UK Edition
Trevor Francis: 'Karren Brady wasn't happy when I told her I had sold her husband'
“I had 23 years as a player, won two European Cups, 52 England caps, managed in three cup finals. But I’m always introduced still as the first million-pound player.” Trevor Francis smiles after he has delivered his takedown about how he is routinely addressed. But it is clear from his tone that, four decades after the signing that broke football’s financial glass ceiling when he moved from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest, he would like to be remembered for more than just his price tag.
Which is why he has written his autobiography: he wants to remind everyone he has a wider tale to tell. A story of supreme early promise, of a career stalked by injury, of playing under some of the finest managers – Brian Clough, Ron Atkinson, Alf Ramsey, Bobby Robson – and then becoming a coach himself. Though he took his time in telling it. After all, he has not been involved in football since he was fired as Crystal Palace manager 16 years ago.
“In a week’s time I’ll be 65,” he says, though in person, relaxed after a holiday in South Africa, he looks younger. “I’ve reached an age now that I think I can speak freely, openly, honestly. I was always brought up to be respectful. I didn’t necessarily like some of my chairmen, but they were paying me a damned good salary, so I used to keep my feelings to myself. It didn’t stop me from storing it all up.”
And there is a lot to come out. Not least if we return to the signing that made his name. One of the things that sticks in the memory was the way Brian Clough, the Forest manager who had paid the historic sum to secure his services, endlessly humiliated him in the media, mocking the player’s revelation he had sought his wife Helen’s opinion on the move, sniggering that he would be asking the dog next.
“I understood what he was doing, clearly he didn’t want me to be seen as a favourite,” Francis recalls. “But one thing that did hurt me was when, after I did so much to help Forest get to the European Cup final the second time and then got injured just before the final, he cast me aside. He stopped me from going to the game. He thought psychologically, the other players seeing me on crutches would have a damaging effect. OK, I can see that. But then I wasn’t invited on the open-topped bus for the celebrations after we’d won.”
Not that he questioned Clough’s ways at the time. Take the night before the European Cup final in 1979, when the manager encouraged his players to drink the hotel bar dry. “As a manager I’d never advocate saying the night before a match, right we’re having a few glasses of Liebfraumilch,” he recalls. “Now when I look back, many of the things he implemented couldn’t possibly be right. But we went along with it. You never stopped and thought: is this right? You just assumed he knew what he was doing.”
When Francis graduated to the job of player-manager at Queens Park Rangers long after parting from Clough, there was none of that. He had spent five years in Italy, where he picked up ideas of how players should best prepare. “I remember I got ridiculed by the papers for serving pasta and fruit on the bus to away games. This was not 100 years ago, this was 1989,” he recalls. “I was trying to implement things that today would be taken as the norm.”
One thing he quickly learned, however, was the need to adapt. When he took over from Ron Atkinson at Sheffield Wednesday in 1991 he realised he would have to modify his aesthetic, disciplined, Italianate approach.
“Ron was the exact opposite to how I wanted to manage. But I could see this was a team who loved playing for him. I had to change my style. So I let it flow like Ron had, let them play five-a-side, not do too much tactical work. It was very happy stuff and it worked.”
It did that all right: under Francis, Wednesday finished third in the top flight and reached two cup finals. Reckoned one of the shrewdest young managers around, he was sounded out to take charge of England after Graham Taylor’s resignation, but turned it down. Then, in 1995, he was unexpectedly dismissed after Wednesday had finished 13th in the Premier League, a position they have not come close to occupying since.
“It was the morning of the FA Cup final when I get the call,” he recalls of his Hillsborough sacking. “I said: why today of all days? I was told it was a good day to bury bad news. How small-minded.”
But he quickly recovered, sealing an emotional return to the club where his career started. He spent 5½five-and-a-half years in the Birmingham City dug-out, reaching the League Cup final and three times qualifying for the Championship play-off three times. Though it was less managing his players that proved tricky. It was managing the club owners, David Sullivan, David Gold, and their chief executive Karren Brady.
“I remember when I sold her husband [Paul Peschisolido] to West Brom, let’s just say she wasn’t very happy,” he recalls of Brady, the now ennobled West Ham director. “Her language was somewhat colourful. The first thing she said was: ‘I wouldn’t have brought you to this football club if I knew you were going to sell my husband.’ ” He had a jot of sympathy: after all his own marriage was central to his life and career.
“We were a partnership in management,” he says of Helen. “I learned from Cloughie: look after the wives and you get a happy dressing room. And Helen did that. She’d have Gold’s mother and Sullivan’s mother to our house for tea every week. One time she had her mother, too, and Gold’s mum said to my mother-in-law: ‘Do you know what my son does for a living? He sells vibrators.’ ” Cue spluttered tea.
It wasn’t that sort thing that soured his opinion of his former employers, however. It was what happened long after he had been dismissed, when his wife died of cancer two years ago. “I’m not being biased - well, I am - but Helen was special,” he says of the woman to whom he was married to for 42 years. “OK, we’ve all got busy lives. Sure, they might not have been able to come to her funeral. But they can pick the phone up. Or even just text. From Gold, Sullivan and Brady: nothing. I just think it’s a poor show.”
It is perhaps no surprise that Francis grew weary of management. And when he was shown the door at Crystal Palace in 2003, he never sought another job in the game, preferring to spend the next few years on the punditry circuit. He was just 49. “Looking around now, yes, it was maybe too young,” he admits. “But I’d had enough. Being in a pressurised position does take its toll. I was playing big-time football at 16, under huge pressure. I’d had 33 years of that. I can’t say I regret it. Actually, there is not much I do regret about my life.”
Except one thing: that he is not playing today. Not for the money – he accepts he was always well paid – but for the smooth pitches, the forward-protecting laws and, above all, the sport science which could have prevented his multiple injuries.
“I missed so much, the European Cup final, the European Championships. Somehow I got 52 England caps, but I reckon if I’d have been playing today I’d have got 100.”
Still, he managed to continue playing until he was 39. “I had ambition to make it to 40. But my manager at the time put a stop to that, wouldn’t pick me for the bench. Do you know who that manager was?”
He pauses for a moment before breaking into a wide grin. “It was me. Serves me right.”
“One In A Million” by Trevor Francis with Keith Dixon is published by Pitch. Available now, £19.99