ideas about what women’s football is, its relevance and its right to exist, a TV show is unlikely to significantly change their point of view. But cultural changes are slow. And bringing these conversations to an audience that isn’t just a niche female football audience but a discerning mainstream crowd is a golden opportunity.

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Parading with altogether less ceremony, locals later followed the same route in great strides, their heads raised as if magnetised towards the stadium’s blazing floodlights. There was purpose in their movements, a form of matchday deportment that said: “This one matters.” Here was not some humdrum league game against a side they would meet at least twice more this season; Freiburg were something else, Europe was something richer. This was a silk fixture in a world of sackcloth.

At the ground they queued on Fir Park Street and around the Davie Cooper Stand, a hungry army awaiting the sustenance kick-off would bring. Sunshine visited at last and predictions were swapped, from “I’ve got a sneaky feeling” to “Gubbed.” Old pals greeted one another, glints and grins restored because they were here and it mattered. Kids yanked mums towards turnstiles and teenagers felt a million miles from double maths first thing tomorrow. Community in its sparky difference is alive and well beneath our pylons.

All climbed their steps and found Fir Park resplendent and tuneful, a rowdy sanctuary. In the East Stand, Motherwell’s Block E ultras group had turned set designers and contrived a terrific drop scene worthy of any great theatre. Giant pennants marking past European ties were hoisted from the rafters, and a long banner greeted the players as they strolled onto the pitch. ‘Write your name in history’, it said, ‘go further than those before you’. It and the gorgeous racket which crescendoed at kick-off sprinkled goosebumps upon the terminally numb.

Motherwell started as if they had taken the banner to be an instruction. After one minute, Emmanuel Longelo acquired possession on the touchline just shy of halfway and pushed the ball inside to Joe Hodge. Longelo then sprinted through the claret and amber tickertape now littered on the pitch, a boy running among autumn leaves. Hodge relocated Longelo deliciously and the wandering left-back scooted towards the penalty area. The crowd roared him on, first with parental encouragement and then feverish belief. Surely tonight couldn’t be this easy? Longelo proceeded without interruption, pushed the ball into the box and then — somehow, as if a wand had been tapped — Regan Charles-Cook rolled it into the net.

What noise the goal unleashed. What primal, evangelical glee. The earth seemed to move. It was enough to restoke the furnaces of Ravenscraig. In the Main Stand, guttural acclamations seemed to rebound from the rafters. Men who never kissed their wives in public embraced each other and didn’t care who noticed. Kids danced and then stared agog as their dads climbed on seats. Over in Block E, human dodgems made happy bedlam and pies flew. This fans’ club — this town’s club — had a moment to smile about forevermore.

Bewildered, the players of Freiburg staggered back towards the halfway line. Many looked as though they had just seen something they shouldn’t have. “We’re all going on a European tour” chorused the delirious of Fir Park. Yet the Germans composed themselves rapidly, snow settling after an avalanche. Moving rhythmically, they passed the ball around Motherwell and connived half-chances.

The Steelmen did not wilt. Home goalkeeper Alex Paulsen caught, parried and commanded. His outfield teammates hunted down opponents ravenously and blocked vehemently. Freiburg, though, were swarming. Only a quarter of the game had passed and it felt as though Motherwell were defending their lead during the final minutes of the second-leg. Meanwhile on the electronic hoardings, an advert for Well’s Christmas party offering flashed gaudily. It was enjoyable to imagine a drinker watching in a Freiburg bierkeller, wiping away his frothy moustache and asking: “‘Barry Chisholm singer and entertainer.’ Was ist das?”

Increasingly, the articulate feet of Yuito Suzuki flummoxed Motherwell. The Japan international seemed to skate across the turf. Left-winger Derry Scherhant was similarly masterly. After 25 minutes, he lulled from Motherwell’s Tawanda Maswanhise a galumphing challenge just outside the area. Scherhant coiled the resulting free-kick into the box where centre-half Matthias Ginter waited. Ginter, sporting the haircut of a freshly unboxed Action Man, hopped and headed in. There came from the stands sighs at this inevitable equaliser, but they were soon trounced by defiant song. All evening, just as the Motherwell players clung to passing principles where brutish stuff would have been understandable, their supporters kept their hymnbooks close by and applauded with flamenco levels of enthusiasm.

Any negativity was reserved for referee Radu Petrescu. Although the lengthy VAR delay which followed the opening goal could not be blamed on him, Petrescu was the public embodiment of this pox on football. At other times, he awarded fussy free-kicks and seemed to be attempting to speak through his whistle, blowing in piercing syllables like some Pingu dressed in sanitary blue. Petrescu was not helped by his heavy running style, which resembled that of a man dashing for a bus while carrying four bags of Lidl shopping. In truth, even if he was favouring the German side as many at Fir Park alleged, they did not need his help. For the rest of the half they settled into dominance, their supremacy matched by home stubbornness.

