Terry Venables made every player feel like a star and was a football romantic

There was the club singing career. The series of detective novels. The clothes shop in Chelsea. The board game. The range of women’s wigs. The chain of pubs. The ticket agency. Then there was the football, in all its guises: player, coach, manager, chief executive, owner, adviser, pundit. Terry Venables wanted to do it all, and it was the making of him, and it was the breaking of him.

He was an only child with a short attention span and a ruthless personal ambition, and yet he was a people person at heart, a valued companion and a superb man‑manager who built great footballing collectives. He was a businessman and a romantic, a man steeped in football tradition who, nonetheless, saw the sport as a branch of the entertainment industry. He wanted to be famous and he wanted to be wealthy and he wanted to be loved and he wanted to win.

In all these respects, it has to be said he failed as much as he succeeded. His business ventures frequently ran aground; his footballing successes were radiant but fleeting; his popular appeal fluctuated wildly over the decades. So what remains of this great English life, cut short at the age of 80? History has a habit of forgetting things such as win percentages and tabloid roastings and financial infringements. What remains, ultimately, is the way he made people feel.

At Queens Park Rangers he will be remembered as the man who put the pride back into a small west London club. At Barcelona they remember him as the maverick foreign coach who ended a decade-long title drought and established them as a force again. For any England fan alive and sentient in 1996, he was the man who orchestrated the second great summer of love, a brocade of hazy memories and stinging emotions that stirred the national soul in a way only Alf Ramsey’s World Cup winners and Sarina Wiegman’s Lionesses have managed to do since.

A young Pep Guardiola (left) looking up at Barcelona manager Terry Venables after their European Cup semi-final triumph against IFK Gothenburg in 1986. Photograph: Colorsport/REX/Shutterstock.

His teams always boasted great individual talent, from Paul Gascoigne to Bernd Schuster to Gary Lineker to Tony Currie. But Venables was a team builder first and foremost, a coach who could make every player feel like they were the star. In an age of the dictatorial manager, Venables offered an arm around the shoulder, talked to players on their level, placed his gift in the service of theirs.

Perhaps this is why Venables fits no particular intellectual tradition or coaching dynasty, is not identified with a particular tactic or style. But his influence runs a lot deeper than many assume. The famous 4-3-2-1 “Christmas Tree” formation he employed with England was repurposed to great effect by Aime Jacquet’s 1998 World Cup-winning French team. His dazzlingly original training sessions were revered by players and even copied by George Graham at Arsenal. Set-piece routines would be conceived and coached with all the rehearsed spontaneity of good music.

At Barcelona he married English intensity with Catalan flair, taking his squad on a gruelling training camp in Andorra, burying himself in videotape analysis, crafting the high‑tempo pressing game that would shake a snoozing giant from its stupor and provide the blueprint for its later dominance. Among his most devoted students was a teenage La Masia midfielder called Josep Guardiola, for whom the arrival of Venables was the catalyst for a lifelong fascination with English football.

A decade later, at a time when the English game was still in thrall to the idea of the dominant, alpha‑male centre-half, Venables trusted in a curious and cultured Aston Villa defender called Gareth Southgate. And in many ways the winding thread that took Southgate to the top of English football began with Venables, where he saw the way a skilful international coach could harness patriotism and loyalty to create a team greater than the sum of its parts.

For all this, Venables was never really appreciated in his own time. Even at the apex of England’s Euro 96 bliss, the nation’s love for him was always somehow qualified and conditioned. Partly this reflects English football’s instinctive distrust of new ideas, its uneasy relationship with celebrity, its suspicion of the kind of unabashed self‑belief that Venables embodied. The Football Association never really wanted him as England manager, tried to shackle him while he was in the job and then effectively forced him out.

Venables enjoyed a pure and simple vision of football as a single organic entity run by people who loved the game. Photograph: Tom Hevezi/AP

Perhaps this is why the highlight of Venables’s coaching career was also his swansong. He was only 53 when he left the England job but achieved precious little afterwards. In 1998 the allegations of financial irregularity that had dogged him for years finally ended in 19 charges of serious misconduct and a seven-year ban on being a company director. Abortive spells with Australia, Crystal Palace, Middlesbrough and Leeds, an ill‑fated takeover of Portsmouth, an extended dotage on the Costa Blanca: ultimately, none of this warrants anything more than a footnote.

Of course, there was Tottenham as well. In a way, those six turbulent years at his childhood club between 1987 and 1993 encapsulated the paradox of Venables, the businessman and the romantic, the messiah and the mess‑maker. Tottenham was all of Venables’s ambitions rolled into one: spine-tingling football and a seat on the board, a little boy’s playground where he could run amok on the training ground and the balance sheet. He rescued the club from bankruptcy, led the team to the 1991 FA Cup, fell out monumentally with his takeover partner, Alan Sugar, left under a cloud of financial mismanagement allegations and scorched bridges. He wanted to do it all, and left with nothing.

Three decades on, the obsession with Venables’s pecuniary affairs feels somehow quaint in an age of state power, public investment funds and invisible billionaires. Yes, he bit off more than he could swallow. Yes, he made poor decisions, trusted the wrong people, bought too strongly into his own personal magnetism. Yes, he could be distastefully avaricious at times, seduced by the lure of a quick buck and a quick headline. No, he probably spread himself across too many roles to be truly great at any of them: player, coach, executive, celebrity.

But at the heart of his many flaws was a pure and simple vision: a vision of football as a single organic entity, from the muddy turf to the boardroom, run by people who loved football and cared about its future, fuelled by an entrepreneurial spirit and industrial vats of self-belief. Where footballers really could do it all. It was a vision that died long before he did.