Over the course of this year, The Athletic has met up with seven footballers born across a period of 70 years, from 1935 to 2005.
Between them, they have made more than 3,000 senior appearances at club level and more than 100 for their countries’ national teams. One of them can also cite more than 1,000 matches as a manager.
The oldest is former Northern Ireland defender Billy McCullough, who turned 90 in July. He used to sit among Arsenal’s supporters on the Tube train to Highbury, the club’s home stadium at the time, on matchdays and played against the likes of Sir Stanley Matthews, Sir Tom Finney and Nat Lofthouse in the era of a pre-match glug of sherry and a half-time cigarette.
The youngest is Tottenham Hotspur and England Under-21 defender Ashley Phillips, who turned 20 in June. He is a product of a multicultural society and a modern football academy system, growing up in the age of sports science, data analysis and social media.
The stories and memories all seven players have shared with The Athletic reflect the enormous changes in society as well as football over the course of their lives and careers. This is part one, which introduces the seven players and primarily covers the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Part two will follow tomorrow — Friday, December 26.
Billy McCullough was born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, in July 1935 and grew up in the shadow of the Second World War.
“I can remember they (German aircraft) were over Belfast and they were bombing the shipyard,” he says at his modest home on the outskirts of north London. “But all that was distant to me. We used to go out into the countryside and sleep under the hedges.”
Billy McCullough, centre, at Arsenal in 1961 (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
He grew up without any thoughts of playing football professionally. At 23, he was happily working in the Belfast shipyards and earning a few quid on the side by playing part-time for Portadown in the Irish League. “It was only pocket money,” he says.
His life changed when he played in an exhibition game at Belfast’s Windsor Park in 1958. Afterwards, he was approached by Arsenal’s new manager George Swindin and his assistant Ron Greenwood. “They said, ‘Would you like to be a full-time professional footballer?’” McCullough recalls. “I said, ‘Well, if it’s possible, yes’.”
Ian Storey-Moore was born in January 1945 and grew up in Scunthorpe, in the eastern English county of Lincolnshire. He was playing football locally in his early teens when a coach from Nottingham Forest, who happened to be watching that match, asked him if he fancied a trial. He made a good impression, and was invited to start an apprenticeship at age 16.
“They called us ‘ground staff’,” he says. “We trained in the afternoons, but in the mornings we had to clean the dressing rooms, sweep the terraces, clean the players’ boots. I used to hate it, to be honest. It wasn’t enjoyable, I can tell you that.
Ian Storey-Moore at Nottingham Forest in 1970 (PA Images via Getty Images)
“And then at 17, you were either given a professional contract or you were let go. I was thinking, ‘Crikey, what if they don’t give me a professional contract?’ I was fortunate to get one. I think the basic wage was about £17 ($23 at the current rate) a week. A lot of the other lads weren’t so lucky.”
Steve Coppell was born in Liverpool in July 1955. He was nearly 18 and planning to go to university when a scout from Merseyside team Tranmere Rovers spotted him playing on the wing for his local boys’ club and invited him for a trial.
Coppell initially said no, unwilling to be distracted from his upcoming school exams, but the scout persisted. A few weeks later, Coppell went along, scored a hat-trick in a trial game, and was offered an apprenticeship there and then. Again, he said no, insisting he would be going to study economics.
Steve Coppell, student and Tranmere player, in December 1974 (Roland Hicklin/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
A remarkable compromise was reached.
Coppell enrolled as a full-time student at Liverpool University while also earning £10 a week playing for Tranmere, initially in the reserves but then making his full debut, at 18, towards the end of his first season.
“I wasn’t even training with Tranmere,” he says. “On Wednesday afternoons, I would play for the commerce and economics department team. I remember we got to the final of the interdepartmental cup, where we were beaten 5-1 by Geography. And then on Saturdays, I’d be playing for Tranmere in the Football League. It was a very, very strange route.”