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As the sun fell at the start of the second half, it daubed a pale orange colour upon the top tier of the Tommy McLean Stand and the highest windows of the tower blocks beyond the stadium — ghostly flames of the old Motherwell reawakened. Stirring too were the home side, now dashing forward and harrying with renewed vigour. While they could not reward their followers with a goal, there was some compensation when Niklas Beste received a booking. From the stands they jeered with shameful joy (someone should invent a word for it) as Beste — wearing the scraggly demeanour of an outdoor pursuits instructor into The Levellers — received his telling off.

The booking proved to be a rare moment of second-half levity. On the hour mark, Croatia’s Igor Matanović — gliding around with menace — nudged the ball to Suzuki. He dummied deftly and slotted Yannik Engelhardt through on goal. Centre-half Martin Moorman missed with a left-handed grab at Engelhardt’s back but connected with a second, right-handed swipe. Engelhardt then seemed to clip his own ankle. Whatever the true cause of his descent, he was soon sprawled on the turf like a cat on a newspaper. There followed another VAR adjournment at the end of which Moorman’s yellow card was upgraded to a red. Ginter planted the penalty beyond Paulsen and everyone knew in the way that supporters do that the game was already over.

For half an hour Freiburg pushed the ball around, their football controlled rather than concerted. A hooter blown by a child that in the first half added to the atmosphere now sounded like a forlorn horn belonging to a street busker with no coins in his hat. Everything drifted and the players became flotsam. The match they now served hit a Morse Code pattern: Pass. Pass pass pass. Shot. Block. Whistle. Whistle whistle. Corner. Header. Goal. Whistle whistle whistle.

Those final dots and dashes were cruel on Motherwell. Yet Keisuke Gotō’s goal to make it 1-3 was instantly forgotten by those who dream in claret and amber. What they will remember are those first minutes, when it felt like they could reach up and touch the sky.

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This week, it was announced that the Tennent’s Sixes will return to Scottish football in October after a 33-year absence. The last team to win the tournament was Partick Thistle. Here, their former striker Gerry Britton takes us inside the Jags’ improbable trophy lift.

By Gerry Britton

In 2023, when I was still working at Partick Thistle as chief executive, somebody mentioned that it had been 30 years since we won the Tennent’s Sixes. So, we had a wee night at Firhill. Gerry Collins came along and we got four or five of the players too. We were jokingly saying: “This is the last national trophy Thistle won. It was the League Cup final in 1971… and this!”

We got about 100 fans and it was a Q&A with the players. Everybody talked about their recollections of the night, but more about their Thistle careers. The guys that turned up were all good theatre… big Davie Irons, Paul Kinnaird telling great Jim McLean stories. It was a top night. We even tracked down the Tennent’s Lager ladies (from the above photo). One of them, June (centre left), is Derek Johnstone’s other half — she came along with her daughter. I actually got in touch with the other girl, but she couldn’t make it.

As part of the pre-event publicity, me, Davie Irons and Andy Murdoch went to the Tennent’s brewery and got our pictures taken with the trophy. The fact that we had a reunion for winning a sixes competition is so Partick Thistle, you know?

The hero of the tournament was big Paul McLaughlin. I don’t know how many goals he scored, but you would just give the ball to him and he would shoot from anywhere. Paul wasn’t the most mobile player but he had a great strike on his left foot and getting him in front of goal was far easier in a tight environment like the Tennent’s Sixes. We had other guys like Kinnaird, George Shaw, Ian Cameron and big Irons — who was so fit and could run all day. We were set up for a six-a-side team.

I loved it because you got so many shots at goal. You had to leave two players up in the opposition half, so you knew you were going to get five or six shots during every game. And because of the rules, you couldn’t even track back. So I was shouting, “Sorry, I cannae mark him, I’ve got to stay up here!” Brilliant.

I think the tournament was on a Sunday and Monday. Imagine saying that to players now: “Monday night, lads, we’re playing six-a-side. Indoors.” Not a chance! I remember John Lambie saying: “I’m not fucking going.” He was trying to make out that it was because it was on a Sunday and he was God-fearing. A lot of shite. He just couldn’t be arsed going, and he sent big Gerry Collins. It was only when we won it and went back in that Lambie tried to take credit for it even though he wasn’t there.

I had played for Celtic in the tournament a couple of years before that, and I remember Nottingham Forest came up. Brian Rice told me that they were staying in the old Albany, which is the Hilton now. He said that Brian Clough was walking them along to the SECC and took them into the Montrose Bar on the Broomielaw, where they all had three or four pints before the tournament! Other English teams came up for it too — it was box office.

It was a great atmosphere and the games were fast and furious. It was brilliant for families — all the Celtic and Rangers fans sat together. Keeping possession was important. If you went a goal up, it was vital that you got the ball into the opposition half and kept it, otherwise it would become like a basketball game.

The pitch? It was more painted concrete than 3G! I remember a couple of times tiles would come up, and they said, “Ah, right, okay, hold on a minute guys. We’ll just try and fix this tile.”

The other thing I remember was the night out after it. We went to the Savoy nightclub in Glasgow city centre. On a Monday night. I wouldn’t recommend it. We all ended up in there getting our Tennent’s tankards filled up behind the bar!

I’m glad to see it back, although it’s a shame that Thistle aren’t part of it. There’s a few of the boys who would still be more than capable of playing… but I’m not one of them!

