The woman behind the counter hands me a piece of cardboard and tells me to hold it up in the air if I want to bid. I’m number 7002 and that makes me feel uneasy. Is that how many people are going to be involved?
Inside the auction room, it is a Trevor Francis nostalgia-fest. There are medals and trophies laid out on a table and, in a glass cabinet, the shiny red shirt that was on his back as he, the first £1million footballer, scored the goal that won Nottingham Forest the 1979 European Cup.
People are taking their seats. We eye each other suspiciously and avoid small talk. But those of us attending also know it’s the people we cannot see that we really have to worry about: the online bidders, dialling in from Canada, the United States and Australia to fill out their collections.
It’s a one-off auction: 108 lots, including two European Cup winner’s medals and a shirt that was the result of a post-match swap with Diego Maradona. I am clutching my number in a sweaty palm. And, though I appreciate that not everyone will get this, there is a frisson of excitement within the room if you are one of those people who collects football memorabilia and understands it is the originals, the one-offs, that count for everything in this game.
I am one of those people. Just don’t ask me why I do it. As the New York-based photographer Robert Mapplethorpe once said: “I don’t think any collector knows his true motivation.”
What I do know is that we are a maligned lot sometimes. Friends mock. Cruel words such as “nerd”, “anorak” and “saddo” are applied (and that’s just my 15-year-old son). But we, the collectors, have to rise above these sneers.
Step into my office/top room at our house and you will find all sorts of prized possessions from the 13 international tournaments I have attended, even some of the gold ticker-tape I rather shamelessly scooped off the pitch in Moscow after the 2018 World Cup final.
Mostly, though, it is the hunt for Forest memorabilia that turns me into a twitching, 24-7 obsessive and explains why, on a damp October morning, I am 250 miles from home, waking up in Exmouth, Devon — deep in England’s south-west — when you (and my bosses) might ordinarily expect I would be in that home office writing about the new England manager.
I am here because this is where the auction is being held and, this being my secret other life, I already have a museum’s worth of programmes, team sheets, tickets, hats, badges, scarves, newspapers, posters and a whole lot more from the years when Brian Clough’s Forest team won back-to-back European Cups in 1979 and 1980.
I have Clive Tyldesley’s original commentary notes from both finals (because Clive is a very kind man).
I even have one of the travel brochures FC Cologne distributed to their fans, advertising packages to the 1979 final in Munich, after the then-German champions drew 3-3 at the City Ground in the first leg of the semi-final. Away goals were the tiebreaker and, plainly, Cologne thought the return leg would be a formality. Ian Bowyer’s winner in the Mungersdorfer Stadion made them look silly in the extreme.
Schadenfreude, I think they call it.
What you might not understand is the surge of exhilaration when, to cite just one example, I got my hands on John Robertson’s old passport a few years ago. It had been, no kidding, discarded in a skip. Robertson scored the goal in the second of those European Cup finals, when Hamburg were beaten 1-0 in Madrid’s Bernabeu. And when I flicked through the pages to find a blurry ink stamp confirming his arrival in Spain for that game — “26 Mayo, 1980, Madrid-Barajas” — it felt like the blood in my veins had been converted into red wine.
Equally, I will admit that trekking all the way to Devon for a Trevor Francis auction, 15 months after his death, is only a small part of what may, at times, come across as slightly obsessive and unusual behaviour.
When they pulled down one of the floodlights at the City Ground this year, guess who was waiting outside to take a piece of one home as a souvenir?
That floodlight had witnessed every Forest home fixture since the early 1960s. I have three of its metal washers on display in a glass cabinet (no sniggering, please) and, in the coming weeks, I am planning a 200-mile round trip to add a brick to my collection.
Not just any brick, you understand. It turns out a fellow enthusiast, Andy Lowe, editor of much-missed fanzine The Tricky Tree, got hold of some when the old Trent End was demolished in 1994 and they have been sitting in a garage all these years. I have promised him that, if he can spare one, it will be going to a good home.
At this point, I should confess that another of my display cabinets is dedicated to Forest’s 1959 FA Cup final victory, featuring a commemorative “Pride o’ the Midlands” wrapper from a loaf of bread, a Wembley song sheet, rattles, rosettes, the menu from the celebration dinner and, though I cannot entirely discount the possibility I got done up like a kipper, a sheet of player autographs I bought off some guy on eBay.
Don’t ask me how I got my hands on John Robertson’s old passport, just tell me if you’ve EVER seen a better stamp . . . pic.twitter.com/Dk683IE1L0
— Daniel Taylor (@DTathletic) June 17, 2017
What I am trying to say is that we are all wired differently. Some people collect art or vinyl or beer mats or Adidas trainers. My weakness is football nostalgia and, trust me, there are plenty of us about.
