The three hours I spent interviewing Terry Paine were steeped in the blood and sweat of the game. They were the kind of conversations rare in football these days – like the benefits of learning ball control with a tennis ball on the streets. It was football with laughter – full of the human frailties exposed by the beautiful game; rather than the vogue, yet false, notion of it as a cross between an academic subject and a computer game.
Paine is the sort of player that England used to be famous for: passionate about the game, down-to-earth, with that openness and innate decency born of growing up in a small town – Winchester, just north of Southampton in Hampshire. It is only that steely glint in his piercing blue eyes that reminds you that you wouldn’t stand a chance in a rough 50/50 tackle.
The bright sunshine on this winter morning, at a table outside an airy Rivonia café in Johannesburg, contrasts with a journey back to the dark days of vicious tackles on mud heaps amid the smokestacks and factories of industrial England. This is where Paine honed his craft as one of the fastest, toughest, trickiest and most enduring wingers England ever produced. He played 19 times for England, scoring seven goals, remarkably as a second division player. Paine won a World Cup in 1966, earned an MBE from the Queen and scores of scars along the way.
“In those days any tackle below the neck was allowed,” he chuckles. “But I never got seriously injured because I could jump.”
Paine’s trade as a professional footballer built a career that straddles the foggy days of bleak, windswept, terraces, where the fans had cigarettes in their hands instead of cell phones, to the glossy, money mad, 21st century game. He played 713 games for Southampton, the club where he began as a wide-eyed teenager, scoring 160 goals in 18 years.
The Premier League club made him honorary president, in 2012, and flies him from Africa for games in another world to the rough, tough one he knew at Southampton. In Paine’s playing days, a pre-match meal was steak, chips, a cup of tea and a slice of toast. In those days there were five people, including the manager, working at the club – now there are 300.
<blockquote>“What you have got to remember is it is business now, and big business. The sport is no longer the sport you and I knew and loved.”</blockquote>
At Southampton’s St Mary’s Stadium there is a swimming pool next to the dressing room with underwater cameras so physiotherapists can study injuries. The club uses special soap powder for washing the kit that reduces the chance of allergies or rashes. Every day, doctors swab the mouths of the players to see whether they are sick.
“If you sneeze nowadays they don’t play you – the medical side has really taken over. The big question is why are players getting so many injuries with all the modern equipment and pitches you’d want to carpet your front room with? No one can work it out.”
St Mary&#8217;s Stadium is a carpeted, cosseted world with one of the best youth academies in Europe that has produced a string of internationals, including Adam Lallana, Theo Walcott, Gareth Bale, Wayne Bridge and Luke Shaw.
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When Paine was a talented 16-year-old playing for Winchester City, in the 1950s, there was no such thing as an academy. His father was a welder for British Rail and the young Paine spent a year as an office runner there before signing up for an apprenticeship in the body building shop in Eastleigh, a few miles out of Southampton, constructing railway carriages.
“I would have made the worst body builder, I was absolutely useless; football came to my rescue there,” laughs Paine.
<div id="attachment_33050" style="width: 264px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-33050" class=" wp-image-33050" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/525723610-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="254" height="338" />Terry Paine gets presented to the crowd, during the World Cup qualifier between England and Andorra, as one of the members of the winning squad of the 1966 World Cup (Photo by AMA/Corbis via Getty Images)</div>
It was a colleague in the railway body shop that proved the catalyst for Paine’s career. Arsenal called  Paine to London for a trial and a fellow worker, a die-hard Southampton fan, phoned club manager Ted Bates to say he was about to miss out on what the newspapers, these days, would call a teenage sensation. What followed could have led to a court case in the uptight world of modern football.
“Ted Bates got in myself and another player, Colin Holmes, and locked the office door and said he wouldn’t open until we signed. Time was getting on and we were both starving so we signed just to get out.”
Bates sent a cheque for £25 to Winchester City to seal the transfer. Paine’s signing on fee was £10. He spent it on a bright red jersey on one of his first games for the reserves, in the Hampshire League, against Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
Money was scarce for the players, even though most clubs were pulling crowds in tens of thousands. The maximum wage was £20 in the winter and £17 in the summer; it wouldn’t have mattered if you had the dash of Ronaldo, you could have been paid the same as a loyal, lumbering, defender for Sheffield Wednesday.
“We always hoped we would play Ipswich just before Christmas because the Cobbold family that owned the club used to give all the players a turkey. In those days we struggled to buy a chicken for Christmas,” Paine recalls.
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This penury was one of the reasons hundreds of English footballers agreed to go on strike in January 1961. The vote among the members of the newly-formed Professional Footballers’ Association – the trade union for players – was 694 for and 18 against.
