UK Edition
The pioneer black manager who became Don Revie's 'superspy'
When he managed Rochdale back in the early Sixties, Tony Collins earned £1,500 a year. Fifty-four years on, as he sits reminiscing in a care home in Manchester, there are two managers in the very city where he is speaking who each earn £10 million a year. But he is not remotely resentful.
“I don’t begrudge them getting good money,” he says. “Because we were exploited. Oh dear, were we exploited. When I was a player, if Stan Matthews was in town, you could guarantee the gates would be locked. The crowds flocked to see him. Or Tom Finney, or Wilfy Mannion. What players they were. Artists, entertainers. But they never got the money.”
Things might have changed financially from his day, but one thing has not: ethnic minority managers remain a scandalous rarity. In that respect, Collins was a pioneer. The assumption has long been that Keith Alexander was the first black or mixed-race manager in the Football League when he took charge of Lincoln City in 1993.
The truth is Collins had done it three decades earlier when he managed Rochdale for five seasons, steering the club to the most significant point in their history, when they reached the League Cup final in 1962. His team remain one of only two fourth-tier sides ever to contest a cup final (they lost 4-0 to Norwich over two legs). And he insists he never faced any sort of barrier – spoken or unspoken – to his progress.
“Prejudice? I didn’t have time to worry about that. I was working too hard,” he says. “I don’t think it held me back. I worked with some of the best people in the game. Big Ron [Atkinson], Don Revie, Jock Stein they all gave me jobs. Prejudice? No. Nothing. Nothing at all.”
Collins’s story, told in a new book co-authored by his daughter Sarita, is an extraordinary one. He was born in Kensington during the general strike in 1926, his 17-year-old mother refusing to identify his father on his birth certificate. One thing was immediately obvious, however: his dad was black. Mixed-race children were an unusual sight in London in the 1920s. But his mother’s parents adopted him and brought him up in the then tough environs of the Portobello Road.
He excelled at football at school. A quick, skilful winger, he was due to sign for Brentford but wartime duty intervened. He served three years in Italy and when he was demobbed some fellow soldiers who had seen him play in Army fixtures wrote to their hometown club of Sheffield Wednesday demanding he be signed. In 1947 he was picked up by the Hillsborough club, his every mention in newspaper match reports collected by the man he called dad, but who was actually his grandfather.
“My dad used to go out to the library and cut the pieces out the paper,” he recalls of the archive of yellowing press clippings his daughter has spread across his bed ahead of this interview.
One of them refers to a visit to watch him play in 1954 by the then England manager, Walter Winterbottom, who was drawn by reports of the quicksilver winger who was by then at Watford. But he never got a call-up. Sarita suggests there may have been unspoken prejudice involved in the decision. Her father prefers to believe it was the England manager’s myopia.
“After the game my manager said to him: ‘What did you think?’ He said in that snooty way he had: ‘He’s got a lot to learn’. And my manager said: ‘Yeah Walter, so have you’. We used to call him Walter Shufflebottom.”
Without an international call-up, his playing career ended at Rochdale, where he found himself put in charge of team matters almost accidentally
“The manager was going to Blackburn and all the players said to me I should apply. But I’d missed the cut-off date. Before he left, the manager said I should put a back-dated application in. Next thing I know I was down at the chairman’s office and within half an hour I had the job.”
It might be thought the very fact he got the position was evidence of the game’s openness to minorities. But Sarita explains, out of her father’s hearing, that she has a file of 13 job applications he had made during his time at Rochdale which were unearthed by the National Football Museum. There he was, having done the impossible and taken a fourth-tier club to a cup final, yet he received not one reply to any of them. Whether that was because of institutional racism or institutional incompetence, it is impossible to say. And the fiercely proud Collins, his daughter says, would prefer not to find excuses.
“People who knew what they were talking about thought I was doing something right,” he says. “That’s good enough for me.”
Whatever the cause of his stalled career, after five years he had tired of trying to spin a silk purse from an impoverished sow’s ear and resigned as Rochdale boss.
“It was a very, very difficult job,” he says. “I never had a moment off. Every night I was watching a game. I’d go and watch reserves play, hoping there was someone there I might get on the cheap. The thing I most remember my wife saying was: ‘You’re a bit late tonight’.”
After he left Spotland he remained employed in the game for another 30 years, first as assistant manager at Bristol City, then as Don Revie’s chief scout at Leeds, charged not only with finding new talent, but with analysing the opposition. When Revie took up the England job, he employed Collins to help him compile the dossiers he would hand to players.
“Before a game with Scotland, one of them left his in the lobby of the hotel. A kid picked it up and leaked it to the Scottish press,” he recalls.
The result was a double-page spread in the Daily Record lamenting the fact Scotland did not have the same resources as their opponents. “How come we don’t have spies like this?” read the headline.
And Collins was soon dubbed “Football’s Superspy”, the James Bond of the game, renowned for the manner in which he surreptitiously compiled information. It was a reputation that saw him recruited in the 1980s by Ron Atkinson as chief scout at Manchester United.
“Ron sent me to Holland once, told me to go to check out this young centre-back. When I came back, he said: ‘How’d it go, Tone?’ I said: ‘He’s bang average, but that right-back is something special. Turned out we were talking about the same player: Ruud Gullit was playing full-back that night. What a player. Shame we never signed him.”
When Alex Ferguson arrived at Old Trafford, Collins stayed in his job for a couple of years, bringing Lee Sharpe to the club, before he was fired. “It’s what you expect when a new manager comes in, he wants his own people. But I didn’t like what he said. He claimed the scouting system was rubbish. Really? Mark Hughes, Norman Whiteside, Paul McGrath, Lee Sharpe: was that rubbish?”
Collins eventually retired from a position as part-time scout at Leeds United just 13 years ago, at the age of 77. And he still loves the game, particularly watching the modern Arsenal play. “I like the way they pass the ball, ping, ping, ping,” he says. “That’s nice.”
And he smiles, delighted that whatever the monetary inflation, the game’s true values remain intact.
‘Tony Collins: Football Masterspy’ by Quentin Cope and Sarita Collins is available from bookguild.co.uk