David Pleat is talking, for the first time in public, about his recent departure from Tottenham. Since 2010 he had been a consultant scout at the club he had once managed, spotting and bringing in players like Jan Vertonghen, Dele Alli and Ben Davies.
But he was told by the club chairman at the end of last season that his services were no longer required.
“Daniel Levy called me in and said, ‘you know it’s all data driven now, we don’t need eyes and ears’. What a nonsense. I didn’t argue. He’s in charge. Actually, I have huge respect for him. The legacy of the new stadium and training ground will always be there. That is all down to him and his drive.”
He pauses for a moment and smiles.
“Although they’ve won nothing for years.”
Now approaching his 80th birthday, after spending a lifetime negotiating football’s ever-changing landscape, Pleat says this is by no means the end for him. He is not the retiring sort and since the start of the new season he has continued as he always has: watching at least three live matches a week, his eyes and ears ever alert.
“Two or three people have spoken to me about things. We’ll see. But I’m not finished. How can I step away? When it comes to football, I’m afraid I’m a total obsessive.”
Pleat is talking to the Telegraph in a hotel in Watford. As he arrives, he reveals he once met up there with Howard Kendall to complete a deal. Though you suspect, given his longevity in the game, there is barely a hotel in the south of England that has not played host to him negotiating a deal. He is here this time, however, to talk about his newly published autobiography, Just One More Goal, its title chosen as a four word summation of his approach.
“I’d never park the bus,” he says of his managerial philosophy (though he is sufficiently old-school never to describe it as such). “If I’m 1-0 up, I want to be 2-0. Always want one more goal. I don’t want to sit back and counterattack. I never played that way. I could never understand ‘1-0 to the Arsenal’. The same with [Jose] Mourinho or [Antonio] Conte’s approach. My edict was entertainment. The game is about glory. That Tottenham thing stuck in my mind, since I saw them in the double 60-61 season.”
And he reels off, without the slightest hesitation, the entire Tottenham side – from Brown through Blanchflower to Allen – he saw that day.
“You can’t compare eras, who knows how they’d survive now. But I do know one thing: that was the best side I ever saw play.”
‘The most important thing to flatter the chairman’s wife’
Almost from the first time he kicked a ball Pleat was fascinated with tactics and management. At 18, as a promising junior at Nottingham Forest, he took his first coaching certificate. Plagued with injury, his was not the most stellar of playing CVs as he moved across the country, from Forest to Luton to Exeter and back to Peterborough (“I always say I had less a career, more geography A level”).
But when, at the age of 26, he was obliged to retire after a rival player stamped on his back, he found his true métier: in the dugout when he was appointed manager of non-league Nuneaton Town.
“I got the job because of Peter Taylor, Brian Clough’s assistant,” he recalls. “When he was at Burton he took the job with Cloughie at Hartlepool and got a local removal firm run by a chap called Sam Downes to move his stuff. Turns out, he didn’t pay him. The poor chap complained. Taylor said: ‘Don’t worry son, I’ll do you a favour down the line.’ Anyhow, Downes was on the board at Nuneaton. And do you know what the favour was? Recommending me to be the manager. I remember saying to Taylor: ‘How do you know I can do it?’ He said: ‘Of course you can. Most managers out there are crap, you’ll be all right.’”
Pleat was more than all right. From there he went to Luton Town, as a coach under the manager Harry Haslam.
“He was some character,” he remembers. “He told me the most important thing a manager had to do is always to flatter the chairman’s wife, tell her she looks lovely.”
‘Man City chairman told me they’d never recover’
If not following Haslam’s advice to the letter, Pleat nevertheless quickly understood that managing upwards was a vital part of the job. Not least at Luton, where he was appointed manager after Haslam left, by David Evans, the politically motivated controversialist chairman who, in the 80s, banned away fans at Kenilworth Road.
“Horrible man,” Pleat says of Evans. “Nasty. You should have seen the obituaries when he died. Really scathing stuff.”
