Big Interview: The football life of Brian Horton

Only Sir Alex Ferguson and Graham Turner can claim to have been involved in more than the 2,118 matches Horton was as a player, manager and coach.

Yet 55 years ago, the prospect of even experiencing one looked remote when Horton sat crying on the back of a bus, on route to his home, in Chadsmoor, Cannock, having just been told Walsall would not be offering him a contract. He was 17.

“I thought that was it,” he says. “The end of the world. I had to get three buses back from Fellows Park and I didn’t stop crying all the way home.

“I just hadn’t seen it coming. I’d been an apprentice for two seasons and I’d broken into the reserves the previous year. Not many other lads had. I thought I was OK.

“But then the manager, Ray Shaw, told me they would not be keeping me on. I didn’t know where I was going to go from there. I thought that might be it for me and professional football.”

It wasn’t, of course. After four years in non-league with Hednesford, Horton was offered a route into the professional game with Port Vale and went on to play more than 700 matches, captaining Brighton and Luton through some of the most memorable periods in their history, before moving into management.

One of only 31 managers in British football to take charge of more than 1,000 matches, Horton’s most recent job was as director of football at Swindon Town in 2018. The past two years, by far his longest break from the game in more than half a century, have afforded time to put his memories down on paper and the result is an autobiography, A Life in Football. It is an apt title.

“The book has given me something to do and it has brought back a lot of memories,” he says. “What has given me the greatest satisfaction is being released from Walsall at 17 and to do all that. To do over 1,000 games as a manager, that is special because so few have achieved it.”

Horton has lived in Manchester since the early 1990s but has never lost his accent or forgotten his roots. When we meet in Cannock, he is preparing to meet up with school friends with whom he has stayed in regular contact.

The son of a miner, Horton’s memories are of endless childhood football matches, punctuated by trips to Molineux to watch the great Wolves team of the 1950s.

“They were my team,” he says. “My dad used to sit me on a wall behind the goal and we’d watch the likes of Peter Broadbent and Ron Flowers, my hero.

“Wolves were the top side in the country. The game against Honved had been one of the first to use a white ball.

“So naturally I wanted a white ball. My dad did a double shift down the pit to buy it. When I wanted new boots, he’d do the same.

“If Wolves were away, where we lived you could go to Villa, Birmingham, West Brom or Walsall. We’d choose the best game.”

After the pain of being released by Walsall, it was in the community Horton found his feet, going to work on a building site and playing for Hednesford.

“I learned how to be a man at Hednesford, playing in a man’s league,” he says. “Dick Neal was the manager who took me there and he was then replaced by another former professional, Granville Palin.

“They were both winners and that’s what we were, a hard side to play against. The West Midlands League was a tough league at the time with clubs like Stourbridge, Tamworth and Kidderminster. We’d get crowds of more than 2,000 for some games at the Cross Keys.

“I enjoyed the camaraderie on the building site too. I grew fitter and got stronger.

“I was earning decent money when adding in the football too and when Port Vale offered me the chance to go full-time my pay was almost cut in half. But I wanted to be a footballer. I couldn’t turn it down.”

The circumstances of Horton’s move to Vale have become legendary, their manager Gordon Lee always claiming he had signed him for the price of a pint of shandy. The truth is a little more nuanced.

“Gordon had come to watch me play for Hednesford at Brierley Hill in midweek and the story is he sought out our secretary and bought him a price of shandy while they started to talk,” Horton explains.

“Vale had no money to pay a transfer fee so that’s where the legend comes from.

“But the other part of the deal was that Vale went back to Hednesford the following season to play a friendly, from which Hednesford took all the gate receipts. So the club ended up getting a bit more than just a pint of shandy.”

Horton, a tireless and influential midfielder, spent six years at Vale before joining Brighton, where he helped the club win two promotions to reach the First Division for the first time in their history.

Next came Luton, where he was part of their remarkable escape from relegation in 1983, the first player to be greeted by David Pleat during the manager’s iconic dance across the pitch following the final day win at Manchester City. Pleat, who has written the book’s foreword, describes Horton as a “diamond of a man” and “the most influential person I have had the pleasure to be associated with in the game.”

His managerial career saw him win promotion with Hull and included spells with Oxford, Huddersfield, Brighton, Vale, Macclesfield and most memorably Manchester City, whom he managed for two years in the Premier League during a tumultuous period in the club’s history in the early 90s.

Later years saw Horton work alongside Phil Brown at Hull, Preston, Southend and Swindon. There are few in the sport he doesn’t know and while there have been ups and downs along the way, the love for the game established in childhood has never waned. At one point he admits to having been “starstruck” during a recent meeting with Pep Guardiola.

“I met him at a dinner,” he says. “It was my 70th birthday and he came over and said happy birthday. I had never met him before but he just came over to say that.

“We all have people we look up to. Was I a little starstruck? Absolutely.”

As a man who worked in the game at every level, Horton is understandably concerned about the future as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic begins to become clearer and several clubs face a fight for survival.

“These are worrying times,” he says. “We’ve seen Bury go, Southend, my old club, not paying players. Wigan in trouble.

“The structure of our league is the envy of the world and if we don’t start looking after some of these teams they are going to go. Some of that money at the top of the game needs to come down. It needs to be shared out.

“People always ask me if I’m jealous of the money players and managers earn now and I’m not. Those at the top, they’ve earned it.

“But there has to be a rationale. You’ve got players now on a million a month. That would run Macclesfield Town for a year.

“Clubs get about £100m in the Premier League now. Can’t they take a little less? Pay the players a little less? It’s daft and it will be the game that suffers.”

Horton turns 72 next February and though a return might be unlikely at this stage he would never entirely rule out a return.

“Yeah, I’d go back in,” he says. “But if it is over than I’ve had 55 years in the game and I’ve got no regrets.

“You miss the camaraderie, the dressing room. I loved that banter. The thing about management is on a Saturday it is euphoria if you’ve won but if you’ve lost you might have a row. That is how I was.

“I wanted to win. If I didn’t win I’d be crying. My dad used to call me a terrible loser. But I am! That is what I was like as a player and a manager. But I never took it home.

“You have to live and breathe it. There is no other way. You can’t think: ‘Oh, I won’t go and watch that player’ or ‘I’ll have an afternoon off’. It is 24/7. But it has brought me a great life for my family and I wouldn’t change a thing. I’ve had a wonderful career.”