A heavyweight autobiography reviewed by Eric Brown reveals the inside story of Francis Lee’s four lives, the treachery, the betrayals and his ascent to become probably England’s first billionaire footballer...
BY ERIC BROWN
Saturday 6th March 1965 may be more than half a century ago but memories still flood back of a football match I attended that day.
I went to watch my local club Charlton Athletic play Bolton Wanderers in a second division match.
Both clubs were struggling to regain lost First Division status. Bolton, FA Cup winners seven years earlier, were making a better job of it, eventually finishing third behind promoted Newcastle United and Northampton Town. Charlton avoided relegation to Division Three by just two points.
On the day, Bolton were clearly superior thanks mainly to a blond, bustling, clever forward who looked a tad overweight to my teenaged eyes.
Francis Lee seemed to be everywhere. He was named in the programme as centre forward but the days of the mid-pitch battering ram who never strayed far from the opposition centre half were numbered and Lee often turned up on both wings. Imagine Nat Lofthouse playing on the wing!
Anyway, all-action Lee inspired Bolton to a 3-1 win, slotting in a 44th-minute penalty thanks to Brian Kinsey’s foul.
So my first match watching England’s future World Cup player included in the result the immortal line “Lee 1pen.” Lee’s ability to earn and score penalties throughout his career earned him the nickname “Lee 1pen” and he sounds mighty proud of it in his autobiography.
This is a heavyweight yarn of more than 400 pages devoted to a man with a genuine tale to tell rather than some of the lightweight offerings from young players with only a couple of seasons’ experience often to be found in bookshops.
Lee achieved so much in his life it is no wonder his story skilfully pieced together by former People, Sunday Mirror and Daily Express sports editor Bill Bradshaw is longer than the usual autobiography.
Proud son alert! 🚨 My Dad has poured many, many hours into getting this autobiography of football legend Francis Lee across the line. I played a tiny part in proofreading and if you’re into footy or Man City, it’s available from all good bookshops from Monday. @PitchPublishing pic.twitter.com/PABcI0C7cV
— Kit Bradshaw (@kitbradshaw) September 7, 2024
In fact, Lee had four lives: footballer, businessman, racehorse owner and trainer, and family man. No wonder he was chosen as a subject confronted by Eamonn Andrews on the TV programme “This Is Your Life.” He excelled at almost everything.
Whatever he did, he wanted to be the best. This applied even when working as a window cleaner, lorry driver or cleaning gravestones. When he cleaned windows, he donned a hat and scarf to disguise features becoming well known on football pitches.
Snooker halls and afternoon card schools were for other players – not for Lee. He’d load and rope a lorry before driving it to Wales on a 12-hour shift and soon he was pocketing serious money of £200-a-week dwarfing his top £30-a-week Bolton wage. Lee expanded his empire to include a ladies’ hairdressers, a laundrette and a boutique.
As a player, he won Football League titles with Manchester City and Derby County and performed in England’s 1970 World Cup team. By then, he’d honed business skills that first surfaced when selling snacks to school pals and he later graduated to a scheme making millions turning waste paper into toilet rolls. Lee spent some of it racing and breeding horses and was proud of his CBE awarded for services to business, charity and football.
It wasn’t all plain sailing though. His life was sprinkled with treachery and betrayals. They started at Bolton when Lee expressed a wish to leave and secretary-manager Bill Ridding told him no clubs were interested. Ridding humiliated him by saying he’d never amount to anything. Later, in conversation with Bill Shankly, Lee discovered Liverpool had wanted him and faced competition from other clubs.
Eventually, Lee arrived at Manchester City, a very different club to the Guardiola-influenced outfit of today. Lee knows City of the 1960s and 1970s inside out and lifts the lid on some sharp practices involving former chairman Peter Swales and others.
Lee tasted glory at Maine Road but was unable to arrest a steep decline which saw the club slide into Division Three. Lee even wound up as chairman but then made some of the worst decisions of his business career. He shook hands with Brian Kidd on his appointment as manager but Kidd later performed a U-turn to stay with Manchester United.
Lee’s former England pal Alan Ball turned out to be a one-season disaster while Steve Coppell lasted little more than 30 days before quitting with mental problems. When Lee appointed Frank Clark, his first move in a series of unpopular decisions was to sack club legend Tony Book.
The biggest betrayal of all came when Lee discovered his business partner and friend of many years had been siphoning money out of his waste paper company for some time. As a result, the company was now financially precarious. With his first marriage also on the rocks, Lee admitted considering suicide. But he pulled himself together, rebuilt his business interests, and remarried. He was probably the first billionaire footballer.
There are a few inconsistencies. The narrative constantly switches between the Premiership and the Premier League, for example. On page 348, Lee makes it clear he dislikes people harking back to the past and berates Freddie Trueman for often using the term “in my day.” Yet three pages on, Lee uses the phrase “When I was playing…”
Perhaps the strongest part of the book concerns his spell as a player at Manchester City and the excesses there under flamboyant Malcolm Allison.
But this is a story which delights the reader on every page until ending in emotional tributes from his family to a giant of a player who died on 2 October 2023, aged 79.
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