‘The HG Wells of football’: How Terry Venables became a cultural icon

When retirement beckons for a footballer, there are a few very well-trodden paths for their second act. If they’re chatty and charismatic (cynics might say that’s not always a prerequisite), it’s presenting and punditry; if they want to keep a hand in the game, it’s coaching and management. Terry Venables, who has died at the age of 80 after a long illness, did both – but beyond that, his post-pro career was filled with more unexpected side hustles.

Some, such as his fondness for singing Sinatra covers and his stint as the owner of the Kensington members club Scribes West (where he’d often be found belting out said Sinatra covers on karaoke), are well-documented; others, like his forays into writing detective novels, which eventually inspired an ITV series (more on that later) and creating his own board game, less so. The former England manager, who very nearly brought football home back in 1996, was a bit of a polymath. “I couldn’t envisage a situation where football took up every minute of my adult life,” he admitted in Born to Manage, his 2014 autobiography. “It meant everything to me, but I found I could be successful at that and still be involved with other things.”

As a youngster, Venables was encouraged by his parents to pursue music, and at the age of 17, had to choose between football and singing. The teenage Terry, already signed to Chelsea’s youth team, won a talent contest at Butlins in Clacton, Essex, and was invited to return in September for the grand final. Chelsea banned him from doing so – it would’ve clashed with the football season – but he still managed to sneak in a chance to perform with big band leader Joe Loss and his orchestra at Hammersmith Palais soon afterwards. “I got some mixed reviews,” he later said of the gig.

It wasn’t the end for his crooning. In 1974, towards the end of his spell at Queen’s Park Rangers, he released a cover of “What Do You Want to Make Those Eyes at Me For?”. In grainy footage from The Russell Harty Show, you can see Venables, dressed in the deeply Seventies combo of a yellow shirt and brown cord blazer, serenading his deeply awkward QPR teammates with this old standard; every single one of them looks like they’d rather be filling out a tax return or undergoing a minor medical procedure.

His version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” appeared on the Bend It! football compilation album in 1992 (alongside such gems as Kevin Keegan’s 1972 single “It Ain’t Easy” and the audio from Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough’s Shredded Wheat advert). Then, after his tenure as England manager, came his attempt at a World Cup song in 2002, collaborating with the boyband Rider (it wasn’t the England team’s official anthem; that honour went to Ant and Dec’s “We’re on the Ball”). “England Crazy” – sample lyric: “Everyone loves you baby, we’re all going England crazy” – had an “X Factor does Big Band week” vibe, but only managed to make it to 46 in the charts.

Still, it didn’t put him off having another shot. In 2010, a few years after he assisted Steve McClaren during England’s ill-fated Euro 2008 qualifying campaign, Venables recorded The Sun’s World Cup song, a cover of Elvis Presley’s “If I Can Dream”, which also featured Ian Wright and Harry Redknapp on backing vocals.

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Music was far from his only extra-curricular interest. Venables’ entrepreneurial streak yielded mixed results. He and a few fellow players briefly put money into a West End tailors, but the company later filed for bankruptcy (“We had good suits and bad debts,” said the sports writer Ken Jones, his friend and business partner). And he was also the creative mind behind The Thingamywig, a hat with a hairpiece attached, designed to allow women to go out and about while wearing their curlers underneath. Compared to these madcap schemes, devising a football-themed board game The Manager made much more sense. In what was essentially an analogue ancestor of Football Manager, players received a multi-million budget to manage their club (doled out in Monopoly-style fake cash, bearing the Spanglish stamp “Banco de Venables”) while keeping on top of the demands of fans and shareholders.

And then there was writing. During his time at QPR, Venables met the Booker Prize-nominated novelist Gordon Williams. “One day we got talking about doing some writing together and the next thing we were working on some books,” he told the Sunday Post. “After I finished training at lunchtime I used to go over to his office in London and we would spend the afternoon dreaming up stories.” Their first collaboration was They Used to Play on Grass in 1972, a novel imagining the future of the game (“Jesus, son, you’re the HG Wells of football,” legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly told Venables upon its publication). When the BBC tried to find the nation’s favourite book in its Big Read poll more than 30 years later, They Used to Play on Grass came in 172nd place, beating Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.

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After trying their hands at horror with The Bornless Keeper, Venables and Williams then collaborated on three detective novels featuring Cockney private eye James Hazell, an ex-Met Police detective who introduces himself as “the biggest bastard who ever pushed your bell-button”.  Annoyed that their initial effort had been “dismissed as a gimmick”, Venables explained in his memoir, the pair published these later novels under the pseudonym PB Yuill, but they dropped a few nods to their true identities into the work: the first Hazell story, Hazell Plays Solomon, features a “fine old legal firm” called “Venables, Venables, Williams and Gregory”.

Writing, Venables later reflected, “forced me to concentrate on a project other than football”, a process that “could not have been more enjoyable or worthwhile”. A few years later in 1978, the small screen adaptation of the Hazell series aired on ITV, with actor Nicholas Ball in the lead role. “After the earnestness of most modern television detectives, Hazell is like being curled up with a good read,” The Times declared, praising his “world-weary Cockney asides” and likening him to Michael Caine’s Alfie.

A career as eclectic as Venables’ is still pretty anomalous in top-level football. It’s hard to imagine, say, Gareth Southgate developing a true crime podcast (although Glenn Hoddle did dress up as a sentient grandfather clock to perform on The Masked Singer). According to his biographer Mihir Bose, Venables was once branded “the Leonardo da Vinci of the league”. It’s not the snappiest of nicknames (it’s no wonder it didn’t stick, when headline writers had “El Tel” at their disposal), but there’s a kernel of truth to it: Venables was certainly a renaissance man.