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Partick Thistle legend Gerry Britton is now COO of the incredible charity Street Soccer Scotland. Their free Women’s Festival, next week in Glasgow, is open to people of all ages, backgrounds and fitness levels. Join them for a day of Zumba, football, ice cream, a live DJ and the chance to meet new people!

Hello!

We’ve just sent Issue 41 off to the printers and we’re incredibly excited to get it into the hands of our subscribers.

This time, the theme of the issue is captaincy and we have some incredible stories across our 196 elegant pages.

analyses Scotland’s World Cup deficiencies and ponders what comes next.

goes deep into the woodlands of the Scottish Borders to re-discover a pitch built for just a single day’s tournament.

goes inside the Tartan Army takeover of Fenway Park.

explains why Villa captain John McGinn’s European exploits prove he’s much more than a backside.

Mark Wilson interviews five players who pay tribute to their instrumental skippers, including Willie Miller, Paul Hegarty, Norrie McCathie, Richard Gough and Klaus Augenthaler.

If you’re already a subscriber, Issue 41 will be with you around September 7.

If you’re not a subscriber, it’s never been easier to join.

Grab an ‘annual’ Nutmeg season ticket via the button below.

With Glaswegian Robbie Ure making his multi-million Euro transfer to Sevilla, we reissue an article from Nutmeg Issue 35 about Rangers cult hero Ted McMinn’s trailblazing but doomed switch to the same club in 1987.

The latest edition of Nutmeg Magazine has just been sent to the printers. To subscribe, choose ‘Annual’ below — and it will be dropping through your letterbox in early September.

By Stephen Walsh

The publishers of Ted McMinn’s autobiography came up with a wizard marketing wheeze — a reversible cover that allows it to be displayed from either side. Pick up the book — titled The Tin Man — in Argyle Street Waterstones and Ted will be on the front in the CR Smith Rangers shirt. In WH Smith in Derby, however, the other side will be on display. The Tin Man has turned Tin Ram, and is in Autowindscreens white.

It does mean that shorter stop-offs in McMinn’s journeyman career are not referenced. Not his beginnings at his near-enough hometown club, Queen of the South. Not Burnley (where, from my uncle’s seat in the Bob Lord Stand, I once saw him score when visiting my East Lancs cousins). And certainly not his exotic stay with the rojiblancos of Sevilla, where for a season and a half in the 1980s he was a pioneering Scottish football export.

McMinn went to Sevilla primarily because his former manager Jock Wallace did. By then, Wallace had had his two spells as Rangers manager — the successful 1970s version, when he dragged Rangers out of the nine-in-a-row shadow of the Lisbon Lions, and the 1980s edition, when he managed McMinn. That second coming turned out to be the archetypal never-go-back scenario. He dragged them back into the shadow, this time of Aberdeen, and got the sack.

Booted out of his spiritual home, this Scottish manager of a dinosaur school hardly known for its cosmopolitan tendencies somehow landed the managerial gig at the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán. When McMinn was unceremoniously booted out of Ibrox a few months later, Wallace signed him for the peseta equivalent of £200,000. And so begins the story of a season or two in the sun for two of the unlikeliest tourists ever to put their footballing handbags in the middle of the dance-floor and give it the full Y Viva España.

*

Wallace died in 1996, aged just 60, and one suspects he might have struggled with the arm-around-the shoulder requirements of modern football management. Ally McCoist calls him “the hardest man I ever met” (Wallace once decked him with a right hook during a pre-season training camp in Switzerland). Gary Lineker “encountered” him at Leicester City. At half-time in a reserve match, Wallace made a beeline for the rookie striker, raising him up the dressing-room wall by the throat and calling him “a lazy wee English c**t”. Leicester were two up, by the way, and Lineker had scored both goals.

Wallace kept goal for the Wee Rangers when they beat the Big Ones at Shielfield in the 1967 Scottish Cup, but his coaching aura originated not in his playing career but in his military service in what the papers invariably called “the jungles of Malaya”. His trademark training sessions were endless shuttle-runs on Murder Hill, the sand-dunes at Gullane. These were famously punishing, with the salt-smell of the sea slowly supplanted by the saltier whiff of young men’s vomit. “I’ve got the battle fever on,” was his favourite slogan, and the military metaphors played well with the Ibrox faithful.

So did the results, which were spectacular. Having coached the Willie Waddell team that won the Cup Winners’ Cup, he took over as manager in his own right. He won the Cup in Rangers’ centenary season, the League (their first flag for 11 years) in ’74/75, and the treble twice. He then suddenly resigned, refusing until he died to divulge why. His reasons remain an enduring 1970s sporting mystery, up there with what happened to Shergar and the true identity of the masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki.

After Leicester, and a short period at Fir Park, Wallace was lured back to Ibrox in 1983. He was not the first choice. In time-honoured Old Firm fashion, Rangers had tried to sign the opposition’s best talent, but neither Alex Ferguson nor Jim McLean was willing to play ball with a club still loaded with debt from the post-Disaster stadium remodel. In desperation they turned to Wallace, hoping to wind the clock back. Performances in Wallace’s second term proved feeble.

