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The tragic life of Brian Clough He was fuelled by alcohol and fears of inadequacy

Brian Clough leaving the pitch after his last game as Nottingham Forest manager. (David Cannon/Allsport/Getty Images)

Brian Clough leaving the pitch after his last game as Nottingham Forest manager. (David Cannon/Allsport/Getty Images)


September 18, 2024   6 mins

The winter of 1962-63 was bitter. So many football matches were postponed that the FA Cup final had to be put back three weeks. In Sunderland, Boxing Day was raw and cold, “the kind of day when seagulls flew backwards to stop their eyes watering”, as Brian Clough put it. Middlesbrough’s game, 32 miles to the south, was called off, but 90 minutes before kick-off at Roker Park, the referee Kevin Howley declared conditions playable: Sunderland’s game against Bury could go ahead. Clough congratulated the official on the decision.

Half an hour before kick-off, an ugly grey-yellow cloud drifted over the ground and unleashed a ferocious hailstorm, worsening conditions significantly. But the decision had been made. A large crowd was already inside. The game was going ahead. Charlie Hurley, Sunderland’s revered captain, missed an early penalty. Even 50 years later, he was asking himself whether things might have been different had he converted it. Then, with 27 minutes played, Clough chased a slightly overhit through-ball. Had Sunderland been 1-0 up, might he have been slightly less aggressive?

Clough stretched for the ball and collided with the Bury goalkeeper Chris Harker. As Harker’s shoulder crunched into high right knee, Clough flipped over the top of him and hit his head on the icy ground. For a couple of seconds, there was darkness. Then he tried to get up but his leg would not respond. He crawled hopelessly and then collapsed; both medial and cruciate ligaments were torn. Clough’s career as a centre-forward was over.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Clough from stomach cancer at the age of 69. Yet he remains a surprisingly constant presence in the mind of English football, the ideal of a particular type of manager, irascible, unpredictable and charismatic, a leader who inspired his teams largely by force of personality. He lives on in countless clips in which he is outrageous, charming and funny, most notably the episode of Calendar on the day he had been sacked by Leeds in which he and his predecessor Don Revie go toe-to-toe.

It’s extraordinary television and has drawn comparison with the debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 when those who listened on the radio thought Nixon had come out on top, while those who watched on television believed the handsome Kennedy had run rings around his sweating opponent. Here too, if you actually listen to the words, Revie makes some good points, but it doesn’t matter, because he is ponderous and thickset, while Clough is nimble, sharp and amusingly provocative. He is also, fairly obviously, pissed.

It wasn’t until the late Nineties when the Arsenal captain Tony Adams spoke publicly about his struggles with addiction that football began to take its relationship with booze seriously. That Clough descended into alcoholism is well known but it tends to be an addendum to his story. His appearance in his final season at Nottingham Forest, when he oversaw their relegation 16 years after he’d led them to promotion, couldn’t be ignored, his skin turned now red and blotchy. It happened to be the season of great change in English football when the First Division switched to the Premiership and the sense was that the new football had no place for mavericks like Clough.

It was a convenient framing. The iconoclast who, armed with little more than a sharp wit, dragged himself up from Hartlepools, got Derby promoted and won the league with them, blew up at Leeds, served his time in the wilderness at Brighton and then returned to lead Forest in the space of four seasons to promotion, a league title and two European Cups, before finding the economics of football had rendered obsolete his brand of messianic unorthodoxy.

And it wasn’t untrue. But there is another way of looking at Clough’s story. He was a prolific and brilliant goalscorer for Middlesbrough then Sunderland, scoring 250 goals in 271 league games before the injury, all in the Second Division. His only top-flight goal came in one of the three matches he played as he attempted a comeback in 1964-65 before accepting, aged 29, that his career was over. Even in the second flight, though, he’d forced his way into the England reckoning; there’s a not especially fanciful alternate reality in which he didn’t get injured, Sunderland were promoted in 1962-63 (rather than missing out by a single point having played half a season without his goals) and he was in the England squad when they won the World Cup in 1966.

