A brief history of wanting away

Transfer window hyperbole has become an accepted part of supporting football clubs now, so that the standard requested punishments for players who decide they want to play for other clubs and decide to do something about it now begins, at the lower end, with disembowelling. It's early in the saga, yet debates are already taking place about how to deal with Wilf Gnonto if he does not, in the end, leave Leeds — boo his every touch? Ignore his every goal? Leave the record books blank when he makes an assist? Worse might be if he goes away, then reappears here in the shirt of another club.

This sort of wounded reaction is supposed to derive from the depth of insult being done not to our team now, being weakened by the behaviour of a good player who won't play, but to the historic institution the contemporary team represents. Gnonto's actions are disrespectful to the shirt, the badge, the city; at Harewood House, the peacocks in the woods there weep. There is something to all that. But Leeds United's history also says that, historically, we can get over it.

John Charles

In 1953/54 John Charles, known to all as a top class centre-back, played his first full season as a centre-forward and scored 42 goals in 39 games. But Leeds United conceded 81 in the same season's games, and only finished 10th in Division Two. It was absurd that a player many were calling the best in the world was not playing at the highest level, and several First Division clubs thought so too; when they played in London, Leeds had to hide Charles in the hotel away from Chelsea and their £40,000 offers. The thing was, Charles was always very polite, so all he'd say to Phil Brown of the Yorkshire Evening Post was, 'He was not asking for a transfer in as many words, but he could not get away from the feeling that it would be very nice to play in First Division football'. By September, after manager Raich Carter argued with and sold Charles' friends, thrust an unwanted captaincy upon him and moved him back to centre-half, a formal transfer request was in, and Charles was waiting to be called into the Elland Road boardroom before a floodlit friendly with Hibs to learn if the directors would let him go. A man from Cardiff was waiting in the corridor to make a £50,000 offer, but he and Charles and the crowd outside were all told: he's staying. "What can I do?" Charles rhetorically asked the press. He didn't withdraw his transfer request, for one thing. But labour relations being what they were, he had to get into Division One the long way, through two more seasons and promotion with Leeds.

Jack Charlton

The quintessential angry young man of the 1950s, Charlton played his first game for Leeds aged seventeen, then never stopped kicking off about wanting a move until he was 27. He hated that he was always playing in the Second Division; he hated that Leeds was such a badly run club, that Elland Road was such an old-fashioned stadium, that the team never had players who seemed to care. When Don Revie signed as a player, Charlton couldn't stand him, and when he became manager, Charlton spent an entire summer arguing about his contract and his wages until he was sitting in Matt Busby's office at Old Trafford, ready to sign for Manchester United. It was only there, when Busby hesitated over the deal, that Jack realised what a fool he was being. "I am going back to Elland Road, and I am going to apologise for what I have done," he told Busby. And then he won every major domestic honour, a few European ones, and the World Cup too.

Billy Bremner

Bremner was three years into his Leeds career but all he had gained to combat his homesickness was a relegation from the First Division that even he, still just a teenager, recognised was due to the club's ramshackle unprofessionalism. Don Revie had taken Bremner under his wing as a player, but now as manager, was struggling to make that count for more than the pull of Billy's fiancée back in Stirling. Bremner had a habit of going missing from Leeds, who would always find him up in Scotland, and it was the best news of Billy's life when, shortly after he'd put in a transfer request, Hibernian bid £25,000 for him. It was only Revie's clever three-angled response that kept Bremner at Leeds United: he convinced the board to ask for £30,000, knowing Hibs didn't have the extra; he told Billy his plans for making Leeds a European giant with him at the heart; and he travelled up to Scotland to persuade Billy's girlfriend, Vicky, to marry Billy and move to Leeds into a house Revie found for them.

Ian Baird

Nothing and nobody could persuade Bairdy to stay once Lee Chapman signed for Leeds. Baird had led the line since 1985, apart from a brief disastrous move to Portsmouth and back, but with everything on the line for promotion in 1989/90 he'd only come up with four goals. Howard Wilkinson got the chequebook out again, spending £400,000 on another of his trusted Sheffield Wednesday old boys, Lee Chapman, and Baird snapped. Wilko told Baird he wanted him to stay and fight for his place. Baird said he wasn't having it and signed for Middlesbrough. With Bobby Davison and Carl Shutt soon injured, Baird would have been partnering Chapman, but Wilkinson had to go buy Imre Varadi (you can guess where from) while Baird was battling to keep Boro in the Second Division and kicking himself for not being more like Carl Shutt: 'I threw away the chance of a First Division medal and playing in Europe', he said in his book Bairdy's Gonna Get Ya. He didn't exactly help Leeds United's chances of getting into the First Division by throwing a tantrum, bailing out and leaving Leeds short of strikers during our shit-or-bust promotion season, but ask any Leeds fan from the era about Ian Baird and they'll tell you, they bloody love him still.

Tony Yeboah

Football is so often about the shirt, even if the shirt is really just some mass-produced polyester with the name of a computer manufacturer written across it. The all-yellow 1996/97 away shirt by Puma was a beauty, true, but it wasn't a fashion statement when Tony Yeboah stripped his off and threw it at George Graham when he was subbed off at White Hart Lane. Ever since he took over at Leeds, Graham had been beetling in the press about Yeboah's fitness, and Yeboah wanted to show him the physique he was messing with by taking him off for Ian Harte. A football shirt's holiness makes it perfect for such a dramatic gesture, and besides, there's not much else around for a footballer to throw unless he starts rooting through the physio's bag, but throwing the shirt away is a sin in the eyes of football fans and Yeboah — with Graham helping the press to make him into a villain — got enough pre-internet criticism that an apology was required. It was quite easily accepted, though, because we didn't really like George Graham, and how could we stay angry at someone who could bend a crossbar with a volley like Yeboah?

Jermaine Beckford

For Baird in January 1990, see Beckford in January 2010. It was simple with Beckford. Ken Bates was a chronic underpayer and loved to slag players off in public. Beckford — who had been out of the game fitting windscreens at one point — had offers to jump from League One to the Premier League and secure his financial future. It was disorienting when we found out that his transfer request had gone in and been accepted before he scored the winner at Old Trafford on January 3rd, but that's the funny thing about footballers and contracts and transfers and commitment — lots of different things can be true at once. It's also true that Beckford's actions were disruptive and contributing to United's awkward post-Christmas form, but in the end the whole saga gave us a beautiful redemption story: after being left out at Charlton, Beckford was made captain for the game against Bristol Rovers, scored the winner, and made history.

Let's deal with the caveat here: all these players are well remembered, despite whatever ruckus they caused, because they did something. Wilf Gnonto, at the present time, does not compare to Billy Bremner. But when Billy Bremner was going awol up to Scotland, putting in transfer requests and pleading for a move to Hibernian, he did not compare to Billy Bremner either, not as we now know him. He was a talented winger, but he'd only played 42 games, only scored eleven goals, only contributed to relegation from Division One then finishing 14th in Division Two. The £25,000 from Hibs would have paid for a number of other players; if he wanted to go home to Scotland that much, why not let the disruptive little sod go? You'd have been glad to see the back of someone like that, as a fan in 1961, knowing — before Billy Bremner it — that the side was more important than the self. I guess, looking back, it was the right thing to take him back.

That doesn't mean it would be the right thing to take Gnonto back, or that if he's forced to stay we should let bygones be. But our history suggests that, sometimes, what looks with full finality like an ending is, sometimes, only a beginning. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)