The Daily: 25th July 2023
Trevor Francis was the superstar who never quite was, a player perhaps better suited to Serie A than the First Division.
Trevor Francis, 1954-2023
A European Cup winner, an England international, and an accomplished manager for more than a decade, Trevor Francis occupies a very singular place in the history of English football. There is a surprising paradox at the centre of Trevor Francis’ career. For all that it was two moments which came within weeks of each other during the first half of 1979 that are now the first things you think of when you think of Trevor Francis (well, those and the knock-off tracksuits mentioned in the opening titles to Only Fools & Horses), his playing career was surprisingly long.
When Trevor Francis made his Football League debut in the Second Division for Birmingham City on the 5th September 1970 against Cardiff City, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles were heading to the top of the UK singles charts with Tears of a Clown. By the time his playing career finally came to a formal close in May 1994 it was Tony di Barti and The Real Thing. To put it another way, a lot of water had passed under bridges in those intervening years.
He scored his first league against Oxford United a week later while being marked by Ron Atkinson. By end of that season he’d scored 15 goals in 22 league appearances, a figure all the more remarkable for the fact that he only turned 17 years old two weeks its end. The following season, Birmingham City were promoted back to the First Division as runners-up to Norwich City after an absence of seven years and reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup before losing 3-0 to Leeds United.
And then there’s those startling moments during the first half of 1979. The first tremor of what was to come came at the start of the year when West Bromwich Albion paid Middlesbrough £516,000 for Gary Mills, the second British half-million pound footballer after Kevin Keegan. And then a few weeks later arrived Brian Clough, who blew the doors off by spending £1m—or £999,999, or £1.15m, or £1.18m, depending on where you get your figures from—to sign him from Birmingham City.
Francis had already made his adventurous spirit clear. In 1978, he’d negotiated a secondment from Birmingham City to go and play in the North American Soccer League in the USA, where he scored 22 goals in 19 games and got to play in an all-star team alongside Franz Beckenbauer and Giorgio Chinaglia before returning to the Midlands early the following season. Francis’s transfer to Forest almost fell through on account of this NASL contract, but the fact that Francis was already under contract to Detroit Express for the 1979 season decided the matter. He would go on to score 14 in 14 for them that time around, but there were no further renewals after this.
The timing of the sale was certainly right for Birmingham City. By the start of 1979 they were fighting was clearly a clearly failing battle to avoid relegation from the First Division, ending they season with just six league wins from 42 all season and just 22 points in total, just two above bottom-placed Chelsea. And with attendances starting to fall precipitously year-on-year, the late 1970s were not a good time to be a club near the bottom of the league table.
Birmingham, like an increasing number of others, were in financial difficulty. When they sold Bob Latchford to Everton in 1974—another British record transfer fee, this time at £350,000—average home attendances at St Andrews were almost 31,000. By 1979 that number had fallen by a third. By this point, with relegation staring them in the place, Birmingham weren’t really in a position to be able to turn down a seven-figure sum into the club.
And while this was a wild amount of money for Nottingham Forest to be spending on one player (and what followed was a bout of hyper-transfer-fee-flation; Francis would turn out to be far from the worst of this new generation of seven-digit players), there were sound reasons for them to do so on this particular one. Francis had made 329 appearances in all competitions for Birmingham over the previous eight and half years. Not only had he proved himself as a player, but that’s a huge amount of experience to have built up by 24 years of age, all supplemented by having become a fairly regular fixture in the England team over the previous couple of years.
Forest’s 1978/79 title defence was already pretty much over by the time that Francis arrived at The City Ground. It was all something of a peculiarity, really, ending in them losing just three of their 42 league games but drawing eighteen and consequently finishing eight points adrift of Liverpool. But in the European Cup, in which they’d dumped Liverpool out over two legs the previous September, the wins kept coming, and by May they were playing Malmo in the final in Munich.
It was—unless we’re counting his appearances for Birmingham in the 1977/78 Anglo-Scottish Cup, which we’re not—Francis’s ever first appearance in European club football, and in first half stoppage-time his moment came. John Robertson’s wing-play had already lit the tournament up, and right at the end of the first half he finally found a few inches of space on the left-hand side and sent the ball over towards the far post where Francis literally stooped to conquer, heading the ball up and into the roof of the goal. “The £1m man puts his name on the score sheet, and returns a great deal of the cheque”, as BBC commentator Barry Davies said at the time. Nottingham Forest, who four years earlier had finished 16th in the Second Division, became the champions of Europe.