Robbie Earle’s parents were part of the “Windrush generation” who migrated to the UK from Caribbean Commonwealth countries in the decades after the Second World War. The British Nationality Act of 1948 invited people from the Commonwealth as part of an initiative to address labour shortages and rebuild infrastructure after the devastation of the war years.
The family had settled in the Midlands city of Stoke-on-Trent by the time Earle was born in January 1965. His father worked down the coal mines, his mother at factories, trying to scrape enough money together to feed their five children. His dad was a miner for more than 40 years until, one by one, the collieries were closed down over the course of the 1980s and 1990s.
Earle joined Stoke City as a schoolboy but was released at 16 and about to enrol at college when he was offered an apprenticeship at nearby Port Vale, then in the old Third Division (League One today), under the government’s Youth Training Scheme (YTS). Like Storey-Moore, he felt he spent more time doing menial jobs than learning to be a footballer.
“My first YTS deal was £25 ($34 at the current rate) a week,” he says. “They also gave me £10 for my mum for my rent, and a bus pass to get me to the training ground and back.”
Robbie Earle at Port Vale in 1990 (Ben Radford/Allsport via Getty Images)
George Boateng was born in Nkawkaw, a town in southern Ghana, in September 1975.
“It was as poor as you would imagine,” he says. “We lived in a cul-de-sac with 20 shanty houses with one TV between them. We shared a bathroom and sometimes you had to fetch the water. We were lucky — we had food on the table and a roof over our heads. And we didn’t know any different.”
He learnt to play football in the streets, barefoot. He was a natural, but the concept of playing professionally was alien.
When he moved to live with his uncle in the Netherlands at the age of nine — “for my education, because my parents felt I was academic” — it was an eye-opener in more ways than one. “It was the first time I had seen snow,” Boateng says. “It was also the first time I saw hot water coming out of a tap. And where I lived, just outside Rotterdam, there were grass football pitches in every area.
Boateng playing for the Netherlands in 2005 (Nigel French – PA Images via Getty Images)
“This was the era of (Ruud) Gullit, (Frank) Rijkaard and (Marco) van Basten (in the Dutch national team). That was my first encounter with international football. I remember after the Euro ’88 final (which the Netherlands won), picking up my ball, running to the pitch, saying, ‘I’m going to be Ruud Gullit today’.”
Boateng was offered the opportunity to join the academy at Excelsior Rotterdam. This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Dutch football was ascendant. The emphasis would be on football, not odd jobs.
Ashley Young was born in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, just north of London, in July 1985. All his early memories are of football: playing with his brothers and friends on a patch of grass near their home, breaking his parents’ ornaments by booting a ball around in the house, watching VHS videos of his heroes, such as Arsenal and England striker Ian Wright.
From the age of five, Young played organised football and was determined to catch the eye of a professional club. At 10, he started training at nearby Watford’s centre of excellence three times a week.
Young at Watford in 2005 (Clive Rose/Getty Images)
At 16, he was asked by a career adviser what he planned to do when he left school. “I told her, ‘I’m going to be a professional footballer’,” Young says. “She said, ‘Yes, but what if that doesn’t work out?’ And I said, ‘It’s going to work out. It’s all I want to do.’ And I got up and walked out.”
In time, he proved that woman wrong. But it was a close thing.
“I was told (by Watford) I wasn’t going to get a scholarship because I was too small,” he says. “They said I could stay on part-time and still play at weekends. I decided I was going to stay and prove the wrong.”
Ashley Phillips was born in Salford, Greater Manchester, in June 2005 to a Nigerian father and a Welsh mother. From an early age, football was everywhere in his life: on television, on the internet. He started playing organised football at local non-League team Curzon Ashton, under qualified coaches. At 12, he was invited for trials at EFL side Blackburn Rovers, and given the opportunity to join their youth academy.
It was a significant commitment — not least for his mother. “She had to pick me up from school and drive me there through the rush hour two or three times a week,” he says.
