Barry Douglas ⭑ From A-Z since '92
"There are players miles better than me who’ve never won anything," Barry Douglas once said. But that he won so much was down to resilience forged in his youth and an open mind to his career and his life.
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.
There's a case for Barry Douglas as the proper template for aspiring youth footballers, and forcing teenage players to do something else, anything else, for a year. After Livingston let him go for being too small, aged sixteen, Douglas let football go, too. When he came back, persuaded to join Queen's Park, it was to a career much richer in experiences than many footballers enjoy.
Perhaps it was something other than his year as an apprentice refrigeration engineer that was the making of Douglas. His dad wasn't around when he was growing up on the Pollok estate in Glasgow, "so my mum was my father figure too, along with my grandpa and my uncle." When he went back into football, he became and remained unapologetically himself as a player and as flamboyantly dressed person. His performances up and down the wing from left-back took him from Queen's Park to Dundee United, with Andrew Robertson inheriting his shirt — not one of his Hawaiian ones — at both clubs. At Tannadice Douglas finished 4th in the Scottish Premier League, twice, and played in the Europa League, raising interest around a player who had gone from repairing refrigerators to playing in Europe in two seasons. Douglas' next step was, to many, as brusque as walking away at sixteen to fix fridges had been: a move to Poland, and Lech Poznan.
There were linguistic and cultural arguments against moving to Europe, and combined with Robertson's emergence it restricted Douglas to one Scotland cap, only given him after returning to the UK. He had a difficult start in Poland, missing the start of the season injured. But there were plenty of advantages in Poznan for a curious player. As an import, he had a certain celebrity, and in the Ekstraklasa he had a platform for his ability. Douglas played 27 times as Lech won the league and Super Cup, and four times each over two seasons in the Europa League and Champions League. Beating arch-rivals Legia Warsaw to the title, Poznan's first championship in five years and only their second since 1993, brought 80,000 fans onto the streets to celebrate; Douglas held his own low-key party when he summered in Scotland, posting a photo of his medal on Twitter next to a sausage supper and a can of Irn-Bru. The next season, as Lech struggled to replicate their success, Douglas discovered the other side of Polish football's intensity, the squad subjected to dressing downs from their dissatisfied Ultras. Being confronted by the gang of black-outfitted men with mixed martial arts physiques wasn't so bad for Douglas, he said, because he couldn't understand a lot of what they were shouting. But it underlined that he was getting what he wanted in Poland: a chance to play football that really mattered, in an atmosphere that could, he said, lift you off your feet.