by There was a club singing career. The series of detective novels of charge. The clothing store in Chelsea. The board game. The range of women’s wigs. A chain of pubs. The ticket agency. Then there was football, in all its guises: player, coach, manager, chief executive, owner, consultant, pundit. Terry Venables wanted to do it all, and he did it, and it was his break.
He was an only child with a short attention span and ruthless personal ambition, yet he was a man at heart, a valuable companion and an excellent manager who built great football teams. He was a businessman and a romantic, a man steeped in football tradition who nevertheless saw the sport as a branch of the entertainment industry. He wanted to be famous and he wanted to be rich and he wanted to be loved and he wanted to win.
Related: Former England, Spurs and Barcelona manager Terry Venables dies aged 80
In all those ways, it must be said that he failed as much as he succeeded. His business ventures often failed; he was very successful in football but it didn’t matter; Its popular appeal has changed over the years. So what is left of this wonderful English life, cut short at the age of 80? History has a tendency to forget things like winning percentages and roasting tables and financial violations. What remains, in the end, is the way it made people feel.
At Queens Park Rangers he will be remembered as the man who restored pride to the small west London club. In Barcelona they remember him as the maverick foreign coach who ended a ten-year title drought and re-established them as a force. For any England fan who was alive and feeling in 1996, he was the man who orchestrated the second great summer of love, a brocade of hazy memories and stinging emotions that stirred the national soul in one way World Cup winners Alf Ramsey and Lionesses Sarina Wiegman. managed since.
His teams have always had great talent, from Paul Gascoigne to Bernd Schuster to Gary Lineker to Tony Currie. But Venables was first and foremost a team builder, a coach who could impress upon each player that they were the stars. In the age of the dictatorial manager, Venables offered an arm around the shoulder, spoke to players on his level, put his gift at the service of theirs.
Perhaps that is why Venables does not fit into any particular intellectual tradition or coaching dynasty, is not identified with a particular tactic or style. But his influence runs much deeper than many think. Aime Jacquet’s 1998 World Cup-winning France team has largely recreated the famous “Christmas Tree” formation he employed with England. His highly original training sessions were admired by the players and even copied by George Graham at Arsenal. The routines of the set piece would be composed and coached with the spontaneity of good music that would be practiced.
In Barcelona he married the intensity of England with the triumph of Catalonia, taking his squad to a grueling training camp in Andorra, burying himself in video analysis, making the high-speed pressing game that would shake a slumbering giant from his stupor and provide a blueprint for his more recently. command. Among his most ardent students was a La Masia midfielder named Josep Guardiola, whose arrival at Venables was the catalyst for a lifelong interest in English football.
Ten years later, at a time when the English game was still in the grip of thinking about the dominant, alpha-male idiot, Venables trusted an eccentric Aston Villa defender named Gareth Southgate. And in many ways the winding thread that took Southgate to the top of English football began with Venables, where he saw the way a skilled international coach could harness patriotism and loyalty to create a team greater than the sum of its parts.
For all that, Venables was not highly regarded in his own time. Even with England’s Euro 96 success, the nation’s love for him was always somehow qualified and conditioned. This partly reflects England’s instinctive football distrust of new ideas, its uneasy relationship with celebrity, its suspicion of the kind of relentless self-belief that Venables embodied. The Football Association didn’t really want him as England manager, tried to humiliate him in the job and effectively forced him out.
Perhaps that is why the highlight of Venables’ coaching career was his swansong as well. He was only 53 when he left the England job but managed to achieve precious little afterwards. In 1998 the allegations of financial irregularities which had dogged him for many years ended with 19 charges of serious misconduct and a seven-year ban from being a company director. Unrelenting spells with Australia, Crystal Palace, Middlesbrough and Leeds, a rude takeover of Portsmouth, a stretch on the Costa Blanca: in the end, none of this needs more than a footnote.
Related: Terry Venables, the coach who saved English football from insularity
Of course, Tottenham were there too. In a way, those six turbulent years at his youth club between 1987 and 1993 embodied the paradox of Venables, the businessman and the romantic, the messiah and the troublemaker. Tottenham had all of Venables’ ambitions: a back-to-back football and a seat on the board, a little boy’s playground where he could run amok on the training ground and the balance sheet. He rescued the club from bankruptcy, led the team to the 1991 FA Cup, fell out significantly with his takeover partner, Alan Sugar, left under a cloud of allegations of financial mismanagement and scorched bridges. He wanted to do it all, and he left with nothing.
Three decades later, the obsession with money affairs Venables feels quaint in an age of state power, public investment funds and invisible billionaires. Yes, he bit off more than he could swallow. Yes, he made poor decisions, trusted the wrong people, greatly affected his own personal magnetism. Yes, it can be overwhelming at times, lured by a quick buck and a quick headline. No, he probably spread himself over too many roles to be really good at any of them: player, coach, executive, celebrity.
But at the heart of his many faults was a pure and simple vision: a vision of football as a single organic entity, from the muddy turf to the boardroom, run by people who loved football and were interested in its future, inspired by an entrepreneurial spirit. and industrial tanks of self-belief. Where footballers could really do it. It was a vision that died long before it did.
