HIS LIFE’S WORK WAS PLAYING FOR LEEDS
For 17 years and 724 games, Paul Madeley was a one-club man. He played in a different era when there was an intimacy between club, players and fans
FROM the margins of one of this week’s many remembrances of Paul Madeley, the former Leeds United player who has died at the age of 73, came a story which screamed out the differences between those days and these.
It was 1975, and manager Jimmy Armfield was trying to offer the then 30-year-old an improved deal, when Madeley proposed that since he had no intention of leaving Leeds, he might as well sign the contract and leave the club to fill in the details.
‘What do you want, then, two years or three years?’ Armfield persisted.
‘I’ll leave it to you,’ Madeley replied. ‘I just want to play for Leeds.’
The exchange belongs to a time before image rights, get-out clauses and choreographed Twitter contract ‘reveals’, not to mention the football agent’s multimillion-pound cut, though woe betide anyone who got the impression that Madeley was to be messed with.
John Giles, a Leeds team-mate, says they called him ‘Mr Spock’ because ‘he never seemed to get excited about anything’.
Yet when the Leeds players were struggling to explain to director Sam Bolton, in the presence of manager Brian Clough, why it wasn’t working with Clough, in the late summer of 1974, it was Madeley who spoke up. ‘What the players are trying to say, Mr Bolton, is that he’s no good.’
His self-effacement and mild embarrassment about money conversations belong to that time.
Nottingham Forest’s John Robertson had been on the same money for four years — £65 a week — when Clough told him to come in and ‘talk terms’ in 1976. Robertson was asked how much he wanted, suggested ‘£100’ and Clough immediately said: ‘Done’, with ‘no discussions, no haggling,’ as the Scot reflected years later.
It was after Forest had won promotion to the First Division a year later that Robertson, amid much indecision, went in to ask him if there might be a bit more, in the circumstances.
‘What do you think you might want, son?’ Clough asked. ‘£120 please,’ Robertson replied. ‘Because you have been so polite and nice about it, have £125,’ Clough said. And that was good enough for him.
It was a time before the TV money came barrelling in, bringing petro-dollars and investment funds in its wake and taking the game away into a global dimension which meant that a dressing room could simply no longer be representative of the English postindustrial city outside.
God knows, those old days were not all wine and roses. The Hillsborough disaster inquests are a relatively recent reminder of that — a journey back into the world of terrace cages, police officer radios that didn’t work, decrepit turnstiles and unspeakable horror. But they brought a modest, uncomplicated intimacy between a club, their players and their place which the cash has certainly stripped away.
Madeley — born in Beeston, barely a stone’s throw from Elland Road — looked no further than the club and Don Revie, who first saw him turn out as a 15-year-old at Middleton Parkside, a rugby league school, in a year group which also gave the England team Paul Reaney and Kevin Hector.
He was given a second thought, in a way that seems unthinkable in this Wild West age of the disposable manager, who has no time to stand and stare.
Madeley had actually wound up working in insurance and playing left half for Farsley Celtic, after a Leeds scout reported that he had ‘poise and control but wants to play the game at his own speed and seems to lack pace’.
It was 1962, Revie wanted another look, and because the average managerial tenure at that time was five years and rising, it was safe to back a hunch. Leeds would become Madeley’s life’s work — 17 years, 724 games — though as he set out on his journey, those of his ilk were declining.
In the 1950s, 24 one-club players at English sides began their careers. The number fell to 12 in the 1960s, six in the 1970s, was still at nine by the 1990s. The last Englishman of this kind to retire was Liverpool-born Tony Hibbert, whose youth career at Everton began in 1990. He left the club in 2016.
Dean Lewington is still playing for MK Dons having made his debut for Wimbledon in 2003 before the club relocated to
Milton Keynes. There are plenty of players who would scoff at the notion of an idealism about the old days in a sport where — even after the ‘retain-and-transfer’ system, which tied them to clubs, was abolished in 1961 — some were viewed as serfs.
Forward Jimmy Seed gave Tottenham Hotspur the best years of his life in the 1920s, only to be sold to Sheffield Wednesday because he did not want a £1 pay cut, when he had only been earning £8 a week. There was a poetic justice about Spurs being relegated the following season.
Defender Ray Sproson gave Port Vale 23 years of service from 1949, playing 760 times for them, operating a milk float for some of that time to top up his salary and turning down a move to Liverpool. He was sacked as manager by the club after being forced to sell players continuously for two years. Heartbroken, he took up work as a newsagent. He never went back.
Jackie Milburn gave Newcastle United, his only English club, 14 years of service but it took them a decade to give him a testimonial.
‘Players were more nomadic than you might imagine in the years after retainand-transfer,’ says the National Football Museum’s Alex Jackson. ‘They had to move around to keep a salary coming in.’
Yet there was a sense of perspective in the days before the sport’s new economics put the players and their followers in different realms. The week’s other reminder of that came in the BBC’s Bill Shankly documentary, Nature’s
Fire, when the former Liverpool manager’s granddaughter, Karen Gill, recalls him having the garden of his home on Bellefield Avenue paved over because so many people were traipsing across the lawn to knock on the door.
‘They would always get invited in,’ Ms Gill told the filmmakers. ‘For my grandad, football without people is nothing. For him, that’s where the joy, the passion, came from.’
That was before they took the stadiums away, out of town, too. For a reminder of what proceeded that process, look up The Homes
of Football, the book in which documentary photographer Stuart Roy Clarke charts his journey around a domestic game on the cusp of the Premier League era, in the 1990s.
Its images include ‘Back up the Hill’, which captures fans climbing up the hill to Beeston — Madeley’s district — away from Elland Road, which is away in the background, on the day their club have returned to the top flight after an absence of eight years, in 1990.
‘Looking Up’ captures what you imagine to be a working-class group of 12 people — brothers, sisters, cousins, school friends, a father; all spellbound by some untold event on the field at Sunderland’s Roker Park in 1996. Such a group of 12, frozen in time, could not afford 12 top-flight tickets together now, even if they could find them.
It was a German publisher — Spielmacher — which commissioned Clarke’s book. (The text is in German, with English translation at the back.) Germany has a fascination with 1990s English football just before the hundred-grand-a-week salaries came in. That country seems to sense that English football has won the lottery and lost its soul. The spirit of Madeley was still clinging on as the game entered the new era, with Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher among the seven English one-club players to make their senior debuts in the ’90s. Both approached contracts in a way reminiscent of him.
Neville always felt he was ‘lucky’, having ‘never wanted to play for any club except United’. He did not feel the need to have a representative in the room when it was time to talk money.
‘I’d walk in with my dad to see Peter Kenyon or David Gill with a number in my head and, give or take a few quid, they’d have the same figure in mind too,’ he once related. ‘Check the wording. Give me a pen. Where do I sign? And I never had an agent worrying about his cut.’
Madeley did not change much with the years. In 2011, he joined 700 Leeds supporters at a gala dinner to raise money for a statue of his beloved Revie, though when it came time for a Q&A session with members of the 1972 FA Cupwinning side, he watched his old team-mates take the stage and looked on from the floor. He never was one for a song and dance.