Paine and his Southampton teammates went to the pub across the road from the ground and voted 8-7 in favor of the strike to be staged on January 14, 1961. The Football League held firm saying removing the maximum wage would send many clubs to the wall. But the league caved in and, on January 18, the maximum wage was lifted.
“They could see the damage it was going to cause; it was no skin off their nose because it was the clubs that had to pay,” says Paine.
One of the first to cash in was the late <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/oct/20/newsstory.sportobituaries" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Johnny Haynes</a>, who played for Durban City in South Africa near the end of his career, the then captain of Fulham and England. His chairman and music hall comedian Tommy Trinder, as many believe in a publicity stunt, said he would pay Haynes £100 a week if the maximum wage was lifted. The day after, Haynes was in the boardroom and got his money.
Paine got his money too – £35 a week and spent his heavier pay packet on a Renault Dauphine, even though he couldn’t drive.
“The chief of police, who was a Southampton supporter, phoned the club and said: ‘Tell Terry Paine to pass his test, we know he is driving and doesn’t have a licence’. Weeks later, I passed.”
Innocent times maybe. But even then the big clubs were winking at corruption. It is still referred to as “tapping up” – the illegal approach to players without the knowledge of their club.
One summer a manager, from one of the big clubs up north, knocked at Paine’s door in Winchester.
“He pops up outside my house and says: ‘Oh Terry, I was on holiday down here and I thought I would come and see you’,” chuckles Paine.
Tottenham Hotspur, and its assistant manager Harry Evans, couldn’t leave Paine alone. Manager Bill Nicholson looked to strengthen his side, in the 1960/61 season, as it strove to become the first club in the 20th century to do the league and cup double.
“Harry Evans would be waiting outside at away games, whispering in my ear. It was all illegal but nowadays they have agents so it doesn’t matter.”
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Football agents and their vast fees they charge stick in Paine’s craw, as well as mine. Money that could keep a score of lower division clubs afloat. On this morning there is uproar in the English newspapers about the agent of Manchester United player, Paul Pogba, who charged £41 million to handle the move from Juventus.
“It probably took a few phone calls and a couple of meetings,” says Paine as he shakes his head.
<blockquote>“A line has to be drawn… All the clubs must get together and say ‘right we are going to cap this, don’t pay more than £20 million in a deal. But you know it’s a business now and the agents will say ‘if you don’t want to do the deal, we will go to Real Madrid’.”</blockquote>
Paine was one of the pathfinders for the highly-paid, sports car-driving, product-endorsing footballer of today. He first came to South Africa with fellow World Cup winner Bobby Charlton’s guest team, in 1979, and made his home in Johannesburg, in 1984, where he was offered a job as a football coach. These days he is a football pundit for a sports TV channel and often comments on players at the highest level, with half his talent, who earn more in a month than he did in more than 20 years.
“That’s always difficult; you have to be careful not to over criticize. You always try to give your honest opinion.”
His final verdict on the money-dominated business that is football?
“If I was playing now I would be a multi-millionaire… I think the players I played with would have thrived in the modern era – I wonder whether modern players would have thrived in our era?”
Spot on, from the king of the pin-point cross.

The Day Football Crossed To Business

He sweated on English pitches, he sweated on African pitches; he broke records and won a World Cup, but on the proudest day of his life he stood in the middle of St Mary’s Stadium, the home ground of English Premier League side Southampton. It was the moment he was made honorary president of the club that he made 815 league appearances for.
Five minutes later, Terry Paine watched from the comfort of his comfy corporate seat as Southampton goalkeeper, Arthur Boric, dropped the ball in the penalty area causing a mad scramble. A few seconds later, a fan sent an SMS: ‘Mr President, change the f&#8212;ing goalkeeper’.
“Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into now?” thought Paine.
It’s all part of the rich tapestry that is being president of Southampton. This season, Paine will make a 13,000km journey, leaving his home in Rivonia, Johannesburg, at the crack of dawn on his way to a football match. He lands at Heathrow airport, then a chauffeur drives him to his seat in the stands. On match days, it’s his job to win the hearts of businesspeople in the corporate boxes.
“The nice thing is I can say, listen I want to go to the Liverpool game, and they automatically get me into the boardroom there. This is an inner sanctum where there is no media or public. You’d be surprised at what you learn there. It’s the heart of business now, sport goes out the window… and it’s all about survival,” he says.
It’s a fitting final chapter to a story that began 57 years ago, just an hour’s drive from Southampton. The club spotted him dazzling on the wing for Winchester City and signed him. In 1956, at the age of 17, Paine made his debut in professional football. A distinguished career led him to the 1966 World Cup, where Paine played against Mexico. The ball hit him in the face in an era when there were no substitutes. He was pulled off, slapped around and then told to get on with it. All Paine remembers is waking up on the physio table, in the changing room, after playing the whole game with concussion. England won 2-0 and Paine can’t remember a minute of it.