On the odd occasion when things were going right, such as the 1984 League Cup final, Wallace carried himself as if they weren’t. That day he harassed the on-field reporter, making the hapless shortie-raincoat boy chase him across Hampden in search of the post-match platitudes. Every time the boy caught up with him, Wallace bawled him out on live TV. “COME ON!” As the boy waited for a signal, Wallace harumphed. “HURRY UP, MAN!” “Were you confident when it went to extra-time?” “I WIZ CONFIDENT BEFORE IT STARTED, SON,” Wallace says, and strides off.

Only 40,000-odd turned up for that final (an Old Firm clash which Rangers won 3-2) and that was widely regarded as a better-than-expected turnout. The next season there was further dwindling. Between October and April Rangers won only a handful of times. They finished fourth in the purgatorial ten-team league that was the first iteration of the SPL, and Wallace was sacked in April 1986.

*

McMinn was one of the headline acquisitions of Wallace’s second stay. Not a marquee signing, perhaps, but at least a family-sized tent. Rangers got him from Queen of the South, who had nabbed him from the junior side Glenafton for £325 and 1,000 half-time lottery tickets for the next match at Palmerston. The Queens board had dispensed with the manager and the chairman was picking the team; not surprisingly, McMinn’s transfer to Rangers was presented to him rather than discussed with him.

As a part-time sawmill worker on £20 a week, McMinn had turned down various other clubs to stay near home and to combine work and football. But Rangers’ offer was good (the tyrannical chairman got £100,000 for his new stand, and McMinn got £250 a week) for a player who had not convinced everyone of his genius. When he announced he’d signed for Rangers at the sawmill, the foreman asked him what the f*** he’d want to go to Berwick for.

McMinn tin-manned his way around Ibrox reasonably successfully for 18 months or so until his mentor Wallace was replaced by Graeme Souness in the summer of 1986. His stiff-legged running became a metaphor for the dead wood Souness was trying to clear out. “How can I tell Ted McMinn what to do when he doesn’t know what he’s going to do himself?” was his exasperated cry. Rangers won the league in 1986/87, but McMinn didn’t play enough games to qualify for a medal.

McMinn helpfully directed himself towards the revolving door with a series of “incidents”. A fight in a nightclub in East Kilbride was followed by a ruckus in Shawlands, shoulder to shoulder with McCoist and Ian Durrant. Durrant’s role was unspecified, but McCoist showed what he’d learned from Wallace by knocking a dentist’s front teeth out, while McMinn chased the victim down the road and up the stairs into a police station.

It was not his finest moment, as he says himself in the Rangers half of his choose-your-own-adventure autobiography. Pished, they hadn’t noticed that the dentist’s teeth were false and that McCoist’s punch was not the slam-dunk he had imagined. The rope McMinn had given Souness to string him up with was real enough, however, and, after one last curfew-break, his days at Ibrox came to an end in a foul-mouthed showdown with the manager.

*

Bring on Spaniards by the score... So went a chunk of a popular song we would all sing at Hampden in the 1970s and 1980s. It never occurred to us for a moment that the Spaniards might want to bring on even one Jock Wallace.

Wallace, after all, was almost in the Jim McLean class in terms of inexpressive dourness, while Sevilla was a glamour destination of sorts. A World Cup venue in 1982 (and the city where David Narey toe-poked Jimmy Hill into a different Tartan Army song), it was host city for the 1986 Steaua-Barcelona European Cup final, when the Romanian goalie’s performance in the penalty shootout hastened the fall of Communism.

Add to that the strangeness of someone so rooted in the Rangers “tradition” going overseas, especially to Catholic Spain. Wallace’s mantra (“It’s never been sectarian as far as I’m concerned”) was typical of the time, and covered a multitude of signing policies. Wallace was blue to the tip of his nose, and the joke that did the rounds was that Sevilla was the one place in the world where he would find more Orangemen than on the Copland Road.

Spanish football in the era of President Felipe González was an odd beast too. According to Antonio González, in the late 1980s it was 80 per cent politics and 20 per cent sport. The Franco era’s deep oppositions and regional imbalances were not so long dead, and the Galactico era at Real (which in González’s view reversed those percentages) was not yet a twinkle in Florentino Pèrez’s eye.

And compared with the declining tedium of the Scottish club set-up in the 1980s, the Spanish liga was sometimes properly loca. La Liga was the league in which Johan Neeskens was sold by Barcelona because he didn’t pass the toilet paper to the club president; where Real’s Santillana, named after a seaside resort, was kicked around the Bernabéu so hard his doctors thought he had lost a kidney; and where El Carnicero, the Butcher of Bilbao, broke Maradona’s leg with a single kick of which Tam Forsyth would have been proud.

Sevilla were regarded as southern softies compared with such Basque hard cases. Founded by two Scots “after the consumption of some small beer” on Burns Night 1905, the club has a Scottish connection, but the impetus for the appointment originated further south. Terry ‘El Tel’ Venables had just tickled the sleeping giant Barcelona awake, while John Toshack had dressed up the Cinderellas of Sociedad. Doing things the British way was in vogue down La Liga way.

