Fotherby on Tour: Trevor Steven
It's easy to understand from the adjectives — diligent, hard-working, cultured-but-disciplined — why Trevor Steven appealed to Howard Wilkinson. Besides, he already had Steve Hodge, so might as well collect another midfielder Diego Maradona had run rings around in 1986.
Transfers are one of modern football's obsessions, because they represent football without its messy reality: why watch some donkey playing for your team, when you can imagine the difference being made by a prime stallion? The best players are usually out of reach for all but the richest clubs, but in the 1990s Leeds United's managing director, Bill Fotherby, had his own ideas about the word 'unattainable'.
As the Peacocks returned from Division Two to Europe with one of the best teams in our history, Fotherby's pursuit of top transfer targets created a shadow team of world stars fans could keep in the back of their minds while watching, say, Carlton Palmer instead.
For the next few weeks, we're going to follow Fotherby on his travels around Europe, chasing the biggest and best transfers, wondering how close he got to his targets, who we signed instead, and what might have been if Bill's will could have forced history into being just a tiny bit different.
In case you missed part one, that was:
Diego Maradona ⭑ Pairing England's most-hated footballer with England's most-hated football club would have sunk the likes of Emlyn Hughes into tabloid column apoplexy for months. Which would have been fantastic.
Who was signing?
Until 1995 no British player cost more than Trevor Steven, who was sold from Rangers to Marseille in summer 1991 for the same £5.5m fee that took David Platt to Bari around the same time and Paul Gascoigne to Lazio a year later. He was a cultured and skilful England international who had won two league titles with each of Everton and Rangers, as well as European and domestic cups, and played at the 1986 and 1990 World Cups. He just wasn't all that exciting.
A lot of this was simply his name: Trevor Steven. He wasn't only in a world where his competition for England's wing had an outrageous name to match his circus skills, Chris Waddle, but where the squad also contained the Gary Stevens he'd played with at Everton and Rangers, and another Gary Stevens, who played for Spurs. The two Stevens and Steven tended to blend and merge, and being Trevor not Gary was not enough to distinguish him.
Then there was the way he played. He was a brilliant player, used out wide by Everton but in central midfield for Marseille alongside Didier Deschamps; you could say he was world class and get little argument. But as well as skilful, he was diligent and hard-working, always willing to defend, with an attacking game that didn't depend on beating players for fun but on making space to put in a cross. These crosses were usually superb, feeding Andy Gray, Gary Lineker or Jean-Pierre Papin, but in the 1980s when flair was everywhere except the England team, fans were longing to see John Barnes repeating his wing-wizardry from the Maracanã, and instead they kept getting a 'right-sided midfielder' who would help out his full-back.
To England fans, Trevor Steven's presence in the team was taken as a sign that someone more exciting was either injured (Gazza) or left out (Waddle, Barnes), which was unfair, but what can you do? Gazza — Waddle — Barnes. Thrilling. Trevor Steven? People knew people called Trevor and Steven, so he could hardly be exciting. He was just another Neil Webb to throw on the pile. So it was to his clubs that Steven showed his Tricky Trev best, and where he was appreciated most, Everton fans loving him, Rangers seeing him as a naturally great addition to their already great team. Marseille had not paid all that money without a damn good reason.
How close did we get?
It's easy to understand from the adjectives — diligent, hard-working, cultured-but-disciplined — why Trevor Steven appealed to Howard Wilkinson. Besides, he already had Steve Hodge, so might as well collect another midfielder Diego Maradona had run rings around in 1986. And in Marseille, Steven had been learning French, so he might be able to talk some sense into Eric Cantona.
The situation at Marseille in summer 1992 was important, as their owner Bernie Tapie — who could even teach Bill Fotherby a thing or two about flamboyance — had been trying to offload Steven ever since Sparta Prague had knocked his club out of the European Cup and knocked millions out of his budget. Opportunity, meet need, and meet Wilko, whose inspirational captain Gordon Strachan was a trophy and World Cup drenched right-sided midfielder whose influence seemed about to reduce as his back pain increased. Steven might not have all the skills and leadership that Strachan had displayed as he helped rebuild Leeds United through the previous three seasons, but Strachan hadn't been showing those attributes either when Alex Ferguson was throwing him on the scrapheap at Old Trafford in 1989. Leeds were about to go into the Champions League and Steven was a very attractive and Europe-ready replacement for Strachan, up for sale on apparently reasonable terms.