Before the injury, Clough was almost teetotal. “He never had a smoke or a drink — well, maybe a half, you know, when he went out,” said his Middlesbrough team-mate Derek McLean. Clough and other Boro players used to go to a café owned by popstar Chris Rea’s father, Camillo, who persuaded him to replace his regular milkshakes with Oxo as a healthier option.

But the injury changed him. After an operation, Clough was in plaster for three months and admitted he would lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of how little he had to offer. Brian alone among the eight Clough children who survived to adolescence had failed his 11-plus. He then failed an apprenticeship at ICI. Without his goals, he was just somebody who hadn’t been able to cut it as a turner-and-fitter. He went through arduous rehab, running up the steps in the stadium and along the beach at Roker, but it wasn’t enough. He showed some promise coaching the youth team but Sunderland, desperate for the insurance money that would come when it was confirmed his injury was career-ending, were callous in letting him go. He became embittered and began to drink.

Clough clearly idolised his mother who, at least in his telling of the story, prioritised academic achievement over anything else. Failing his 11-plus clearly hurt, and he seemed never quite to forgive his brother Bill for mocking him over it on the day he got his results. The “immaculate” Bill, he said, “was Mam’s favourite son. I never was. Perhaps it was because he won the teapot in a ‘lovely baby’ competition and I didn’t. Still… I had a reasonable consolation prize by winning the European Cup — twice.”

It’s a strikingly odd comparison, but it’s one that recurs. “I don’t have any O-levels, I don’t have any A-levels,” he said in a TV interview after his retirement, “and when my children chastise me and give me stick… I put my European Cup medals on the table, my Championship medals. I’ve got a tableful — they’re my O-levels and A-levels.” Throughout his career, Clough was reliably anti-intellectual, and yet his 11-plus clearly haunted him. There’s a sense even that his entire managerial career was an attempt to make up for that failure with his mother.

“There’s a sense even that his entire managerial career was an attempt to make up for that failure with his mother.”

Clough’s Derby County were controversially beaten by Juventus in the semi-final of the 1973 European Cup. In both his autobiographies and countless interviews, he spoke of his distress that night, coming home and receiving the phone call that his mother had died. But it wasn’t true. She had actually died a month earlier, on the night that Derby had beaten Spartak Trnava in the quarter-final. Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if he conflated the events because he had vowed in his own mind that winning the European Cup would earn his mother’s approbation, and that, as he saw it, cheating Italians had stolen that from him?

If that is the case, if winning the European Cup to honour his mother’s memory became a grail, then suddenly his otherwise incomprehensible decision a year later to take over at Leeds United, a club he had repeatedly attacked, becomes explicable: as league champions, they were in the European Cup and so offered an immediate pathway to his ultimate goal. As it turned out, he lasted just 44 tempestuous days at Leeds and the European Cup wins came in 1979 and 1980, with Nottingham Forest. 

The achievement was remarkable, but behind it all lay booze. When a friend visited him in his hotel in Leeds to help look for a house, Clough preferred to lie on the bed, drinking cans of beer, watching the cricket on television — as though perhaps he knew even then that there was no point buying property there. There was booze to calm everybody’s nerves on the night before major finals, booze to celebrate wins, booze to deal with the eternal grind of one game after another, booze to deal with the pain of his break-up with his old friend and assistant Peter Taylor and, in the end, booze just to get by.

The European Cup in 1980 was Clough’s last great success. There were League Cups after that but by the early Nineties, idiosyncrasy and eccentricity had become unreliability and rudeness, his genius had curdled into cantankerousness. After relegation came treatment, excruciating television appearances, illness and death.

Clough’s brilliance is undeniable. Only three other managers have ever won the league with more than one club, and nobody has done it with two medium-sized provincial sides; he had an extraordinary gift. But he never escaped the shame of his 11-plus, never got over the knee injury that denied him playing glory, never perhaps felt he had earned the love of his mother. And his response was to drown himself in alcohol.

His story was one of greatness, but behind the charisma and the outrageousness, it is also one of tragedy.


Jonathan Wilson is a columnist for the Guardian, the editor of the Blizzard, the co-host of the podcast It Was What It Was and author of 12 books on football history and one novel.

