The last time Viv Anderson played in a football match, he accidentally broke a man’s nose. “I said, ‘That’s me finished,’” he says. “I left very quickly after that.” After this amateur match, five years ago, in which he participated as a favour to a friend, he decided he wouldn’t step on to the field again. In some ways, it was a fitting end to the playing days of one of England’s best full-backs, a man who thinks that today’s football is lacking the rough and tumble of yesteryear. In other ways, it is inconsistent with a player who cites “team bonding” as the thing he misses most about professional football.
Basking in the sun on a hot summer’s day, 66-year-old Anderson is the picture of serenity. He greets me with a firm handshake. He has a habit of ending sentences abruptly, pursing his lips as if swallowing the depth of his feeling, although when he is animated, he bangs both hands on the table to make his point. “My memory for detail is not the best in the business,” he wrote in his 2010 autobiography, First Among Unequals. But today, the memories he shares are profound. “The easiest part is breaking through,” he says at one point. “The hardest part is staying.”
In 1978, Anderson made history as the first Black footballer to play for the England men’s senior team. Of the other Black players who followed in his wake in the late 70s and early 80s, with the exception of John Barnes, he was by far the longest-serving.
In a new documentary, Local Heroes, there is footage of him being interviewed about his selection. He is a lanky 22-year-old with an afro and a soft voice. In typically mellow fashion, he says that being picked is “tremendous”. This was an era when it was still rare to see Black players on the field in Britain – Anderson’s only real contemporaries, he says, were Clyde Best, Bob Hazell, Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis.
Even so, a few days before his first match, the Observer ran with the headline “Black is bountiful”, and concluded: “The Black revolution in English football isn’t coming. It is here.” These were prescient words; the current England men’s squad has nine Black or mixed-Black players, and more than 100 Black men have played for England since Anderson first took to the pitch (though Black women remain woefully underrepresented).
On the day of his first England match, Anderson received personal telegrams from Elton John and the Queen. “They’ll be somewhere in a bag in the garage,” he chuckles. He doesn’t remember exactly what they said, but he appreciated the notes because he was nervous. It was a low-stakes friendly against Czechoslovakia, but conditions were less than ideal – it was an icy day at Wembley in late November.
“It wouldn’t be played today,” says Anderson, shaking his head. Half the pitch was frozen solid while the other half was still soft, meaning the teams had to change in and out of studs at half-time. “I was thinking, ‘We’ve got to go back to basics. You’ve got to hit the first header, first tackle. The things you’ve been doing that got you here in the first place.’ It was all about making sure I didn’t make a fool of myself,” he says. He got in an early tackle, which calmed his nerves, and he enjoyed the second half of the match far more than the first.
After putting in a strong performance for the 1-0 win (the Guardian said at the time that it would assure him “an international career of some length”), his dad, Audley, who was in the crowd of 92,000, took him home. “He was a very quiet man,” says Anderson. “But I know he was very proud. I could tell from his expression.”
Anderson’s parents had come to the UK from Kingston, Jamaica in the 1950s, as part of the Windrush generation. Like many in that era, they were enticed by the promise of a new life abroad and willing to make sacrifices for it. His father moved over first; his mum, Myrtle, followed shortly afterwards. He began working in security; she had been a teacher in Jamaica but was told her qualifications were not valid in England. Instead, she became a dinner lady, then an NHS nurse. The couple settled near to family in the centre of Nottingham, later moving to the Clifton council estate. Anderson was born in 1956. His younger brother, Donald, came two years later.
He describes a generally happy childhood with parents who were calm in nature, though his dad was away a great deal, working. Anderson played a lot of football on the streets and was well liked at school, thanks to his athletic prowess, although not particularly academic – leaving with, he thinks, just three CSEs (certificates of secondary education). Although there was a race riot in Nottingham in 1958, he has no memory of his family being affected by it, nor did he experience much in the way of racism as a child.
The biggest upset to the equilibrium of his youth came from his brother Donald’s polio diagnosis when Anderson was five. “We took our turns looking after him because Mum was working,” says Anderson. “My brother went to different schools because he wasn’t able-bodied. It was a full-on thing for the family.” In his autobiography he calls the virus a “scourge” and a “cruel suffering” on his brother and parents. Donald, who still lives in Nottingham, later became a passionate football supporter, often travelling to see Anderson play. “He was just a mad Manchester United fan. So, when I finally went to Manchester United, he got the season tickets and all sorts of things,” says Anderson.
Anderson was discovered as a schoolboy playing on the white sands of Bridlington Beach. The family, who didn’t have a lot of money, would spend part of their summer holidays at the seaside, bringing deckchairs and sandwiches with them for a “proper day out”. Anderson, aged about 14, was playing alone with a ball when a scout approached him and asked if he would like to do a trial for Sheffield United. “I must have had some sort of talent that people saw from an early age,” says Anderson. “A little Black skinny kid from Nottingham.”
From those trials, he was noticed by Manchester United and spent a glorious year travelling back and forth from Nottingham to Old Trafford, with the hopes of being selected to join the team as an apprentice. His eventual rejection was the first heartbreak of his life. “I was very disappointed,” he says. “I cried a little bit in my room, probably.” But looking back, Anderson says, he can see that the young men he was playing with were the best in the country. “You’ve got to be as good as them, or even better. Clearly, I wasn’t.”
He started to understand that being a Black man in England meant working harder than everyone else. He pulled up his socks, decided to be practical and stoic, like his parents, and looked for a job – settling on becoming a silk-screen printer and leaving his football dreams behind.
