Source: Telegraph
The day Trevor Francis broke football's £1m mark
But when Trevor Francis became the first British player to break the seven-figure barrier, 30 years ago on Monday, it felt like the sporting equivalent of putting a man on the Moon. Nottingham Forest supplied the payment to Birmingham City. [LNB]Their initial outlay of £950,000 spiralled to £1.18 million with the addition of VAT and other sundries, though Brian Clough always claimed that the real figure was £999,999, out of concern for his new signing's state of mind. [LNB]He was right to be worried: Francis is still remembered as the man who went for a million, yet never quite lived up to his billing. [LNB]Technically, the deal was not a world record. Two Italian strikers – Giuseppe Savoldi and Paolo Rossi – had already cleared the two billion lire mark, which equated to well in excess of £1 million. [LNB]But Serie A was not then so well known in Britain as it is today, and the reporters who gathered around the signing ceremony on Feb 9, 1979, had a breathless sense of history in the making. [LNB]Clough, typically, put his own spin on events. He turned up in a bright red sports jacket, and with a squash racket in his hand, as if to suggest that his social life was far more important than this minor business formality. [LNB]His comments were perfunctory, and not especially complimentary, in true 'Ol' Big 'Ead' fashion. Before Francis's debut, Clough instructed him to "just give the ball to John Robertson – he's a better player than you". [LNB]Francis, not surprisingly, felt bemused by his lukewarm welcome. "When I signed for Forest, they said provocatively to the press that they thought I had great potential!" he would recall. [LNB] "And they had just paid a million for me. I thought to myself, well, what can they get out of me that no one else has got?" [LNB]The question was never fully answered. Francis went some way towards repaying Forest's investment when he broke through Malmo's tenacious defence with a diving header to win the 1979 European Cup final. [LNB]But Clough and his assistant Peter Taylor could never quite agree where Francis should play: up front with his back to goal, or breaking forward from the right side of midfield. In the end, the million-pound misfit was shuffled on to Manchester City for another hefty sum. [LNB]Francis was not alone in labouring under the weight of his giant price-tag, as the accompanying list should make clear. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they sell for a record transfer fee. [LNB]Take Ian Rush's £3.2 million move to Juventus in 1987, which lasted just over a year, and spawned the deathless quote "It was like living in a foreign country." [LNB]Rush was thrown off balance by the warm embraces of the Juventus fans, and the equally intimate attentions of the local defenders. He suffered from acute homesickness, as did Paul Gascoigne at Lazio five years later. [LNB]Yet some of these players felt out of place without even leaving the country: just look at Stan Collymore in his time at Liverpool. [LNB]The ebbs and flows of football politics are reflected in the way the record has grown – stealthily at first, and then at a crazy gallop. [LNB]During the 1980s, a handful of top British players drifted to the Continent, motivated not only by the size of the salaries on offer but by Uefa's post-Heysel ban on British clubs. [LNB]Hence the elopements of Rush, David Platt, and Chris Waddle, the latter a former sausage-factory worker who became Marseille's £4.25 million man in 1989. [LNB]Two years later, the lifting of the ban spun everything on its head. In 1995, a time when only three foreigners could appear in the European Cup, Manchester United bought Andy Cole for £7 million. [LNB]Cole told an interviewer "I never thought Newcastle would sell me, at least not to another English club," but this was missing the point. It was his very Englishness that had inflated his value. [LNB]Over the last decade, United have shown that no fee is too high, as long as your big-name signings keep winning you trophies. Both Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney are reckoned to have cost more than £30 million each, when all the bonuses are totted up. And there is no sign of a slowdown just yet. [LNB]The fact that United's two purchases from Partizan Belgrade last month (Zoran Tosic and Adem Ljajic)) added up to in excess of £16 million demonstrates how insulated they are from the global economic crisis. If Francis was the man on the Moon, today's players are shooting for the stars. [LNB]Million-pound men[LNB]Trevor Francis, Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest, £1.18m, 1979Steve Daley, Wolverhampton Wanderers to Manchester City, £1.45m, 1979Andy Gray, Aston Villa to Wolverhampton Wanderers, £1.469m, 1979Bryan Robson, West Bromwich Albion to Manchester United, £1.5m, 1981Ray Wilkins, Manchester United to AC Milan, £1.5m, 1984Mark Hughes, Manchester United to Barcelona, £2.3m, 1986Ian Rush, Liverpool to Juventus, £3.2m, 1987Chris Waddle, Tottenham Hotspur to Marseille, £4.25m, 1989David Platt, Aston Villa to Bari, £5.5m, 1991Paul Gascoigne, Tottenham Hotspur to Lazio, £5.5m, 1992Andy Cole, Newcastle United to Manchester United, £7m, 1995Stan Collymore, Nottingham Forest to Liverpool, £8.5m, 1995Alan Shearer, Blackburn Rovers to Newcastle United, £15m, 1996Rio Ferdinand, Leeds United to Manchester United, £29m, 2002 [LNB]