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John Murray
John Murray
27 days ago

Honestly, the 11-plus was bloody awful, I am 100% on board with them having got rid of it. I did the 11-plus in NI when I was kid in 1983, when it had been abolished in the rest of the UK. The exam was over two days, and the first day I failed to finish the exam paper. I have vivid memories of being in floods of tears because I felt I’d ruined my life. In fact, I was so convinced it was all over, I was so relaxed on the second day, I breezed it and passed. But the terror of it outside the school gates on that first day still sticks.
Never knew Brian Clough had that issue, but he would not have been the only man like that.

J Bryant
J Bryant
27 days ago
Reply to  John Murray

I’m curious, did you prepare for the exam? Were there special classes?

John Murray
John Murray
26 days ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Did a lot of practice tests in school as I recall. There were no special practice courses like they have now for US school tests or college entry exams (or at least there were none I’m aware of).

Aphrodite Rises
Aphrodite Rises
26 days ago
Reply to  John Murray

It seems that it is not just you and the author who are rather fixated on the eleven plus but also those who contribute to Wikipedia pages, this must be a recent thing. Probably more taxpayers money being wasted on grievance studies aimed at enlarging the victim pool, retrospectively. When will elevation of the hero return? Society desperately needs it. At the time Brian Clough was a footballer, it would be assumed, if people actually thought about it, that he had failed. Alex Ferguson failed. Football was a working class sport played in secondary moderns. Private schools and grammar schools generally played rugby. Successful footballers were working class heroes who were not paid excessive salaries. The supporters and spectators and commentators were generally from the working class, tickets were inexpensive and spectators stood.

Aphrodite Rises
Aphrodite Rises
26 days ago
Reply to  John Murray

Deleted repeat

peter barker
peter barker
26 days ago
Reply to  John Murray

I passed 11+ and am pleased it was in existence as I then went to grammar school, university etc which has given me a much wider choice of what to do with my life. No pressure was put on me by my (working class, early school-leaver) parents though so that would’ve helped me see it as a stress-free activity.
The lads I mixed with growing up who failed 11+ didn’t seem to see it as something that adversely affected them. By and large they liked to take the **** out of “grammar grubs” without any obvious envy. .

Ken Charman
Ken Charman
26 days ago
Reply to  John Murray

I wouldn’t swap passing my 11+ for all those medals

J Bryant
J Bryant
27 days ago

I’m American and haven’t heard of Clough, but I have heard of George Best. Another Brit soccer player who is rated by some as one of the best players ever, and something of a playboy. I read that, unlike Clough, he was also academically gifted but quit school early. Sadly, he too was his own worst enemy and drank himself to death. Top level sport has always taken a harsh toll on its most famous participants.

John Wilson
John Wilson
26 days ago
Reply to  J Bryant

By American do you mean from the US? I seem to remember a great Venn Diagram somewhere but I can’t find it again (lots of the ones on-line are simplified or wrong). This was the best I could find and isn’t great https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-12114389/amp/UK-vs-GB-Whats-difference-Great-Britain-British-Isles-United-Kingdom.html.

Josef Švejk
Josef Švejk
27 days ago

I never knew that Clough had a problem with alcohol. It explains a lot.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
27 days ago

Putting passing the 11+ on a par with winning the European Cup? The definition of madness.

Aphrodite Rises
Aphrodite Rises
26 days ago

Maybe failing the 11plus gave Brian Clough the required drive and motivation to achieve what he did. It was the injury that turned him into an alcoholic, not failing the 11plus. He lived an incredible life which is to be celebrated. Attitudes to alcohol were very different then. I was never particularly into football but I was aware Brian Clough was known as the greatest England manager that never was.

Rocky Martiano
Rocky Martiano
26 days ago

Fairly certain it was the injury that turned him into an alcoholic. As it did with Jimmy Greaves, although his injury resulted in him missing out on a World Cup winner’s medal despite having played in the early rounds. That injustice was righted many years later when they finally gave medals to the whole squad. Too little too late for Greavsie who was too far gone by then

Geoff W
Geoff W
24 days ago

And here’s a post from someone in the tiny minority who don’t care very much that a boy failed the 11-plus more than seventy years ago.

