No Room at the Top Table for Football’s Benevolent Former Binman

It’s hard to imagine another Neville Southall in football today. In his 2012 book, the Binman Chronicles, we meet an honest, unvarnished man, all heart, and rough edges.

I reviewed the book with my co-host Al for our podcast, The Ademola Bookmen Podcast. It’s the 8th book we’ve done to date and certainly one of the better ones.

As someone whose football consciousness started around the mid-90s, I was familiar with later Southall; the heavy-set Southall, the one who looked like he was the last survivor from a bygone era of the football of handlebar moustaches and shorts that were barely perceptible to the human eye. And in many respects, he was that era’s last survivor, at least as a player.

But that is only one of the things that makes Southall an outlier.

With 751 games under his belt, there is not a single Everton player who has come within 200 appearances of his record for the club. He managed that in a 17-year period that included two league championships, two FA Cups, and a European Cup-Winners Cup. And yet when he left the club, he did so under a cloud; sidelined by Joe Royle, he ended up going down two divisions to Southend.

The episode is, well, very-Neville Southall. Royle didn’t want him to leave shortly before when Chelsea came in for him. Frustrated by his lack of playing time, Southall just said “Fuck it, I’m off”, and he left for the first team he could as soon as Royle agreed to let him go. No Chelsea, fine; Southend is close enough, isn’t it?

Southall says in his book that, with the exception of Mike Walker and the Welsh FA, there was no one in football he didn’t like. Despite the fact that Royle ended his Everton career, Southall even liked him, calling in to radio phone-ins to defend Royle’s record as manager.

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop Royle, himself an Everton playing legend, from later devoting an entire chapter in his book to attacking Southall. The result, according to Southall, is that the two Everton giants end up sitting awkwardly at gala dinners, each of them looking the other way, with little to say to each other.

Southall’s book itself starts slowly, as so many football autobiographies do. In the early chapters, I feared the worst. But as I laboured through descriptions of games that were before my time, and references to players I hadn’t heard of, I couldn’t help but fall for Southall. What an unusual chap he is. An uncut diamond; a rough, gem of a man.

Southall’s first stint in English football was with Bury, where he was voted player of the year. His performances there bought him his ticket to the big leagues, to Everton and the First Division. But being Southall, he decided he’d just keep on living in Bury, because he and his wife liked it there.

He was initially able to cadge a lift off his new manager, Howard Kendall, who was commuting from Blackburn. He eventually realised that getting your manager to go miles out of his way to bring you to and from training wasn’t the done thing. Because he couldn’t drive, this meant public transport.

From the old Everton training ground, Bellefield, this was a bus to the local train station, a train to Liverpool, another to Manchester, and a third to Bury before another bus home. Ridiculous and unconventional. Classic Southall.

And it wasn’t youthful naivety either, when he left Everton almost two decades later to wander through the football wilderness, he went back to 4- and 5-hour commutes, albeit by this time he had learned to drive.

One of the most telling Southall stories was when he got a call from Alex Ferguson in the late '80s, as Everton’s heydays were getting smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. Thinking it was his former team-mate Andy Gray having him on, he told Ferguson to fuck off and hung up.

When Ferguson called back, he realised it was a tap-up, not a wind-up. He told Ferguson to speak to his agent, but the exchange appears to have been enough to give Fergie second thoughts. He bought Schmeichel instead.

I’m sure Ferguson has no regrets. And maybe Southall doesn’t either, he doesn’t seem the sort. But I feel some regrets on his behalf.

That opportunity passed him by and although he beat Ferguson and Schmeichel a few years later in the ‘95 FA Cup Final, it was an up in a career that ended mostly with downs. By 1992, Everton were finishing 12th, the next year it was 13th, and by the time Southall was being frozen out, they were surviving in the Premier League just by the hairs on their chinny, chin, chins.

Everton’s problem was one of timing. They’d been good in the 80s, great even. The Heysel ban meant they missed out on Europe for the most part. The team broke up, with some going abroad for European football.

By the time the '90s rolled around and money started raining from the Sky, other teams were talking sports science while Everton were arguing with each other over Chinese takeaways, firing footballs at the faces of the YTS lads, and waiting for their 100-year-old Chairman John Moores to loosen the drawstrings on his penny purse.

The twilight of Southall’s career, he was a football nomad, to use his own description. Having been Everton’s longest-serving player, for his last years, he jumped from club to club: Southend, Stoke, Torquay.

After one more appearance in the Premier League for Bradford, after which he was widely berated for his weight, he turned to coaching, both as a goalkeeping coach with teams like Huddersfield, and then as a manager with much smaller teams, like Dover Athletic, if you’ve ever heard of them.

It was a strange end to a decorated career and for a man who appears to have been widely accepted to have been the best goalkeeper of his time.

Before he ever made it in England, he travelled to Germany with his local team in Wales. He was offered a place in the Dusseldorf academy but turned it down, saying he “couldn’t be arsed”. One can’t help but think that it was this side of Southall that sent his career in the direction it went in the end.

He applied twice for the position of Wales first team coach and, despite being told he did the best interview the second time around, he learned on the radio that his old team-mate, Mark Hughes, got the job.

He liked everyone in football, but it seems that everyone in football did not like him.

In our 8th episode, we reviewed Peter Crouch’s How to be a Footballer. The book itself is okay. The world Crouch describes – one of sleeve tattoos, camouflage Bentleys, and £800 Kashmir jumpers – is so far from the world described by Southall that I find it difficult to reconcile the two. The fact that their playing careers briefly overlapped makes it all the more mind-boggling.

Crouch describes a profession that is shallow, vapid, and ultimately just dumb. And although Southall appears to have been dismissed by people in football as such, he is anything but dumb.

If anything, Southall seems to be an oddity in football for the very fact that he is capable of thinking about things other than matches and money. He’s been in the news recently for engaging people on Twitter on issues he admits that he doesn’t understand, asking trans teenagers to explain things in a way that is open-minded and every bit as out of place on social media as he is in the world of football. In this, Southall is the anti-Barton. Sadly, in the Bizarro World of the internet, it’s the Bartons who get the attention.

Even Crouch, as likeable as he is, has managed to forge a stellar post-football career by leaning into his role as master of ceremonies of the bantz parade. Southall may have taken to the training pitch on a pre-season tour of Sweden in nothing other than his gloves and boots, but he was no bantz man.

He says one of the reasons he wrote his book was to show people that he wasn’t mad or stupid. He says he hoped that it might even open doors back into the game for him. But in the years since, I don’t think it did.

He remains a playing legend, but legends fade. Banished from the world of football, he ended up training underprivileged kids, eventually setting up a consultancy that aims to use football as a way of providing opportunities for people who have struggled in formal education. Happily, he says he finds joy in what he does today but it’s clear that he misses football. At least the game’s loss is to the benefit of others who are much more in need of help.

Southall is undoubtedly one of football’s good guys. Sadly, football doesn’t seem to have a place for him anymore, other than at gala dinners awkwardly ignoring Joe Royle.

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