The Sevilla fans had no idea who ‘Jock’ was, however. Its popularity as a character name in B Westerns meant that ‘Jock’ was perceived as cowboy rather than Scottish, so Wallace’s first nickname was El Sheriff de Sevilla, come to clean up a team that had been flatlining for several years. The fans’ lack of knowledge was echoed by Wallace’s own ignorance of his squad. At his first training session he “robustly” chastised one of the squad for a lack of effort, only to be told that the player in question was actually the club masseur.

He started poorly. He lost his first derby to Betis, lost a lifetime’s worth of tactics notebooks in a theft from his car, and lost some of the fans for his perceived neglect of their rising stars. His board was encouraging him to “Buy British”, as if it was a Mini Metro he was shopping for. He wanted Robert Fleck and ended up making an offer for Ted McMinn. McMinn was not sure, but Chick Young made up his mind by buying him a ticket to Andalucia in exchange for an exclusive.

Wallace clearly wasn’t that sure either. When he met McMinn at the airport he shoved him into the back of his Opel and told him to put a blanket over his head. The Sevilla chairman thought £200,000 was a lot of money to spend on someone the Spanish media were calling a thug, but Wallace defended his player. “He’s an honest lad. He’s told me he’d no involvement with the boy losing his teeth and I’m happy with that.”

*

Ted McMinn was not a name you’d have particularly associated with an international outlook either. In his era, most Scots’ experience of Spain was two weeks on the lash in Benidorm and flying back into Abbotsinch with a sombrero on and a stuffed donkey under an arm. Discounting John Fox Watson’s one game at the Bernabeu in the 1940s, Steve Archibald, a very much more complex kettle of fish, was the only Scot who’d made a living from football in Spain.

McMinn’s move seemed almost impossibly exotic. Or possibly just impossible. In his first match, against Cádiz, he remembers being penalised every time he touched the ball. That was just the start. The day after it, he broke his foot playing squash with his interpreter. Plastered up, and feeling a fool, he decided not to lie low, went to an away match with Atletico on a supporters’ bus and was persuaded to join the commentary team. He had no knowledge of his own team, let alone the opposition, and didn’t possess a word of workable Spanish.

Exclusively Spanish apart from McMinn and a couple of Uruguyans, the Sevilla side should have been doing better than it was. It featured Francisco López Alforo, on a ten-year contract after appearing for Spain at the 1982 World Cup; the current national coach Luis de la Fuente; and the future manager Manolo Jiménez, with whom McMinn bonded over their upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks to the extent that the squad nicknamed him ‘Manolin’, or Little Manolo.

Wallace, already under pressure, had a vested interest in McMinn’s recovery, and so took him to his holiday flat in Torremolinos. He had watched a documentary about Ginger McCain healing the Grand National winner Red Rum by getting him to trot in the sea off Southport, so got McMinn to do the same thing in the wintry Mediterranean. Whether it shortened his rehab is not clear; he was out for eight weeks.

When he got fit Wallace made a tactical error that affected both of them — he gave Alforo’s No.6 shirt to McMinn, apparently on the basis that the Spaniard didn’t track back enough. The Sevilla Ultras, the Biriris, were unhappy, and cushions were thrown. No one came to wave Manolin off when he had to fly home to face the legal music for Denturegate. The verdict was “Not Proven”, but his association with the general class of los hooliganos británicos was established.

All might have been forgiven with a derby win against the verde blanco caca of Betis (how at home both Wallace and McMinn must have felt to be facing up to “green and white sh*te” again) but training for the match was fiasco-ridden. At the camp, on the Mediterranean coast, the players went out to eat. In an attempt to integrate, McMinn took on the challenge of a Full Spanish, a giant seafood paella. An hour later, like a first-time tourist, he was throwing it all up at the water’s edge. He played next day while still debilitated and was booed off.

*

Meanwhile it was clear that Wallace was not bringing about the renaissance Sevilla’s board had demanded. Two wins from their last three games would have seen them into the European places, but they ended up ninth, just three points clear of relegation. El Sheriff had acquired a new fan nickname based on the local phonetic pronunciation of Wallace — they called him Señor Vayasé. ‘Señor Go Away’, in other words or, more idiomatically — ‘Mr GTF’.

In response Wallace tried to impose a Gullane regime, complete with beach runs and dietary restrictions, ahead of 87/88. McMinn might have been able to let Wallace know of the rumblings in the camp and rumours of revolt, but he couldn’t understand what the players were saying. When the axe fell, the Sevilla board ducked Wallace’s poor stats, holding the official line that they sacked him because he had reneged on an agreement to learn Spanish.

McMinn stayed until the following February. He reckons he played about 25 games in all, but the new manager, from Valladolid, repeatedly named him as a sub and he was often unused. Finally, with his team 5-0 down at half-time against Real Zaragoza, McMinn refused to get up from the bench. He was back in England and playing at the Baseball Ground by the time the Hillsborough season was underway.

Though not without a little swansong. “We beat Betis in their stadium in my last game,” said McMinn. “Everybody knew I was leaving, and I got presented with a lovely plaque. It was strange. I never thought the players liked me much. I couldn’t speak their language so I couldn’t really communicate. Turns out they did. But because I didn’t learn the language, I was just looking at four walls every night. The days were getting longer. I was lonely. And I missed the big man.”