Peter B
Peter B
26 days ago

In all the reading I’ve done on Brian Clough, I’d never registered this 11 plus angle. I’m wondering if this is really any more than the author’s projection and exaggeration. Most children failed the 11 plus.
How do we know he never got over his exam failure or the injury ? All we know for certain is that he overcame and used the setbacks and succeeded as a football manager. And arguably as a man who touched a lot of people’s lives for the better (and incidentally brought up his children to behave rather better than he sometimes did).
Remember, this was a man who thought on his feet and had the wit and self-confidence to say things like “I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business, but I was in the top one”. He may not have been intellectually smart, but he certainly made a lot of intellectually smarter people look pretty stupid.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
26 days ago
Reply to  Peter B

Excellent summary.

David Giles
David Giles
25 days ago
Reply to  Peter B

Sorry, but I disagree. I remember interviews where he mentioned the 11-Plus failure. The pain was etched on his face. So much did it strike me that I thought it was an accepted seminal element of the Clough story.

Aphrodite Rises
Aphrodite Rises
26 days ago

Bobby Robson failed the eleven plus but had a long football career as a player and trained to be a manager when his career as a player was over. He thought his career as a manager was over when he was sacked by Macclesfield. He didn’t hit the bottle excessively and to his surprise was appointed Ipswich manager where he enjoyed incredible success leading to his appointment as England manager. Bobby Robson was two years older than Brian Clough.

Anthony Quinn
Anthony Quinn
26 days ago

He was sacked by Fulham . Don’t think he ever managed Macclesfield.

Aphrodite Rises
Aphrodite Rises
26 days ago
Reply to  Anthony Quinn

Oops. Thank you.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
26 days ago

If that ‘Calendar’ performance was Clough “fairly obviously pissed” then I can only applaud Mr Wilson’s radar for these things. I can’t recall many occasions where I’ve seen someone “pissed” and able to offer such a cogent and lucid performance.

Peter B
Peter B
26 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Indeed. I’ve seen that several times and never noticed.
It’s worth remembering here that Jonathan Wilson would have been 16 in Brian Clough’s final season with Nottingham Forest in 1993. So he certainly has almost no direct experience of the times and context he’s writing about here.
And the 11 plus angle just feels like someone trying to shoehorn a rather complex and contradictory life into a tidy narrative. In other words, lazy. And possibly dishonest. But that’s modern journalism for you. Clough would have torn him off a strip.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
26 days ago
Reply to  Peter B

In other words… a typical Jonathan Wilson article. Unherd would do better to seek more interesting writers on football.

Peter B
Peter B
26 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

To be fair, he’s written some good books on football. I’ve read “The Inverted Pyramid” which finally explained to me how we got from 5-3-2 (5 attackers, 3 midfield, 2 defenders) which was still around when I was growing up to the modern systems like 4-3-3. I haven’t read enough of his journalism to comment on that. There are certainly Guardian writers whose books are much better than their press articles (yes, I even have a Polly Toynbee book).

richard jones
richard jones
26 days ago

Part of being extraordinarily successful in any field seems to be a need to fight, constantly. So failing something important at school, then at work and so failing to win his mother’s admiration, failing to become a top level striker, failing at abstinence…
Clough maybe made sure that he always had plenty of personal demons to fight, to keep him relentlessly, desperately driven and so finally become, in the Top One.

Gerard A
Gerard A
26 days ago

For those who want to know more about the complex character of Brian Clough I recommend reading Be Good, Love Brian: Growing Up with Brian Clough by Craig Bromfield

Peter B
Peter B
26 days ago
Reply to  Gerard A

Also “Provided You Don’t Kiss Me” by Duncan Hamilton. The “Great Lives” (Radio 4) episode where John Motson chooses to talk about Brian Clough is also very good (and proves that Mathew Parris does do some excellent stuff – sometimes).

Andrew Thompson
Andrew Thompson
26 days ago

I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was definitely in the top one.
Brian Clough

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
26 days ago

Well, I enjoyed it.
Then again, my image of Clough, Ol’ Big ‘Ed, is coloured by The Damned United.