The tragic tale of Kevin Beattie: why do footballers struggle so much after the final whistle?

Most top football clubs employ a “player liaison officer” – someone who attends to the every need of men who may earn more than £200,000 a week. You might think that if a player takes home that amount of money, he might have the resources to look after himself. But, no, the club takes care of the details, no matter how small, to ensure their gilded charges are not inconvenienced by the intrusion of the real world.

Some years ago, I was talking to the man who fulfilled the player liaison function at Manchester City. He told me that he would get calls at all times of the day or night: one player rang him up to ask him to place an order for a takeaway pizza, and another phoned him on Christmas Day to say that his Sky dish wasn’t getting a signal. My only thought when I heard these stories was to wonder what on earth these players do when their careers are over, when they have to start doing things for themselves.

Kevin Beattie

The afterlife of a professional footballer was brought to mind on reading the encomia for Kevin Beattie, who died at the weekend aged 64. Beattie was a giant in a previous age of football, a man who left his native Carlisle at the age of 15 clutching a pair of football boots in a brown paper bag to head for Ipswich Town, where he was promised a weekly wage of £5.

A rugged central defender, he served Ipswich with great distinction, winning an FA Cup winners’ medal and playing nine times for England. His manager Bobby Robson said that, after George Best, he was the best British player he had ever seen. He was nicknamed “Monster” by his teammates, but even those with seemingly impregnable physical attributes – he spent much of his time on the set of the feature film Escape to Victory taking on, and beating, Sylvester Stallone at arm-wrestling – occasionally succumb to the particular demands football places on the joints, and his knees gave up. He would have three cortisone injections just to get through a game.

Alcoholism

He played 296 times for Ipswich, but his body couldn’t take any more by the time he was 27, and he called time on his career. Like many players of his generation, he became a publican, not the best career choice for a man who had a troubled history with alcohol, and whose father was an irredeemable drunk. Beattie himself struggled with alcoholism and at the age of 37, was diagnosed with pancreatitis. A priest was called to administer the last rites.

He had financial help from the Professional Footballers’ Association, but was on benefits when he died of a heart attack on Sunday. Football people are incurably sentimental, and there will be an outpouring of emotion, particularly when Beattie’s ashes are scattered, as he requested, on Ipswich Town’s pitch.

But that should serve only to throw light on what happens to professional footballers after the final whistle. They can’t all be pundits. Were Beattie a player today, advances in medical science and pastoral care might have made his life different, but his wretched, salutary story highlights the fact that these modern-day bejewelled, tattooed demi-Gods are human beings just like the rest of us.