Graham Morse - Sir Walter Winterbottom: The Father of Modern English Football

1. Appendix 1: GAMES PLAYED FOR
   MANCHESTER UNITED
2. Appendix 2: GAMES AS ENGLAND
   TEAM MANAGER

W alter Winterbottom never wanted to write his own biography. I asked him many times, but he always politely refused. After he resigned from his job at the FA as Director of Coaching and England team manager he had many requests from publishers, but always turned them down.

I think that the reasons were two-fold. He had an unswerving loyalty to his employer, the Football Association, and he felt that publishers would only be interested in his story if he was digging the dirt. He most certainly would not have done that, and in 50 years I have never known him speak ill of anyone. The second reason, I believe, is that he was essentially a modest person, despite his exceptional achievements. It was always his belief that credit should go to others. He never claimed any for himself.

I felt that this was a story that should be told, that his place in English sporting history should be documented. He was a pioneer. Not just the first, the youngest, and the longest serving England football team manager, but the person who created the FA national coaching scheme and the first Director of the Sports Council, a ground breaking organization that changed the face of British sport.

He had a profound influence on English football and it is no exaggeration to say that he was, of his generation, the leading technical thinker and exponent of football coaching in the world. Despite his high media profile as the manager of the England team, he believed that his most important work was as Director of Coaching, and tellingly, in his passport he listed his profession as FA Director of Coaching. When he began there was strong resistance to the very idea of coaching from the amateur bastions within the FA, from the older players who believed you were born with it, and from club managers and directors. He developed strategies to overcome this resistance and built around him a group of young coaches who became his disciples: men like Ron Greenwood, Bill Nicholson and Jimmy Hill. By the time he left the FA after sixteen years, the national coaching scheme had become firmly established and internationally admired, and the foundations had been laid for the World Cup success that followed in 1966.

He had a much lower public profile in his role as the first Director of the Sports Council. The creation of this new organisation revolutionised sport: providing funding for the development of sports facilities and coaching, and working with sports governing bodies and government at national and local level to provide facilities such as swimming pools and sports centres throughout the country.

Walter Winterbottom was one of a new meritocracy who had a profound effect on Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. He came from a working class home in Oldham, and paid for his education through scholarships and by playing professional football for Manchester United. In a sporting world still dominated by the Victorian creed of amateurism, he emerged as a new kind of public figure, a man who had seen sport from all sides: as a professional player, a teacher, a coach, a manager and a sports administrator.

As a person he touched the lives of many people. He was always full of praise and encouragement for those he worked with, whether it was players, coaches or chairman of sporting governing bodies. He was welcomed wherever he went by people who always wanted to know his views, especially if it was about a football match. His opinions, whether they were about football, sports administration or international affairs, were always totally his own and uninfluenced by the popular view. He was a man who could walk with kings, nor lose the common touch, a person equally at home talking to players, managers, FA councillors, or leaders in business and government.

Although he had a very high public profile and great success in his life, those that knew him well would say that he was a man who was best known not for what he did, but how he made you feel.