*

Two poor travellers clinging together for warmth. It doesn’t say much for the Scots of that era. To this day it is only Archibald, of the handful of Scottish players who have played in the top league in Spain, who has made it to two seasons or more. It’s hard to imagine him doing what McMinn and Wallace did — living in each other’s pockets, sharing lunch, dinner, pints and hours of chat. “It wasn’t really a manager-player thing,” said Ted. “It was a father-son thing.”

When Wallace was sacked, McMinn met him for a beer in the bar beneath his flat. With Wallace off the scene, he could see no future at Sevilla. Wallace told him to stay, that he had to keep going, that if he walked away he’d be seen as a failure. They had a few beers and Wallace sent McMinn upstairs to get an early night to be ready for the next day’s training. He himself stayed in the bar for a few more.

McMinn went to bed and dozed. A couple of hours later, through the windows of his apartment, he could hear Wallace’s distinctive footsteps echoing down the street and off into the night. Wallace was whistling. McMinn tried to make out the tune. Was it Una Paloma Blanca? La Bamba? Despacito? Or even La Macarena? Of course not. It was Follow, Follow. McMinn lay in the dark listening to what sounded like the Lone Piper. Or perhaps a Pied Piper, whose flute-tune was calling him home again.

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Paul O’Neill has something to get off his chest, a statement he would have found it harder to make when he was part of Scotland’s refereeing fraternity.

“I grew up supporting Celtic,” he says candidly. “I’ve never denied that in my background, I think that it would be really silly to do that.”

Now 44, O’Neill combined a career as a senior manager in the NHS with serving as one of the SFA’s specialist assistant referees for 18 years. After 835 fixtures, refereeing has been a huge part of his life. He has been part of the team of officials for a Scottish Cup semi-final, an Edinburgh derby and a Scottish Junior Cup final. He has travelled across Europe handling youth games for UEFA, absorbed the constant rule changes from IFAB, endured the verbal grief and abuse, and lived with the frustrations of VAR.

A head of Community Health in South Lanarkshire, the fitness tests were becoming more gruelling with every passing year and in May he walked onto the pitch for his final game of Inverness against Hamilton carrying his four-year-old daughter. Erin O’Neill was born with Trimosy 21 Down Syndrome and her father now plans to use his free weekends to head up a drive to recruit officials for Scottish Para Football.

Like the decisions he made as a qualified referee, he felt retirement was the right thing to do. And this time, for once, there was no dissent.

“I can say that I never once in my career made a decision in favour of any team that was based on anything other than the laws of the game and what I believed was the correct decision,” he says in measured tones. “My sole focus was always to do better and to progress my career.

“I didn’t do the hours and hours of training, reading the laws of the game, to favour one team. I was never going to put any of that at risk for one club.”

The subject is topical because, when we meet, an online row is raging over his former colleague Sean Murdoch.

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Eighteen years since his first match as a football referee, it’s the loneliness Paul O’Neill remembers most.

His first game was an under-13s fixture between Hamilton and Dundee at Laigh Bent Sports Ground watched by a posse of coaches, parents and dog walkers. For a 28-year-old man working as a nurse in a prison, the experience should have been as daunting and intimidating as dipping a toe in the shallow end at Blantyre baths. Yet the isolation was something he had never experienced before or since.

“It was the most nervous I was for any game,” says O’Neill after stepping down from his role as a specialist assistant referee in May.

“Years later, I ran the line at Ibrox in front of over 40,000 fans when Rangers won League Two. But there was nowhere near the nerves I felt for that first under-13s game. You are basically given a whistle and after that it’s only you.

“I just felt really vulnerable. You desperately want to do a good job and you don’t want to embarrass yourself. There was an experienced referee watching me and I remember thinking, ‘I wish he wasn’t here….’”

He still has the first observer’s report tucked away in a drawer somewhere, containing the remarks that his whistle tone was off and that his positioning left a bit to be desired.

The early years, at grassroots level, were the hardest. In a BBC Radio Five Live survey launched in 2023, hundreds of grassroots referees told of fearing for their safety, reporting physical abuse by spectators, players, coaches or managers. Some described being punched, headbutted and spat at. Almost all of them had experienced some form of verbal abuse.

Last summer, the Scottish FA launched a ‘Let Them Ref’ campaign in a quest to tackle behaviour on the sidelines and abuse of referees. Despite calling a halt to his career after 835 games, O’Neill plans to keep his hand in by leading a new drive to recruit officials for Scottish Para Football and helping out with new entrant training courses.

In March, the National Referee Introductory Course was launched allowing people from any part of the country to take part in live tuition on the laws of the game, delivered by the country’s top match officials. While new courses run every six-eight weeks, the task of persuading young referees to come forward becomes more challenging when parents, coaches and players are screaming foulmouthed abuse from the sidelines.

“I have a suspicion that at grassroots level we have a real problem in Scotland and beyond,” O’Neill observes. “I have been a new entrants coach in Lanarkshire and we take 20 or 30 people through the referees’ course twice a year. But we are losing more than that.