Three weeks later, Anderson was given an apprenticeship at Nottingham Forest, and made his debut on the youth team at 17. He worked hard, deciding early on that he wanted to “make the A team”. Brian Clough, who joined Forest as a manager in 1975, saw his talent and made him a regular.
With the brash and brilliant Clough at the helm, Forest, who had been languishing in the Second Division for much of the 1970s, conquered the top-flight First Division league in 1978, then won the European Cup [the precursor to today’s Champions League] two years on the trot (the winning goal in the 1979 final was scored by Trevor Francis, who passed away yesterday) – one of the greatest underdog stories of modern English football.
When Anderson made his debut for England, Clough was cautiously proud, telling the papers that Anderson deserved the recognition, but also not to let the selection go to his head. The year before, in 1977, Clough had sponsored the launch of the Anti-Nazi League, a campaign that opposed the growing threat of the National Front. During his tenure at Forest, Clough started or boosted the careers of a fair number of Black players (though in more recent years he has been criticised for his homophobic treatment of Justin Fashanu).
It was Clough who took 19-year-old Anderson aside after he had been pelted with bananas and other fruit during a warm-up against Carlisle in the mid-1970s. Racism in football from fans in the 70s and 80s was rife, and this wasn’t the first time he had been verbally or physically attacked, but it was the most memorable. When he complained, Clough told him to “go back out there and get me two pears and a banana,” and, moreover, to focus on his game. “He said, ‘You let people like that dictate to you, you’re not going to make it as a footballer. We’re going to pick somebody else.’ So at that point, I’m going, ‘Well, the only thing I want to do is be a footballer. I’m not going to let these people or anybody derail that,’” Anderson says. “I made a conscious effort to just dismiss it and get on with it. There wasn’t an alternative. You couldn’t walk off because it wasn’t done.”
Unlike with contemporary Black footballers, Anderson is struck by how few people he was able to tell who might care. He remembers sharing a room with Laurie Cunningham when they were both called up for England. “You’d think it would be the first thing we’d talk about – ‘What was it like for you?’” he laughs. “But no. He’d say, ‘Have you seen this car I’m buying?’ You never talked about it, you just got on with it.” It wasn’t, he adds, all “doom and gloom” for the Black players at the time. “It wasn’t nice, but it was in one ear, out the other.” They were too busy, mostly, having a good time and living out their dreams.
As a former ambassador for Kick It Out, the anti-discrimination initiative, he’s been pleased to see the changes over the years. “It’s not like now, with the Marcus Rashfords and the Sterlings and all the other players. They’ve got a voice. Governments change policies on the strength of what they’ve got to say,” he says. “I didn’t do an interview about being racially abused. And suddenly, since I’ve finished, people have asked, ‘What was it like in your time?’”
After he left Forest in 1984, Anderson went on to have generally illustrious spells at Arsenal, Manchester United (where he was Alex Ferguson’s first signing), Sheffield Wednesday and finally Middlesbrough as a player-coach. It was there he played the last matches of his career, pushing 40, and sensing his body was ready to give up.
Retirement from football for Anderson meant joining a concierge service and then founding a company that helps to look after former professional sportspeople, PlayOnPro. He feels lucky, he says, because the stats for ex-footballers around suicide, bankruptcy, divorce and even imprisonment are scary. “We try and give them the chance to fill the void from when they were playing,” he says. “You’ve got to give them a reason to get up in the morning.”
In recent years, he’s also had the space to focus more on his family. He now lives a quiet life in a leafy part of Manchester with his long-term partner, Nicole, and his two youngest children, daughter Ruby, 12, and son Freddie, 16. His eldest son, Charlie, is 31.
“I’m a taxi driver. I’m ferrying them all over the place,” he jokes. “I’ve got a lot more time than when I was involved in playing. Because you’ve got to make sure you get all the rest for the games on the Saturday, so your partner or your wife ends up doing all that stuff.”
He wants to pass this discipline on to his kids, but he also expects them to keep up their studies in a way he didn’t. Ruby, he says, is not interested in football (Anderson is not a particular fan of the women’s game, saying that he “wouldn’t watch 90 minutes, but I’d watch bits”). Charlie was once a semi-professional footballer and now works as a football agent. In 2022 Charlie signed his brother Freddie, who had been part of Manchester City’s academy since he was six and recently joined Stoke City.
“He’s not made it yet,” says Anderson of Freddie. “Lots of things can happen in that short space of time. Injuries can appear, the manager doesn’t like him, form – of all the people who play football in the UK, there’s only 4% who ever make it. Are the rewards good? Yes. But, you know, that’s why the GCSEs are more important; there’s got to be something to fall back on.”
While Anderson is pragmatic about Freddie’s chances, he speaks warmly about the fact that both his sons have taken on elements of his playing style and outlook. “They run very similar to me. They both got my physique. You can see some similarities,” he says. “It’s this desire to be a footballer.”
His legacy then, is carried on through his children. But, I ask, is it important for him to be recognised as the first Black player for England? There have been debates about which men should carry that crown; Jack Leslie was the first Black player to receive an England call-up in 1925, John Charles played for England Under-18s in 1963, Benjamin Odeje played for the England schoolboy squad in 1971, Laurie Cunningham played Under-21s in 1977, and Paul Reaney, who is of mixed race, is regarded as the first BAME England men’s senior team player, having made his debut in 1968.
“It’s not just about being the first Black player. But it’s all the rest of it, it goes together,” Anderson says, calling the debates a distraction. “I don’t want them to talk about, ‘Oh, Viv Anderson was the first Black footballer who played for England.’ I just want them to say, ‘Viv Anderson was a really good footballer.’”
• Local Heroes is available now on digital, DVD and Blu-ray
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