Football’s first professional travelled to England in a sturdy steam locomotive nearly 150 years ago; Manchester United’s World Cup superstar chose a sleek, chauffeur-driven Roller for his transportation earlier this week.
A film director charged with telling the story of football could do much worse than create a road movie. Travel has been at the heart of the game since the very beginning, a key element in precipitating its spread.
The palaces on wheels that convey the twenty-first century footballer around the country lack the Carry on potential of the 1950s, when players and fans travelled in the ramshackle vehicle hired from the local coach company.
The modern monsters that announce the opposition’s arrival as they nose through the crowds suggest a rather sinister kind of movie, with its occupants lurking behind tinted windows. They exude the same sort of menace as prison vans taking criminals to court.
The old-style coach came with its obligatory operative, the driver with the massive gut straining his braces to snapping point. Likely as not he had a fag pinched between his lips as, for mile on end, he intuitively directed his vehicle from behind a thick veil of smoke. In the passenger seats the finely honed athletes smoked just as devotedly while, almost without exception, they whetted their competitive juices by playing cards.
Plenty of comedians have picked up on the humorous possibilities of football teams and their followers on the move. Billy Connolly told the one about the drunken man, wrapped in a Celtic scarf, lying face down on the pavement, who was rescued by the supporters bus as it travelled back to Scotland from an away fixture in England. On the outskirts of Glasgow the man mumbled his address, but when the bus got there no one was in. A neighbour, woken by the knocking, stuck his head out of an upstairs window: ‘You’ll nae find anyone there. They’re in England on honeymoon.’
In its earliest days football was indebted to the railways for kindling mass interest in the game by providing fast, affordable travel. Acknowledging this, many clubs positioned themselves close to train stations. Manchester United, for example, moved to Old Trafford in 1909 to be near the rail network while most London clubs made sure they were adjacent to a railway or underground station.
In 1875, a young Glaswegian rode this railway system on an historic journey. Fergie Suter was bound for England where he would gain notoriety as the player credited with being football’s first professional. On a late December morning he crossed the border to catch his first glimpse of England through the trailing smoke of a steam locomotive that was battling to reach a speed of more than 40 miles an hour.
For more than 20 years now it had been possible to go directly by train from Glasgow to London, a 400-mile journey that on a day with the weather set fair could be completed in a punchy twelve and a half hours.
In many instances when I was collecting material for When Footballers Were Skint I travelled down the same lines and gazed out at the same pastel landscapes as, decades earlier, the veteran footballers I was going to see had done on their way to matches. They were young men then, the heirs of Suter, full of hope and wonder. They were the stars of Saturday afternoons and yet their everyday lives were no different from those of the ordinary working men who idolised them.
The financial rewards for becoming a footballer would have been only marginally higher than driving the train on which the players travelled. For the Irishman Frank O’Farrell, being an engine driver was the aspiration that first consumed him.
During his boyhood in Cork in the 1930s, O’Farrell dreamed of being ‘King of the Cab’, just like his father. But after working his way up from engine cleaner to fireman shovelling coal into the firebox – just a footplate away from becoming a driver – he answered the call of his second great love. He signed as a professional footballer for one of England’s great clubs, West Ham United, before some years later joining another, Preston North End. He played also for the Republic of Ireland and his posts as a manager included Old Trafford.
Still, though, what brings a look of trance-like rapture to O’Farrell’s face, as he sits contentedly in his Torquay home, is not the memory of a sweetly struck goal. It is when he softly whispers the words ‘steam engine’.
This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback Publishing.