As Bad as Things Got; Burnley, 9th May 1987

In the mid-1970s, Burnley were a top flight club. By 1987, they were fighting for their place in the Football League.

By the middle of the 1980s, Burnley had entered a seemingly perpetual period of deep decline. As recently as 1976, they’d been a First Division club, but considerable debt had forced the sale of such players as Leighton James and Martin Dobson. When The Bob Lord stand was opened at Turf Moor in 1974, it was joked that they should have called it The Martin Dobson Stand, because his transfer to Everton in the same summer that it opened had paid for it.

1976 had started badly for Burnley, with the departure of manager Jimmy Adamson, who’d played for the club from 1947 to 1964, had been on the coaching staff for the next six years, and then manager from 1970.  This wasn’t just a manager leaving a football club. This was the departure of a club legend. Burnley finished one place off the bottom of the First Division table at the end of the 1975/76 season, five points—the equivalent of seven, today—from safety.