“Sometimes at these kids’ games the level of abuse from parents, spectators, coaches and the players themselves is beyond acceptable.”

To encourage new entrants, the SFA Referees’ Department are launching the Youth Referee Introductory Course, with an initial 25 young people signed up to become officials. The entry age will be lowered to 14 to encourage teenage officials to develop confidence, leadership and communication skills.

In partnership with Qualifications Scotland, those undertaking the Level 7 Refereeing Course at school are now being encouraged to make the leap into active refereeing. Currently 120 schools have signed up, with over 1200 16-18-year-olds scheduled to sit the course in the next academic year.

“If I was sitting as a 16-year-old aspiring referee, would I be able to take the level of abuse I have heard?” ponders O’Neill. “I don’t think I would have at that age.

“I was a nurse in a prison and my bar was probably set quite high. Did I take abuse during my refereeing career? Yes I did. Was that abuse sometimes unacceptable? Yes it was. I was always lucky that the level of respect I got from guys in the game was reasonably high. But I had horrible things said to me at games. Mainly in the junior game.”

For the aspiring Scottish referee, ‘the juniors’ has always been a notorious testing ground. A footballing bearpit where nerve ends are pushed and pulled for signs of weakness or fragility.

Last season, the senior game managed to match the bowel-loosening attributes of a clash between Auchinleck Talbot and Cumnock when the SFA were forced to condemn the online leak of personal details belonging to referee John Beaton. A lengthy statement condemned the ‘hysterical media narrative’ around refereeing decisions and warned of an environment of intimidation and fear. Scotland’s governing body also confirmed plans to strengthen rules aimed at protecting match officials and their families.

Grassroots clubs are now expected to appoint a designated referee Liaison Officer as a ‘safe person’ to offer support. As in the senior game, head of referees Willie Collum has warned that only the team captain can approach officials to communicate during a match. All teams must introduce a technical area open only to team officials to discourage encroachments onto the pitch. Spectators should also be positioned at two metres back from the sidelines in a quest to foster a ‘culture of respect’.

At grassroots games, O’Neill always found the shouts and the noise more difficult to block out than they ever were at Ibrox or Parkhead.

“You would hear the voices of a small number whereas, in the senior game, a lot of noise is in the background. It’s very rare that you hear individuals. But there is something about people going into a football environment which makes them behave in a way they would never do somewhere else.

“I have had colleagues who have received horrendous abuse in regards to religion, sexuality, appearance and it’s not acceptable in society. I don’t know why it’s acceptable at football. There were grounds you would go to that were really intimidating. But there was never a ground where I actively feared for my safety in my career.”

The presence of his late father at games probably helped. Before Brian O’Neill passed away last March, he became his son’s personal refereeing observer for the best part of 18 years.

A late starter, O’Neill went on to take the decision to become a specialist assistant referee rather than push for the category one status earned by the likes of Nick Walsh, Don Robertson and John Beaton. He was never short of free advice on that score.

“When I became an assistant referee, my dad came and watched me officiate at every senior ground in Scotland, except Bonnyrigg Rose. That was the only ground he never got to see me in. That was massive for me. That ability for my dad to come out to games and to talk in the car.

“My dad wasn’t a referee, he was an armchair football fan and a lot of the times going back in the car he would be telling me what I did wrong and I nearly dropped him off the Forth Road Bridge a few times.

“But there was so much time talking about more important things and when he passed away people were reaching out to me making sure I was alright. Other referees like Callum Spence and Lloyd Wilson got in touch because they had met my dad at games. I think back to a picture I have of me and my dad at the Scotland-England Leigh Griffiths game in 2017 and days like that were an opportunity to spend time you never get back. Refereeing gave me that.”

Refereeing could also be a demanding mistress. Retirement will mean more time with his wife Danielle and daughters Abbie (15) and Erin (four). His other half now welcomes the chance to arrange nights out three weeks in advance with no fretting over the possibility of a Championship game in Dingwall and a return home at 10pm.

“It’s incredibly difficult when you are juggling two careers,” says O’Neill, a senior manager with the NHS in South Lanarkshire. “There’s what you do in the day job and then there is refereeing.”

English football runs a pool of 20 to 21 full-time referees, but O’Neill remains unconvinced by the notion of a similar system in Scotland, describing it as a ‘double-edged sword’.

“If you decide to make refereeing full-time you are going to lose some of your top officials. My career is with the NHS. Others will be lawyers or police officers and they would be walking away from a career they had spent years building up as well as a pension and the security that comes with it. They would also have to ask, ‘How many years am I going to be a referee?’

“There is also that risk because, like being a footballer, it’s performance-based and injuries can creep in. It’s an easier decision to make for young referees to embark on a career.”

O’Neill still asks himself if he should have taken up refereeing before the age of 27. For all the hassle and abuse and grief he took at grassroots level he has no regrets over the choice to attend a training course run by former referees Brian Winter and George Drummond at the Bellshill Hilton hotel around 2008.

“I never did an Old Firm game. I never did a Scottish Cup final or a League Cup final, but I’m not bitter about that in any way. I back myself and I think I was a good assistant referee. I take pride in the fact that I did do a Scottish Cup semi-final, I did an Edinburgh derby, I did the Junior Cup final and I was trusted by the SFA to take on appointments that were important.

