Jock Stein - The father of Scottish football

Scotland is a country that borders England. Like the rest of Britain, Scotland too is football crazy. But today, Scottish football is like the poor cousin of English football and fans in Scotland are hardly able to celebrate European success. But it was different earlier; Ferguson’s Aberdeen were a regular threat in Europe and teams like Rangers and Dundee too managed to reach the later stages in European competition. Managers like Bill Shankly and Sir Matt Busby were Scottish and managed Liverpool and Manchester United respectively, to breathtaking success. But if there was one team who introduced Scottish football to the world, it was Celtic. Fans outside Scotland, though, have forgotten a name that literally built the identity of Scottish football. A name that formed a formidable triumvirate of Scottish managers with Shankly and Busby. A colossus in the history of the game, Jock Stein was the man who made football beautiful.

Stein was a man who literally rose from the ground. He worked as a coal miner early in his life and like thousands of others, he used football as his way out and had a mildly successful career with Celtic before an injury forced him into early retirement. He came into management, and after managing Dunfermline and Hibernian, he was appointed Celtic manager in 1965. The rest, as they say, is history.

Stein started a phenomenon that has till date not been matched by any club in any country. He led Celtic to 9 consecutive Scottish titles, and had he done nothing else in his life, his name would have been secured in the history books forever. But reading through various accounts, one gets to know that Stein was hardly a man to rest on his laurels.

Stein was a manager who never went to coaching school but was the standard against whom managers like Ferguson and Paisley measured themselves. An old-school manager, Stein did not believe in managing players; he believed in managing people. He had worked in the underground coal pits until the age of 27 and undoubtedly that gave him an edge in understanding people of varied natures. But it was not just his man-management skills that made him great.

He is generally credited with developing a tactical sense in British football. He was a tactical genius and was adept at using systems that promoted his team’s strengths while exploiting his opponent’s weaknesses. He was the first person who changed his team’s tactics during games and his players had been trained hard enough to respond to it. Stein was a big man and a big personality in every sense. Like Mourinho today, he had the ability to instantly become the center of attention and by all accounts was a motivator par-excellence.

‘Jock’s teams were essentially more than the sum of their parts. His teams had almost a perfect balance of skills. Jock’s knowledge of the game was huge and everything he did tactically was attuned to the capacities of his players’. - Sir Alex (Managing my life)

But his greatest achievement was not the titles he won in Scotland. His greatest achievement was winning the European cup in 1967. He made Celtic the first British team to win a European Cup. As if that was not enough, he did so against the mighty Inter Milan of Helenio Herrera, a team that took negative tactics to a whole new level and a team that was an expert at closing games once they got the lead. Stein beat the Catenaccio and was the first man to do so.

The most astonishing part of his legend, though, was that he did it with players who were all Scottish. To be more specific, he won the European cup with players who had all been born with a dozen miles of Celtic park. Only one player, Bobby Lennox, was an outsider and he too lived only at a distance of 30 miles (48 kms) from Celtic park. Now the world has seen talent produced by Ajax during the 1970s, Fergie’s Fledglings in the 1990s and are seeing the talent produced by La Masia take the world by storm. But it all pales in comparison to what Stein did. He essentially won the European cup with a Glasgow district eleven. Never before or after in the history of football has such a prestigious trophy been blitzed away by such concentrated local talent.

“There is not a prouder man on God’s Earth than me at this moment. Winning was important, aye, but it was the way that we have won that has filled me with satisfaction. We did it by playing football. Pure, beautiful, inventive football. There was not a negative thought in our heads. Inter played right into our hands; it’s so sad to see such gifted players shackled by a system that restricts their freedom to think and to act. Our fans would never accept that sort of sterile approach. Our objective is always to try to win with style.” - (Jock Stein, 1967)

Style was indeed Jock’s buzzword. If there were two things Jock’s Celtic always had, it was style and temperament. He won 25 trophies during his 12 seasons in charge and led Celtic to another final in 1970 but lost to Feynoord. Sadly though, he was neglected by the Celtic administration and in desperation, had to go seek employment at Leeds. But here too he left after 44 days.

Stein was then made coach of Scotland and he led them to two world cups. In 1982, they were unlucky to be eliminated in the group stage of the finals, on goal difference. The quest for qualification to the 1986 world cup came down to a match against Wales at Cardiff. Scotland only needed a draw to get through and they achieved it. But tragedy struck and Jock Stein, the greatest British manager at that point in time, collapsed on the pitch with a heart attack that took his life. Stein had lived for the game and it was perhaps fitting that he breathed his last on a football field.

Scottish football had lost its greatest servant, and even though Stein passed away, his ideas found many followers. His views emphasizing on wing play, on playing two strikers upfront, on retaining possession, on playing at a high tempo with quick players lived on and to this day build the cornerstone of successful teams, Manchester United being the most notable amongst them. Ferguson was the assistant to Stein for the qualifiers to the 1986 world cup, and Stein’s imprint on United is obvious for the world to see. Ferguson summed Stein’s death perfectly in his autobiography – he wrote, “the silence was as if the king had died. In footballing terms, the king had died”.