Trevor Francis may have been UK’s first £1m player.. but Brian Clough knew just how to bring him back down to earth
TREVOR FRANCIS was never likely to get carried away with becoming Britain’s first £1million footballer — not when the man who signed him was Brian Clough.
The year before Francis made his historic switch from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest in February 1979, his future manager presented him with the Midlands Football Writers’ Player of the Year award.
And Clough scolded him with the words: "You are a very talented young man, now if you kindly take your hands out of your pockets I will present you with this trophy."
Francis, who has died aged 69, was a modest softly-spoken Devonian who always wore his fame lightly.
Yet Old Big ’Ead wasn’t going to take any chances, turning up for the player’s official signing armed with a squash racquet, as if the deal was a minor inconvenience to delay his regular morning exercise.
Asked what advice he would give to his new recruit, Cloughie replied: "Give the ball to John Robertson, he’s better than you."
READ MORE ON TREVOR FRANCIS
Three months later, Francis would score the only goal in the first of Forest’s back-to-back European Cup final wins, a stooping back-post header against Malmo in Munich following some classic Robertson wing-play.
Francis enjoyed a long and prolific career — from teenage sensation at Birmingham to a League Cup winner as a veteran at Sheffield Wednesday.
He became Birmingham’s youngest first-team player when he debuted against Cardiff, aged 16 years and 139 days in 1970 — a record which stood for half a century, until Jude Bellingham made his Blues bow.
It is testament to Francis that he played under Sir Alf Ramsey and also in the Premier League, winning trophies in three different decades before he became a distinguished manager and TV co-commentator.
Most read in Football
Such was his celebrity that, when the classic sitcom Only Fools and Horses first aired in 1981, the music over the final credits mentioned two names — David Bowie and Francis. It included the immortal line: "Trevor Francis tracksuits, from a mush in Shepherd’s Bush."
But while the striker scored almost 300 goals in a career which spanned nearly a quarter of a century, he will always be primarily remembered for the fee Forest paid to take him across the Midlands from St Andrew’s.
At a time when players are regularly moving for 100 times that price — and when Kylian Mbappe may soon go for £259m — it is easy to forget how seismic the story was when Francis joined Clough’s reigning league champions.
The fee of £1.15m was more than double the previous British record, it was preceded by more than half a dozen transfer requests and followed by weeks of wrangling over paperwork.
Francis’ career at Forest was brief but relatively successful, yielding 37 goals in 93 appearances.
But it was not helped by Clough often employing him out of position on the right wing.
During Forest’s march to their second European Cup, in 1980, Francis would score twice in the quarter-final against Dynamo Berlin and once in the semi against Ajax, only to suffer a ruptured right Achilles tendon before the final.
And Clough then banned him from attending the showpiece against Kevin Keegan’s Hamburg in Madrid’s Bernabeu Stadium.
Francis recalled: "He thought psychologically, the other players seeing me on crutches would have a damaging effect.
"OK, I can see that. But then I wasn’t invited on the open-top bus for the celebrations after we’d won."
He spent the 1981-82 season at Manchester City — where he scored 14 goals — and then became one of England’s more successful exports to Serie A during the 1980s.
He played four seasons at Sampdoria, helping the Genoa club to their first Coppa Italia victory, alongside Graeme Souness, whom he would later play under at Rangers.
After being part of the Wednesday side that won the League Cup in 1991, he took over as manager from Ron Atkinson and guided the Owls to a third-place finish in the top flight, as well as two cup finals in 1993.
That year, Francis turned down the chance to succeed Graham Taylor as England manager.
He also managed QPR, Birmingham and Crystal Palace and was a long- serving co-commentator with Sky.
Francis won 52 England caps, scoring 12 times, including two at the 1982 World Cup in Spain.
And yet in later life, he often admitted that being remembered primarily for that world-first seven-figure fee was a source of both pride and frustration.
In a recent interview, Francis said: "I literally smashed the transfer record. Doubled it.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
"It was just a magical figure — a million pounds.
"Paris Saint-Germain spent nearly £200m on Neymar but I don’t think it has the same magical appeal that £1m did."