When former Forest and England defender Viv Anderson’s collection was auctioned in Manchester last month, we were 60 lots in before I realised the man sitting two rows behind me was Angus Loughran, aka ‘Statto’, previously seen in a dressing gown and slippers beside Frank Skinner and David Baddiel in Fantasy Football League, the BBC’s television comedy show.
Loughran is another collector. He had spent the morning sourcing an old Tottenham Hotspur ticket from Bratislava and, in a quiet moment, we bonded over our shared love of collectibles.
He has offered to help me find a match ticket from the 1959 Charity Shield (the game at the start of each season between England’s league champions and FA Cup holders). He also promised not to bid for the same items as me. I looked him in the eye, told him he was a good man and — don’t judge me — spent far too much on a gold commemorative clock that had been presented to Anderson for helping Forest win the 1977-78 league championship a year after getting promoted. “Fantastic, enjoy!” Viv texted me afterwards, the exclamation mark representing, I suspect, a flicker of bemusement on his part.
Their first European Cup arrived the following season and Francis’ medal, which he received after heading in the winner against Swedish champions Malmo, is lot number 42.
It is gold and beautiful, perched elegantly in a red velvet case and inscribed with ‘Coupe Des Clubs Champions Europeens’. I stare at it lovingly and wonder whether I might be permitted, just for a second, to hold it against my cheek.
Robertson is about to cross the ball. Francis is running in at the far post and, in my head, I can hear the BBC commentator Barry Davies: “Well, that’s what I wanted to see Robertson do … and Trevor Francis, the million-pound man, puts his name on the score sheet and returns a great deal of the cheque.”
The medal ends up going for £11,500 ($15,000) and, suffice to say, it wasn’t my £11,500. The 1980 medal (a match Francis missed because of a late-season Achilles injury) fetches £6,200 and his two Super Cup medals (the annual match between the European Cup/Champions League winners and their UEFA Cup/Europa League counterparts), from that season and the next, go for £2,700 and £1,350.
It’s a heck of a price but these are the moments when I am also filled with a certain sadness. I know Forest had tried to arrange a deal, unsuccessfully, to buy the medals privately, as they did with Anderson previously.
Evangelos Marinakis, Forest’s owner, wanted to put them on display in the club museum. But they got knocked back and were not involved in this auction. At least they asked the question and, if nothing else, it is preferable to the story I heard recently about the previous City Ground regime chucking away all sorts of nostalgic treasure, including a suit Clough once wore at Wembley. Sacrilege, really.
I am not having much success, either. I have got my eye on the National Football Museum’s Hall of Fame award, presented to Francis in 2014. Or, failing that, the Sunday Mercury trophy when he was named in a Midlands Hall of Fame XI.
But I am outbid on both and, in those moments, the disappointed collector has no choice but to conceal what I can describe only as loathing for the winning bidder (an entire afternoon on holiday recently was ruined when I was gazumped on eBay over a programme for a 1956-57 game at Blackburn Rovers that would have meant finishing my entire Forest collection, home and away, from then until 1999).
In total, the evening at the Piers Motley auction rooms raises £103,000. Francis’ shirt from the 1979 European Cup final goes for £2,300. His England ones, with their Admiral badges and oversized white collars, fetch prices ranging from £240 to £4,000. Other items act as a reminder that ‘Sir Trev’, as he was known around Nottingham, also had success as a player or manager elsewhere, including Birmingham City, Glasgow’s Rangers, Sheffield Wednesday and Sampdoria in Italy’s Serie A, as well as a spell in the old North American Soccer League (NASL) with the Detroit Express.
Nothing, though, attracts bigger money than the Maradona shirt, which was swapped after a Sampdoria-Napoli match in 1985 and is now on its way to a Hong Kong collector for £15,500. I told you: it’s those online bidders, the rich and the relentless, who always get the last word.
Don’t be put off, though, by the eye-watering numbers. One of the joys of collecting is finding a bargain, and there are plenty out there if you are willing to look hard enough for them.
It all depends, for the most part, on how scarce the item is. So you can get a ticket stub (or programme) from the 1959 FA Cup final for £5 on eBay because there are loads of them knocking about, but when one came up recently for Forest’s third-round tie that season at home to Tooting & Mitcham… well, that was another thing entirely. My bid, rather optimistically, was £20. It ended up selling for £425.16.
The thrill is often in the chase and maybe also the strange sense of satisfaction that comes from knowing you have, in your possession, something that will impress not just your fellow fans but also other collectors.
What that says about us, I’m not exactly sure. But I will continue hunting for that Blackburn away programme (do get in touch if you ever see one). That brick is going to look lovely.
And one day, perhaps, I will work out why we do it.
(Top photos: Daniel Taylor/The Athletic; design: Dan Goldfarb)
