The Day Football Crossed To Business

This month hundreds of the highest-paid players on the planet will run out onto the lush, green pitches of the English Premier League earning millions. In this money-mad game, many of these stars will earn more than £300,000 a week. Once upon a time it was £20 and that was your lot. An African-based World Cup winner fought to end this.

- Chris Bishop

The three hours I spent interviewing Terry Paine were steeped in the blood and sweat of the game. They were the kind of conversations rare in football these days – like the benefits of learning ball control with a tennis ball on the streets. It was football with laughter – full of the human frailties exposed by the beautiful game; rather than the vogue, yet false, notion of it as a cross between an academic subject and a computer game.

Paine is the sort of player that England used to be famous for: passionate about the game, down-to-earth, with that openness and innate decency born of growing up in a small town – Winchester, just north of Southampton in Hampshire. It is only that steely glint in his piercing blue eyes that reminds you that you wouldn’t stand a chance in a rough 50/50 tackle.

The bright sunshine on this winter morning, at a table outside an airy Rivonia café in Johannesburg, contrasts with a journey back to the dark days of vicious tackles on mud heaps amid the smokestacks and factories of industrial England. This is where Paine honed his craft as one of the fastest, toughest, trickiest and most enduring wingers England ever produced. He played 19 times for England, scoring seven goals, remarkably as a second division player. Paine won a World Cup in 1966, earned an MBE from the Queen and scores of scars along the way.

“In those days any tackle below the neck was allowed,” he chuckles. “But I never got seriously injured because I could jump.”

Paine’s trade as a professional footballer built a career that straddles the foggy days of bleak, windswept, terraces, where the fans had cigarettes in their hands instead of cell phones, to the glossy, money mad, 21st century game. He played 713 games for Southampton, the club where he began as a wide-eyed teenager, scoring 160 goals in 18 years.