FOOTBALL’S FIRST SILLY SEASON B

In 1979 the British transfer record was smashed four times – its value tripling – in nine months. Never mind Neymar’s switch to PSG, this is when football moves went really mad...

reaking a transfer record drops the player affected into a goldfish bowl, his every action probed by an eager-to-criticise public. Just ask Steve Daley. In September 1979, the 25-year-old Wolverhampton Wanderers midfielder became the most expensive player in British football by moving to Manchester City for nearly £1.5 million. After putting pen to paper (below), he travelled back down the M6 to the Midlands, stopping at a service station on the way. A fellow motorist recognised him from the day’s news bulletins. The driver’s greeting? “I don’t envy you one bit.”

But Daley’s switch was a sign of the transfer-crazy times – the third of four deals that smashed the British transfer record during 1979. The record nearly tripled over a nine-month timeframe. In January, the first of these moves took Middlesbrough striker David Mills to West Bromwich Albion for £516,000, £16,000 more than Hamburg had paid to sign Kevin Keegan 18 months earlier.

After 76 goals in 296 league games – and despite having just been named as Boro’s captain – Mills headed south, celebrating the move with a new perm. With several clubs keen, Ron Atkinson had been his most dogged suitor.

“Middlesbrough were really pushing me out the door,” Mills later revealed. “They were going to get £500,000 for a player who’d come from schoolboy football and had cost them nothing. They simply saw it as huge business.”

A throwaway Atkinson line, uttered with the ink still wet on the forward’s contract, would prove instructive.

“I hope the day doesn’t come when I have to pick David,” said the Baggies’ gaffer, “because it will mean the team aren’t maintaining their present form!”

Sitting atop the old First Division, they didn’t – couldn’t – make room for their big signing. The new recruit was on the substitutes’ bench for his opening five matches, and when he did get on the pitch Mills did not have a regular role. “We’ve had to shove him in wherever there has been a hole,” Atkinson said.

Mills’ time at The Hawthorns was, by the player’s own admission, “just about a write-off”. He contributed six goals in 59 league outings during three years in the West Midlands, including two entire campaigns without scoring at all. After a promising spell on loan at Newcastle, his old Boro boss Jack Charlton rescued him at second-tier Sheffield Wednesday. The fee they paid? Only £30,000.

Just a month after Mills had departed Boro, the transfer record nearly doubled when Trevor Francis (right) famously left Birmingham City for Nottingham Forest in British football’s maiden seven-figure deal. His February unveiling at the City Ground was unforgettable, with boss Brian Clough holding a squash racquet in front of the assembled press. In true Cloughie fashion, he had kept everyone waiting while he played squash across the road at Trent Bridge cricket ground.

For all his addiction to publicity, Brian didn’t want to break the million-pound mark. Forest’s offer was £999,999. As it was, taxes carried the final total beyond the million-pound threshold.

“I started at 16 and played until I was 39,” Francis later recalled of the figure. “I did lots of things, but whenever I go to dinners I will always get introduced as the first million-pound footballer, as if it was the only thing I did in 23 years.”

The 25-year-old’s first appearance in Forest colours was a third-team parks game the next day – “I played in front of 20 people and two dogs” – but his most memorable match for the club would come just three months later, when he headed home the only goal in Munich against Malmo to clinch the Reds’ first European Cup triumph.

The post-match analysis universally described how Francis had repaid a large part of his fee with that goal alone. It was also the instant reaction of Barry Davies, the BBC match commentator that night: “And Trevor Francis, the million-pound man, puts his name onto the scoresheet and returns a great deal of the cheque.” No one could claim that Steve Daley’s performances for City returned a great deal of the cheque that had taken him to Manchester at the start of the next season. Once all the add-ons had been applied, the transfer fee was a precise £1,437,500. “The £500 was my fee as part of the deal!” Daley told FFT in 2015. The figure – for a player yet to make his full international debut for England – even raised the eyebrows of the Blues’ supremo, and cigar enthusiast, Malcolm Allison. His chairman, Peter Swales, had exclusively handled the transfer. “I didn’t know anything about the fee,” Allison later explained. “John Barnwell [then manager of Wolves] had wanted £600,000 for him, but I did not think he was worth it. Then Peter Swales went and bought him for one million and four hundred thousand pounds.” The hefty price tag took its toll on Daley, as the midfielder’s performances suffered and he became the personification of a Man City team full of big-money misfits. One particular match, an FA Cup loss against fourth-tier Halifax Town, brought it into sharp focus. “I looked round our team on the pitch,” Daley later recalled, “and it’d cost about £8.5m to assemble. NASA had only spent £10m getting a man to the moon. We could not get past Halifax.”

Less than two years into his 10-year City contract, Daley retreated west to the NASL and a successful period with Seattle Sounders. His transfer fee was less than a quarter of what Swales had paid. Nearly 40 years later, that earlier overpriced deal still defines his career. He is now an after-dinner speaker. “I’ve won no trophies, no cups, no medals,” he told The Observer. “The only things I can talk about are the things I have not done in the game.”

To rub salt into the wound, Wolves lifted the League Cup in March 1980, six months after Daley left Molineux. That wasn’t all – the winning goal was scored by the man whose signing had been made possible by the Daley deal – the cash from which had been burning a hole in Wolves’ back pocket.

Andy Gray (top left) had signed on the dotted line a full three days after Daley’s departure, making the short trip from Aston Villa for £1,469,000.

The Glaswegian scored on his debut against Everton and, almost inevitably, repeated the feat when his former club visited Molineux the following month. So desperate had the striker been to untangle himself from Villa boss Ron Saunders’ strict rule, his goal gave him great satisfaction: “[Ron] was my sole reason for leaving.”

Saunders believed he could safeguard against Gray’s possible exit by placing a seven-figure fee on the Scot’s head.

“The manager felt that by asking for so much, he’d put off potential buyers and I’d end up staying at Villa Park, no matter what I wanted,” Gray recalled. “Unfortunately he had miscalculated – the transfer market was about to go through one of its periodic explosions.”

Gray spent four years wearing Wolves colours, scoring 45 goals in 162 games. The most famous was the tap-in to see off Forest in the League Cup final, surely the simplest goal scored at Wembley. Another million-pound player had now secured silverware for his new club.

Halfway through Gray’s four years at Molineux, Bryan Robson became British football’s most valuable asset when he left West Brom to join Manchester United for £1.5m in October 1981. Not that the burden had ever weighed too heavy on the Scotsman’s shoulders – Gray was never affected by life in the game’s goldfish bowl.

“The transfer fee didn’t bother me. I wasn’t frightened by it. I was still the same player. I was just doing my job playing football.” Neymar, take heed.

MILLS COST MORE THAN HAMBURG HAD PAID FOR KEEGAN BUT WENT TWO SEASONS WITHOUT SCORING A GOAL FOR WEST BROM