Phillips began a scholarship at Blackburn at 16. In contrast to previous eras of the English game detailed above, the focus was on education — football and academic — rather than menial jobs. The flip side is that, with clubs casting the nets further and wider in search of talent, the opportunities for homegrown players are more scarce than before.
Phillips with Blackburn in 2023 (Dave Howarth – CameraSport via Getty Images)
Phillips played for Wales at under-16s level, before switching his allegiance back to the country of his birth in the next year up, where he played alongside Nico O’Reilly, now starting for Manchester City, and Arsenal’s now senior England international Myles Lewis-Skelly.
He made his professional debut with Championship (second-tier) Blackburn at 17, and signed his first professional contract a month later. By that stage, he was already represented by one of the leading player-management agencies in the game, Wasserman, and attracting interest from bigger clubs. Just over a month after turning 18, he joined Premier League Tottenham Hotspur in a £2million deal.
When McCullough joined Arsenal in the late 1950s, footballers in England were restricted to a maximum wage of £20 a week, which was just over twice the national average.
In 1961, their trade union, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), forced the abolition of the maximum wage. “Then there would sometimes be crowd bonuses and win bonuses, so if you compare with a train driver or a plumber or something then, yes, we would have been earning more than them,” McCullough says. “But it wasn’t like now.”
Rather than live in vast mansions or gated communities in London’s most exclusive areas, players back then lived normal lives among normal people in unremarkable suburbs. Afternoons off, he says, were spent at the cinema, or picking mushrooms in the fields near the training ground.
On Saturdays, he and his team-mates made their way to the stadium by public transport, sitting or standing inconspicuously among the fans. “I used to take the bus up to Bounds Green, then get the Tube to Highbury and just walk to the ground,” he says.
McCullough, far right, with Arsenal manager Billy Wright and team-mates as undersoil heating is laid at Highbury in 1964 (Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
“On Fridays, we used to have a team meeting at Highbury and a bottle of sherry came out… Most of the lads liked a drink. I didn’t, but I would have the sherry on a Friday. You had to.
“The lads who wanted a smoke went down to the boiler room. The same applied when we went away. The smokers got together.”
The boiler room had another purpose. Players who were overweight would go in there and jog on the spot with “two or three tracksuits on” in order to try to shift a few pounds.
A typical pre-match meal was steak. But McCullough points out he preferred his without sauce and without chips, usually with only a grilled tomato on the side.
Smoking was banned in the three hours before kick-off, though that didn’t stop some players making their way to the boiler room for a few last puffs before the action started.
Storey-Moore broke into Forest’s first team at the age of 18 and, as a skilful winger, often found himself subjected to rough treatment — and not just from opponents.
As a teenager, he had his ankle broken by a team-mate who took exception to being “given a bit of a chasing” in training. Storey-Moore recalls the player leaning over him and saying, “You won’t take the p**s out of me again.”
“Some of the tackles flying about in those days were horrific, really,” he says. “Every team in those days had three or four players who could put it about. Which is probably a euphemism for ‘a dirty b****d’.”
Storey-Moore’s professional career started shortly after the abolition of the minimum wage. “Fulham started paying Johnny Haynes £100 a week,” he says. “Since then, things have escalated somewhat … .”
But the effects of wage inflation were hardly felt by a youngster at Forest. To top his £17-a-week wage, Storey-Moore was reliant on occasional win bonuses and then, during the summer, on working at the steelworks back in Scunthorpe.
“It used to drive me bonkers,” he says. “I absolutely hated it. But the summers were long, and you had to do it to supplement your income.”
Coppell was stunned when Tranmere told him they had agreed to sell him to Manchester United in a £60,000 deal in early 1975.
“In an era with no agents, I didn’t have a clue what to do,” he says. “But my dad has always given me wise counsel. He just said, ‘Listen, son. You don’t turn down Manchester United’.”
He was left to conduct his own contract negotiations. United’s manager at the time, Tommy Docherty, who told him he had never seen him play, asked how much he was earning and Coppell, under instructions from Tranmere, said £30 a week rather than the true figure of £10. Docherty immediately offered to double it to £60. “I thought, ’S**t, I could have asked for more’,” Coppell says.