It is almost an understatement to say it was a different world back then. The tournament directors decided to give the 11 English winners £22,000 in prize money. The players divided the money equally within the 22-man-squad. It proved a 43-year wait for Paine’s medal. In those days only those who played in the final got a medal. In 2009, then British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, handed over the medal.
“Nowadays you would expect a World Cup side, with all the spin-offs and sponsors, to collect £3-4 million,” says Paine.
In his latter years, Paine played for Hereford United and Cheltenham Town notching up 937 matches as a professional.
Paine fought for an end to the minimum wage in football, even though it came a bit too late for him. Paine watches over players, who will earn more in one afternoon than he would have seen in a lifetime in a world away from agents, mobile phones and modeling contracts.
When Paine started playing professionally he was paid £17 pounds a week. It was a pretty penny he says, compared to his father, who earned £3.50.
“My match bonuses were incredible; £1 for a draw and two for a win,” he says.
It was in the 1960s that Paine along with former Fulham player and head of the Professional Football Association, Jimmy Hill, urged players to strike for money. The problem was whether you played for Manchester United or Hartlepool United you could earn a pittance and no more.
“I remember Tommy Trinder, a famous comedian and chairman of Fulham Football Club, saying ‘I am going to pay our English captain Johnny Haynes £100 a week if it was lifted’. Well the day it was lifted Haynes came to collect. We were the pathfinders to where they are today,” says Paine.
Paine believes footballers deserve every penny they get. The problem he has is when clubs spend 90% of their money on players when they should be thinking about club finances.
“I think the guys in the Bundesliga have got it right. They open their books at the beginning of the season and declare how much they can spend. If a club does well like Bayern, they can spend €25 million, if they do badly they can only spend €15,000,” he says.
Paine also sees the wealthy generation of footballers as having lost that dash of old-school flair.
“Take South America for example and Brazil they are never going to be the side they were with Pele, pure and simple, because all the players when they used to play in South America, had the flavor of the Samba. Now they go and play in Europe, a little bit of that goes out. In some ways the game hasn’t quite got flair. It’s a good thing we got the Messi’s and the Ronaldo’s of today. But I don’t think there is the individual flair coming out of the players, in our day there seemed to be so many,” he says.
Paine’s career was forged in England and seasoned in Africa. His first taste of Africa was with the Bobby Charlton XI team, in 1979, where he played alongside England’s retired internationals including England World Cup winning captain, Bobby Moore. Paine says he will never forget walking onto the pitch at the Orlando Stadium in Soweto and seeing 80,000 screaming fans, with another 80,000 trying to jump the fence from outside. In those days he was blown away by the passion of the fans on the streets. On a minor note, he will never forget the R9 breakfast buffet in the Alengani Hotel in Durban, paid for by his £1-a-day budget.
Paine was captivated by Africa. He left Hereford United to coach South African amateur players with Robertsham Football Club in Johannesburg. He also had stints with Bedfordview Country Club, Witbank Black Aces and Wits University.
“Some of these guys were the best players I have ever seen, even better than in European leagues, all they needed was a bit of organization and they were unbeatable,” says Paine.
This is where football in Africa falls short he says. He was disappointed by African football at the FIFA 2010 World Cup.
“They have so much talent within their ranks they just can’t seem to get it together. It comes to organization and planning for the future. Ghana, Zambia and sides like them do produce players. It has been disappointing that they haven’t kicked on to win a World Cup,” he says.
Football has taken on a more professional approach since Paine’s day. In the very same place where he grew up playing Sunday 22-a-side matches, at King George V’s fields, is the Southampton Junior Academy.
In Paine’s day you were lucky if you got an orange at half time. These days, the young stars of England have their mouths swabbed by experts to see whether they are sick. Their shirts are washed in non-allergic soap. From the age of eight, players run out on a manicured pitch fit for Wembley.
Paine is adamant over certain aspects of the game. He thinks Manchester United’s George Best was better, by far, than Eric Cantona. When it comes to Africa, the best are: George Weah; Abedi Pele; Kalusha Bwalya; Roger Milla; Gary Bailey and Yaya Toure.
When he is at home, he likes hacking at golf balls and flicking through his memories in photographs and books. Most of his memorabilia has been given away or sold, he says. This includes his World Cup medal, which went on auction in 2011, where it sold for £25,000.
Since he became president of Southampton, the fan mail has flowed in to Rivonia. Many ask for an autograph, which Paine is happy to sign, but gripes a little about the R460 ($46) cost of sending them back. If you are a president and a legend it’s just another day—but what about that goalkeeper?

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