Trevor Francis went from teen sensation to UK’s first £1m player and scored iconic goal for Forest in European final
HE was Britain’s first £1million footballer, he scored the winner in a European Cup Final and his name is mentioned in the closing music of Only Fools And Horses.
From teenage sensation at Birmingham City to a League Cup winner as a veteran at Sheffield, Trevor Francis – who has died aged 69 – was one of English football’s shining lights.
But while the striker scored almost 300 goals in a career which spanned nearly a quarter of a century, he will always be primarily remembered for the fee Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest paid to take him across the Midlands from St Andrews in February 1979.
In an era in which players are regularly moving for 100 times the price, it is easy to forget how seismic the story was when Francis joined Clough’s champions.
The fee of £1.15m was more than double the previous British record, it was preceded by more than half a dozen transfer requests and followed by weeks of wrangling over paperwork.
But just three months after the historic deal was struck, Francis was heading in the only goal against Malmo to secure the first of Forest’s back-to-back European Cups.
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Such was his celebrity that when the classic sitcom Only Fools first aired in 1981, the music over the final credits included the immortal line: “Trevor Francis tracksuits, from a mush in Shepherd’s Bush.”
Francis, a softly-spoken Devonian who wore his fame lightly, went on to manage Sheffield Wednesday, QPR, Birmingham and Crystal Palace and was a long-serving co-commentator with Sky.
After a prolific spell at Birmingham, his career at Forest was brief but successful, yielding 37 goals in 93 matches.
After a season at Manchester City, he became one of England’s more successful exports to Serie A during the 1980s.
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Francis spent four seasons in Sampdoria and helped the Genoa club to their first Coppa Italia victory, alongside Graeme Souness, whom he would later play under for Rangers.
After helping Wednesday to win the League Cup in 1991, he took over as manager from Ron Atkinson and guided the Owls to a third-place finish in the top flight.
Francis won 52 England caps, scoring 12 times, including two at the 1982 World Cup in Spain.
And yet in later life, he often admitted that being remembered primarily for that seven-figure fee was a source of both pride and frustration.