He likens his debut, against Cardiff City in front of 43,601 spectators at Old Trafford, to an out-of-body experience; like he was “floating across the grass” in “a euphoric trance”.
That sense of the surreal was enhanced by the fact that — unofficially — Coppell remained a part-time footballer, continuing with his university studies and training on his own in Liverpool, other than one evening session a week with United. He was playing for one of the biggest clubs in the world, alongside established international stars, but was occupying a totally different world. “It would never happen today,” he says with a laugh.
Coppell with United manager Tommy Docherty at Old Trafford in 1976 (PA Images via Getty Images)
The 1960s were an exciting time to be a footballer in England. The advent of television had brought more exposure and glamour, as did England’s World Cup triumph as hosts in 1966 and the emergence of George Best at Manchester United. Arsenal were enduring a barren period, but were still regularly attracting crowds in excess of 30,000 — good news for players whose wage bonuses were linked to attendances as well as results.
“There were a lot of very good players around,” McCullough says. “Playing against players like Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters… I remember playing against Jimmy Greaves — I think it was against England at Wembley — and he came up and started talking to me, breaking my concentration. The next minute, he was off and away.”
What was it like playing against Best? “Oh, well, every time the ball was fed up to George, the girls (in the crowd) started screaming. I played left-back. I remember him coming over to my side and I would tell him, ‘B****r off to the other side’.”
International trips could be memorable.
“We went to Albania, which was under (the influence of) Chinese Communism at the time,” McCullough says. “They had a big roundabout with four men at each corner directing the traffic. But the only traffic was the big CD cars — the corps diplomatique (carrying foreign diplomats). The rest was just donkeys and carts. It was a very poor country. We took our own food and our own chef. We had some eye-openers abroad.”
Storey-Moore wasn’t a household name like Best or Greaves, but was among the stars of a Forest team that ran Manchester United close for the league title and reached the FA Cup semi-final in 1966-67. He made his England debut in January 1970 but missed out on that year’s World Cup due to injury.
He calls himself a nearly-man — “nearly won the league, nearly won the FA Cup, one cap for England” — but his only serious regret is the ankle injury that cut short his professional career in 1974, two years after he joined United in a £225,000 deal.
The initial assessment of his ankle was that he didn’t need surgery because there was no fracture — a verdict that horrified the specialist he saw four months later, who immediately diagnosed serious ligament damage. Surgery did not fix it and he was forced to retire at 29 because the ankle would no longer stand the rigours of professional football.
Coppell recalls that United were one of the few clubs who had a qualified physio in the early 1980s. Other teams would simply send one of their coaching staff onto the pitch to assess any knocks, armed with a bucket of water and a sponge. “The magic sponge!’ he laughs. “It was, ‘Get up, you’ll be fine’.”
He withstood many a fierce tackle to establish himself as a leading figure in United’s resurgence in the late 1970s, playing in their FA Cup final victory over Liverpool in 1977 and making his England debut six months later.
But like Storey-Moore, Coppell was cut off in his prime, his knee wrecked by a wild challenge from Hungary full-back Jozsef Toth during a World Cup qualifier in 1981. After a series of failed comeback attempts and unsuccessful operations, he was advised that retirement was his best hope of being able to run around with his children and grandchildren in future years. He describes that dilemma as a “no-brainer”.
In some ways, Coppell was lucky. He had signed a new contract not long before the injury, making him one of the best-paid players in English football, and his insurance payout was far bigger than, for example, Storey-Moore’s nearly a decade earlier.
“I was earning £1,000 a week, which I was very grateful for. My brother was earning £300 a week as a plumber at the time, so I was earning good money compared to the national average, but it wasn’t money that was going to change your life, like it is now. I had hoped to play until I was 35. But I was 28 and I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next.”
Part two of ‘Football through the generations’ will be published tomorrow, December 26.