“Some people finish their career and look through a glass half empty at what could have been. I’ve never been that kind of person, I look on my glass as being half full. I look at what refereeing gave me. It’s easy to look when you are leaving and point at the SFA and say, ‘Here’s what they could have done.’

“I don’t have that approach. I think those 18 years allowed me to develop myself as both a referee and as a person. And for that I will be forever thankful. All those hours I spent with my dad. The chance I have now to help para football.

“And what I would say to any young person looking at refereeing as a possible career or hobby is that they should grab it with both hands. They might do two games and decide it’s not for them or they might travel the world for the next 30 years.”

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Bannan made 477 appearances for the club after joining in 2015. He moved to Millwall in January when the club entered administration, but re-signed this summer — and will be awarded a heroes welcome when he walks out Hillsborough again this season.

Barry Bannan smiles as we bring up his daughter, Elsie, who burst into tears when he told her he was moving back to Sheffield Wednesday.

The 36-year-old is a ‘new’ signing for the Owls this summer. But it’s also a move that will almost certainly see him break the 500-appearance mark for one of the oldest clubs in English football. Only a handful of others have achieved it, and even fewer who weren’t locals.

He doesn’t sound it, but ‘Baz’ is one of us now. His departure to Millwall was short-lived, and never one that anyone at Wednesday — including the Scot himself — ever really wanted, but none of that matters now. In a pre-season run-out in Austria earlier this month, he looked like he’d never left.

Chat to the man, and it becomes apparent that all he wanted in football was to find a home — one where he was appreciated. He left home young, leaving behind Scotland and his beloved Celtic for Aston Villa, where he was continuously sent out on loan. To Blackpool, to Bolton, to Leeds.

Then came Wednesday. He didn’t know it at first, but it didn’t take long for him to realise that they were the perfect match. And it wasn’t just his quality that got fans on board — although it certainly helped. It was his vociferousness, his tenacity, his energy. It became pretty clear, pretty quickly that Barry Bannan got Sheffield Wednesday… and they got him.

Don’t get me wrong, the left-footed rockets into the top corner, the mazy dribbles and crunching tackles all played their part, but just as memorable are the 50-yard dashes to make a last-ditch block and the fist-pumps towards the fans after a hard-fought victory.

He arrived in a summer that saw then-owner Dejphon Chansiri splashing cash all over the place, but none was spent better than what was paid to get free agent Bannan on board. A decade later, he’s the only one still left in blue and white.

Reading about his ‘tanner ba’ roots only serves to further explain why he fitted in so well. Wednesdayites have been starved of top-flight football for over a quarter of a century, and many players have come and gone without ever leaning into Sheffield’s proud footballing history. Not Bannan, his love for this sport is pure.

And it’s mutual. He describes defeat in the 2016 play-off final as the “best worst day” of his life, and victory — as captain — at Wembley seven years later went some way to putting things right. His name filled the air under the arch after the Owls beat local rivals Barnsley in the most dramatic of fashion...

“We’ve got Bannan,” they sang, to the tune of the Billy Ray Cyrus classic Achy Breaky Heart. “Barry Bannan. I just don’t think you’d understand. A wee Scottish man, better than Zidane, we’ve got Barry Bannan.”

There have been tears, in good times and in bad, and there could be more to come.

“When I left, I didn’t think I was ever going to come back as a player,” he said, speaking to The Wednesday Word for Nutmeg. “I’m 36, so it might have never happened. That’s why there was all that emotion — it felt like it could be the end. I didn’t want it to be, but that’s why it came out the way that it did.

“But I think it might be just as bad going back out there — I don’t know how I’m going to take it, because I didn’t think I’d react the way I did when I left!

“My wife is on to me, because she’s adamant that I never cried when she walked down the aisle — which I did! — but she says I never. So she was surprised I was crying, and it could be the same again. It’ll be a different emotion completely though, and I’ll see my kids and wife in the stand again.

“I’m excited about it, though, I can’t wait to get back playing in front of those fans. Deja vu all over again.”

Owls of generations gone by had their Chris Waddles and David Hirsts and Mel Sterlands. They saw trophy wins and cup runs, they saw international footballers on a weekly basis. Those born after the 1990s have had none of that, and if you ask most of them, they won’t even have to think about who the best player they’ve ever seen in a Wednesday shirt is.

It baffles us how he’s only got 27 caps for Scotland. How a man with 112 goals and assists for our club never found the back of the net for his nation. How a man so beloved in a Steel City south of the border barely got a kick in front of the Tartan Army despite being Football League royalty.

Pep Guardiola once called him an “incredible player”, not too long after Bannan had outrageously stuck the ball through Bernardo Silva’s legs. He’s singled out by opposition managers before practically every game, and for a long while it was a case of ‘Stop Bannan, stop Wednesday…’

Now, after his brief southern sojourn, the diminutive Scot is back where he belongs. And just wait for the noise when he saunters back out at Hillsborough once again.

Watch Bannan on his daughter’s reaction to his return to Wednesday

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