Frank Soo: England’s forgotten footballer

The England squad at this year’s soccer World Cup shows us that much has changed since 1978, when Viv Anderson became the first black player to represent his country.

Eleven players out of the 23-man squad in Russia this year are black or of mixed ethnicity — one more player than at the last European Championship and four more than at the last World Cup.

Anderson’s status as a pioneer for black players is firmly established. But the story of British Chinese midfielder Frank Soo — another trailblazer for nonwhite English footballers — is much less well known.

Labelled “England and China’s forgotten footballer” by biographer Susan Gardiner, Soo was one of the best players of his generation. He captained Stoke City during the 1930s in English soccer’s top division and was named in former England manager Joe Mercer’s alltime 11.

And on May 9, 1942, Soo became the first player of nonEuropean descent to represent England. Soo played nine fixtures in a Three Lions jersey, though they were all wartime internationals so he never earned an official cap.

“During his lifetime he was as famous as all the great footballers like Stanley Matthews, Joe Mercer and Tommy Lawton,” said Gardiner, author of The Wanderer: The Story of Frank Soo. “It’s very strange that out of all of them he is the one to have disappeared from the narrative.”

Soo was born in Derbyshire in 1914 to Chinese immigrant Quan Soo and his English wife Beatrice, who both worked in a launderette. He showed promise as a player while in school and joined Stoke City at 18.

Gardiner says Soo became a household name in England during the 1930s and 40s — his wedding photos made the front page of the Daily Mirror, and Stoke fans regarded him as a working-class hero. He played for the team 173 times, before stints at Leicester City, Luton Town and Chelmsford City.

Alan Lau, who plays for the London Chinese Community Centre Football Club and established a foundation in Soo’s name, says the player is an inspiration to him and his teammates.

“We want to promote his legacy,” Lau said. “His story is not well-known in the wider footballing fraternity. As someone growing up in the UK of Chinese background, to have someone like this as a role model is important. He got to the top of the game and overcame so many barriers.”

Soo played in both midfield and defense and was lauded for his ball control and accurate passing. In his column for a national paper, Dixie Dean — one of English soccer’s most prolific goal-scorers — identified Soo as one of the country’s greatest talents.

Following his playing career, Soo left England to work as a manager in Sweden, Italy, and for the Norwegian national team, and mentions of him in British media soon dried up. He died in 1991 at age 76.

“Soo gets overlooked because his caps came during the war, and because he’s playing in an era when the dynamics around race relations were very different,” said Martin Johnes, a sport historian at Swansea University.

“When Viv Anderson appears for England it’s at a time when race is a political issue, it followed 20 years of large scale immigration,” he added. “Soo is playing at a time when there were probably less than 50,000 people of color living in the UK — race simply wasn’t a political issue in the same way.”

Soo said his ethnicity held him back from reaching his full potential. He told the Evening Sentinel in 1945 that he thought he “would have had many more (England appearances) but for his Oriental blood”.