The following year Forest successfully defended their European Cup, but Francis wasn’t in the team for this final, and his absence due to injury, a subject which was to become a familiar theme throughout the next decade of his career. Perhaps the effects of wear and tear as a result of a career that had started very young. He was sold on to Manchester City in 1981, but they were in financial difficulty and couldn’t really afford his wages. The following summer he was sold on again, this time to Sampdoria.
Italy made sense, for Francis. Here was a player who looked all the healthier for having an all-year tan and who sometimes seemed a yard too smart for the English game of the time, like other players of the era who were tempted to Italy at that sort of time such as Liam Brady and Ray Wilkins. His time at Sampdoria only resulted in one trophy, a Coppa Italia in 1985, and he moved on to Atalanta the following year. One goal and 21 appearances later he was on his way to Ibrox, before returning to England with Queens Park Rangers.
It was at Sheffield Wednesday where the end of his playing career would blend into the start of his managerial career. He moved to Hillsborough in February 1990, as the club took on what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to avoid relegation to the Second Division. But they were promoted back at the first attempt, and surpassed even this achievement by also winning the League Cup, although Francis was only a non-playing substitute in the final.
At the end of that season, Wednesday manager Ron Atkinson left for Aston Villa and Francis was chosen as his replacement as player-manager. His first season saw them finish in third place in the First Division behind Leeds United and Manchester United. The following season he reached the finals of both the FA Cup and League Cup, but lost them both to Arsenal. At the end of the 1993/94 season, his playing career finally came to an end as he reached his 40th birthday. He was dismissed as Wednesday manager a year later after finishing 13th in the Premier League. They were relegated five years after his departure, and haven’t returned since.
Two more managerial spells followed. Back at Birmingham City he couldn’t quite get the team back into the Premier League, while they lost a League Cup final to Liverpool on penalty kicks. His last spell in management at Crystal Palace saw him never really gel with the club. They knocked Liverpool out of the FA Cup at Anfield and beat rivals Brighton 5-0 in a league match, but a failure to get the team near the promotion places led to him being sacked.
Trevor Francis was a genuinely precocious and prodigious talent at Birmingham, but it did sometimes feel as though the timing of his career could be just a little…out. He arrived in NASL in 1978, just as that league passed its Pele-inspired peak. Francis’s goalscoring record was superb and who knows what might have happened had the league continued to grow, but this didn’t happen. NASL showed its first signs of strain around the time his second contract expired in 1979, and collapsed altogether just over five years later.
At Forest he delivered in that first European Cup final but missed the following year’s final through injury. When he arrived at Manchester City, they were just about to enter the state of unhappy delirium that would end in their relegation two years later, by which Francis had gone to Italy. He left Sampdoria in 1986. In 1991, with Serie A basking at a peak of popularity that went stratospheric with Maradona-mania at Napoli and the successes of Milan in the European Cup, Sampdoria won what remains their only Serie A title. If some of these timings had just been slightly different…
And the effect of injuries on the mid-period of his career cannot be denied. He made 30 league appearances for Nottingham Forest in the 1979/80 season, but he wouldn’t make that number again in a single season until 1991, when he played 38 times for Queens Park Rangers. In the intervening eleven years he only made more that twenty appearances in a season on three occasions.
Francis’s medal tally was fair. That European Cup winners’ medal alone would be a decent haul for most playing careers, but he also won League Cups in England and Scotland and a Coppa Italia, as well as making more than fifty appearances for his country. He never won a league title, but it was exceptionally difficult to do this in the 1980s if you didn’t play for Liverpool or Everton. And for all the injuries, when your playing career lasts 24 years it’s going to take in quite a few games. He made 783 club appearances in all competitions for all clubs, and you can add 52 national appearances to that total, too.
He came close as a manager, too. He could have been the manager who took two trophies to Sheffield Wednesday in the same season in 1993, but they lost both finals narrowly to Arsenal. At Birmingham City in 2001, he was a penalty shootout from managing them to what would have been the club’s first ever major trophy.
But he was the first £1m footballer, and he did score the winning goal in the European Cup final. More famous players than Trevor Francis will never break a transfer record or score the winning goal in a European team, or be beloved by his first club for the way in which he lit up their team for so many years, or at his second, for scoring that absolutely crucial goal, the goal that made Nottingham Forest the champions of Europe, something which can never be taken away from that club.
And surely breaking those records, creating those memories, having a playing career which lasted almost a quarter of a century, and being so fondly thought of at more than one club is what it’s all about. At 69 years of age, Trevor Francis was taken too early, but he leaves memories which won’t be going anywhere soon, and at more than one club.