Football is littered with wasted talent. Players who, for one reason or another, never made the grade or fell by the wayside.The problem is that being a footballer means you have both visible and invisible problems. When you play in front of TV cameras in every direction, everyone can see just how good you are and the things you do that make you so good. Like an artist or a novelist, your work speaks for itself. But the flipside is that, if you’re bad, no one ever fully sees why.Natural dips in form, family issues, niggling injuries, and relationships with teammates all play a part. And as with any occupation that takes young men – often teenagers – away from their homes and their support networks and showers them with more money than they can dream of, football demands a special ability to be able to deal with homesickness and being lavished with too much, too soon.Nick Barmby was a player who epitomised the struggle: both the fact that talent and form are often so difficult to bring together at the same time, and the fact that greatness in the sport means you need everything to fall into place at the right time.
His career is a story of those near misses and unseen difficulties that dog a footballer’s career and prevent them from reaching the level they might have been capable of had everything gone their way.
In 1990, Barmby left his hometown of Hull for Tottenham in north London at the age of just 16. He was brought to the club by Terry Venables, who would also give him his England debut, and broke into the first team right when the Premier League restructure changed the face of English football forever. Whatever happened from then on, the media intensity and increase in TV presence meant pressure was an inevitability – especially for a young, English hope whom Pele once predicted would become a world class star.
If pressure was inevitable, then so too was homesickness. And whilst some can deal with that better than others, for a certain kind of person it’s crippling.
After breaking into the Spurs first team, Barmby was a part of an exciting midfield and attack at White Hart Lane: Jurgen Klinsmann and Teddy Sheringham led the line, but still managed to bag a goal every four games for his club. Everything seemed set up for the youngster to break through into the big time – he had a team with prestige, some top class teammates and his first England call-up promptly arrived.
The problem was, Barmby missed the North, and so, with the world seemingly at his feet, the newly-minted England international moved to newly-promoted Middlesbrough, not far from his hometown.
Homesickness wasn’t the only story, though. Whilst still a young player at Tottenham, Barmby met former Blind Date contestant Mandy Telford in a nightclub and two years later they were married in Hull. The players parents didn’t approve of the decision, however – Telford was seven years older than he was and already divorced from her first husband. The issue led to some kind of a feud between Barmby and his parents, who fell out and refused to speak to each other.
Perhaps that explains a certain protectiveness to Barmby when it comes to his family life. Described in a 2004 piece in the Guardian as being an ‘intensely private family man’, it seems as though the former Tottenham midfielder wasn’t the easiest character to get along with. Teammates routinely describe him as a nice boy, but one who was difficult to get to know socially, perhaps ostracising him from his teammates at times.
One event in a person’s life can shape their future dramatically, and perhaps that was it for Barmby, who didn’t leave Tottenham for lack of talent. After just one season at Middlesbrough, Everton came calling.
Just a season previously, the Toffees had narrowly missed out on a UEFA Cup spot, and had won the FA Cup in 1995. It looked as if they were making a comeback to something approaching their 1980s status, when the Goodison Park club had a solid claim to being the best team in Europe at times, even if a ban on English football clubs from European competition in the wake of the 1985 Heysel disaster meant they couldn’t prove it by taking a European Cup back to Liverpool.
But it wasn’t just Everton’s prestige and position that made Barmby leave Middlesbrough: he’d also fallen out with Bryan Robson.
It’s another sad story of a player whose career took a decisive turn based on elements unseen to the wider public. After leaving Tottenham because of family issues and homesickness, it was a personal problem with a manager that had Barmby on the move again.
It was to be a crucial move in the player’s career, too. Up until 2004, when Barmby joined his hometown club, and his first love, Hull City, Everton was the team for whom he’d played the most games. 116 in the Premier League, much more than with any other club. But that was over four years – injuries played their part in keeping the attacking midfielder out of the side for a large chunk of the 1998/99 season. It wasn’t so much that injuries dogged Barmby’s career, but injuries at the wrong time can be devastating.
Despite the promise shown after winning the FA Cup two years before Barmby arrived, Everton had become a team pottering around the lower reaches of the league, fighting relegation in the bad years, stagnating in midtable in the good ones. But Barmby’s star was still rising.
With teams of the calibre of Manchester United interested in him, it was Liverpool who eventually made the England man the offer he couldn’t refuse. The problem was, moving across Stanley Park to join the Reds from the Blues was not going to be a popular move.
In fact, it had been quite a common move at one point. No fewer than 18 players had played for Everton and then joined Liverpool up until 1959 – but that was when Dave Hickson moved to Anfield from Goodison. After that, times had changed, and footballing rivalry became more important than a professional footballer – still earning a working class wage – and his desire to keep his household in the local area. Barmby, in 2000, became the first played to move from Everton to Liverpool in a generation when Gerard Houllier’s side payed £6m for his services.
With that, though, comes pressure. Not just the pressure and the problems associated with being reviled by your old fans, but also that of proving to your new fans that you were worth it in the first place.
His first season was a success, helping Liverpool to their famous Scouse treble, the FA Cup, the League Cup and the UEFA Cup may not have been the three most glamorous trophies a Premier League club could have hoped for, but three cups in a season is not to be sniffed at, and winning three knockout competitions is a rare feat, and one that points to a certain type of greatness.
The second season wasn’t so good. More injuries and a loss of form meant that Liverpool felt they could dispense with his services, and Barmby joined up with Terry Venables once again, this time at Leeds – a club soon to be in crisis. But injury once again hit his start to the club, and by the time he had recovered, Venables – a coach Barmby seemed to like – had been replaced by Peter Reid, as the Whites started to slump.
When you look back over Barmby’s career, his 23 England caps and the fact that he played for some of English football’s biggest clubs all before the age of 30, you can’t help but be struck by the fact that injuries at the wrong time, coupled with personality issues and other off-the-field issues really laid waste to a promising career. The most galling part of that, though, is the fact that it was all done so quietly and away from the gaze of the football fan, watching as the rise of Sky Sports changed the face of football. Perhaps Barmby’s skill seemed fleeting to the spectators watching only what happened on the pitch, but all of the unseen problems mitigate the loss of form in a way that fans don’t realise.
In the end, becoming a top footballer in one of the world’s biggest leagues isn’t all about talent, nor is it just about drive and passion. It’s also about luck. Injuries and loss of form at the wrong time can wreck a career, and so too can the wrong clash of personalities.
Barmby seemed to suffer all of these problems, even if his talent was never in doubt. His was a career seemingly stalled from the inside by problems unseen.