It's not clear whether Fotherby and Tapie ever met on this deal, as Howard Wilkinson seemed to be handling things for Leeds. Someone at some point must have brought up the subject of Steven's wages, however. If a £3m transfer was a decent discount on the record fee he'd last moved for, the £14,000 a week he was making was a little rich for West Yorkshire. Not only were Steven's payments high, they were complicated, and he'd been arguing about monies owed from Marseille for half the summer. The transfer to Leeds was presented in the press as done but for the details, and those details seemed to be out of Leeds' hands, despite Marseille being very keen to drop as many thousands of those 'details' as they could if not in Leeds' hands, then Fotherby's lap.
It can't be a good sign when someone like Howard Wilkinson is using a phrase with the press like "the Trevor Steven situation". Nobody wants to become 'a situation'. "I know Trevor Steven is desperately disappointed," Wilkinson went on, speaking to the Sunday Mirror, "but I rang him myself to tell him that I was no longer interested. I didn't want him reading about it or hearing from somebody else. I felt it my duty to let Trevor know. After all, in this business, people do sometimes get treated like merchandise."
What did they do instead?
Fortunately for Trevor, there was a very simple alternative. One of the sticking points of his original transfer from Rangers to Marseille had been the payment terms, with Tapie eventually getting his way about paying in instalments. He still owed Rangers £2.5m for Steven, in fact, so once Wilko cancelled his deal at £3m, the next best thing was to write off the last payment due from Marseille to Glasgow and let him go back to the one club — apart from moneybags Blackburn — who wouldn't flinch at the salary. There was still a pre-season friendly arranged as part of the original transfer so it was a very convenient and cordial way of divvying up who was owed what while letting Steven go back to a club where he'd been very happy.
Who did we buy instead?
Amazingly, Leeds did not have all their eggs in Trevor Steven's basket, and it was the club's own choice to pull out of the deal. They'd already looked at his teammate Chris Waddle, the mulleted maestro of Marseille, but he'd joined Sheffield Wednesday instead and earned the ire of Leeds' MD Bill Fotherby when he gave his reasons. "I cannot see Leeds United winning the European Cup next season," said Waddle, "but I can see Sheffield Wednesday winning the Premier League."
"We are only interested in quality players who want to play for us," Fotherby clapped back. "After Waddle's comments it was obvious he only wanted to sign for Wednesday and we were wasting our time."
The decisive factor in turning away from Steven, though, was the easy availability of Arsenal's David Rocastle. In terms of position and style of play Rocastle was essentially Steven but three years younger, and Steven had only just pipped him to a place in the 1990 World Cup squad. Rocastle had two First Division titles to his name but didn't have Steven's European experience; in fact, even leaving London had never been on his agenda. "I cried," over leaving Arsenal, he said. "It was like leaving a great big happy family. The idea of leaving, having grown up at Highbury, hit me hard, very hard."
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At Leeds, he said, "I realised that this was a big and homely family, too," and the club were very pleased to make Rocastle their record signing at £2m. At the pre-season Makita Tournament, Fotherby couldn't hide his pride — about the stadium's banqueting suite. "With our facilities and situation on the motorway we are an ideal venue for a semi-final for the European Championships in 1996," he said. But he wasn't forgetting Rocastle's role. "We recognise that there is no point in having a super stadium and a poor team — or vice versa," he said. "So we have set out to provide our public with a super stadium for a super team."
The most significant intervention of the summer, however, was not the new magnificent East Stand, but the surgery on Gordon Strachan's back. By the next summer, he'd dominated another 43 matches and been voted the Supporters' Player of the Year, while the club's record signing had only started thirteen games — and come on thirteen times from the bench — and was having to make do with the manager's 'most eligible' award. "David Rocastle is a magnificent human being," Wilkinson once said. "If I had a daughter free..."
What might have been?
Things probably wouldn't have turned out so differently. Trevor Steven played more games in the next two seasons at Rangers than he might if he'd been trying to dislodge Strachan, but fans at Ibrox never felt he recaptured his pre-France form. Then, around the point when Strachan's age or David Batty's sale might have made room for him at Leeds, injuries began to afflict him and he only managed 25 league games in his last three seasons. Injuries were a problem for Rocastle, too, and the state of his knee was an unspoken part of George Graham's willingness to accept Leeds' bid. So whoever Leeds had signed, we'd probably have been swapping them for David White in the end anyway. ⭑彡