Nonetheless he was able to manage upwards sufficiently to stay in charge for eight years, taking the club into the First Division and signing a long line of fine players, from Brian Stein to Peter Nicholas. Though the thing most people remember about his time at Luton is that image of him conducting a one-man invasion of the pitch at Maine Road on the final day of the season in 1983, after his team had just won with a last-second goal to stay in the top flight. He was less eyes and ears that day, more grey slip on shoes and suit jacket flapping, as he raced, arms outstretched, to embrace his team captain Brian Horton.
“Oh, do we have to?” he says, when pressed to recall the details of what still counts as the most glorious managerial victory celebration in football history. But, being David Pleat, a man with a magnificent portfolio of anecdotes, when pressed he is happy to remember.
“When I ran on the field like a whirling dervish, it was all the emotion of what that win meant,” he says. “Not just the fact we had avoided relegation at the very last. But the fact if we had gone down it would probably have been curtains for the club, financially.
“As it was we sent Manchester City down. I remember Peter Swales [the then City chairman] came up to me afterwards, in his platform shoes, his hair with that comb-over, and he said: ‘We’ll never recover from this.’ This was Manchester City. Never recover? Yeah, right.”
‘It was nice when aesthetic football won’
Luton consolidated after that win, getting better all the time, playing quick, progressive, possession-based football under his direction. Pleat particularly enjoyed getting one over the local rivals Watford, then managed by Graham Taylor.
“Graham was a lovely man, a great friend. We played him 10 times when I was at Luton and beat him seven and that was important to me. He played direct football, and was very good at it. But let’s just say it was nice when aesthetic football won out over direct.”
Pleat’s mastery of aesthetic football took him from Luton to Spurs, where, for one season in 1986-87, it reached its apex. Playing a five-man midfield including Glenn Hoddle and Ossie Ardiles, he took Spurs to third in the league and to the FA Cup final.
“I think I was a good creative coach going forward,” he says. “People said I didn’t do enough on defending. Maybe that was true.”
He left Spurs under a cloud after a tabloid sting on his private life (though the rumour at the time was that it was a convenience to allow the chairman to appoint Terry Venables). But he continued to practise his creative methods at Leicester City. That was a four-year sojourn he really enjoyed. Even the manner of his departure makes him smile years later.
“Terry Shipman was the chairman, lovely man, very nice to me. He rang me up and said: ‘I’ve got bad news. Unfortunately we had a board meeting and we’ve decided to make a change. I must tell you, I was right behind you, I didn’t want you to go. But you’ve got to go’. He then said: ‘but what’s far worse is, they want me out too.’”
He then had another four years at Luton, before returning to Tottenham in 1998 for a brief spell as caretaker. He took on the role twice more in his long association with the club, finally settling into his position seeking out new playing talent.
Leaving BBC radio was ‘pure ageism’
In his time in football Pleat has seen enormous change in the way things are organised behind the scenes. Not all of it for the good.
“There are so many processes. You recommend a player and it has to go through a recruitment person, then the head of recruitment, then the director of football, then the manager, then the chairman. But do you know who has the last say? The bank manager. I think there’s too many voices now. Peter Taylor once told me that when it comes to making a decision, two’s company three’s a crowd.”
While scouting he would often combine the job with working for BBC Radio 5 Live. He was a superb pundit, his ability to put things in historical context second to none. Not for the first time in his life, he believes he was let go from that role prematurely.
“Pure ageism,” he says.
Though in the latter years of his broadcasting career he was unable to devote as much time as he would have wished to caring for his wife Maureen, who was stricken with a degenerative form of motor neurone disease. She died in 2020. And part of the profits from his memoir will be donated to charities seeking a cure.
“I’m not expecting it to be a fortune,” he smiles. “But every little helps fighting that horrible disease.”
Not that there will be any copies available in the Tottenham club shop.
“They’re not selling it there, something to do with it not being through the club’s official publisher,” he says. “I asked Daniel if I could have a room there to launch it and do a presentation. He said he’d get back to me. I’ve not heard anything. It’s funny. Arsenal gave Bob Wilson a seat for life. They’re a classy club, Arsenal. Me, I was told I can get a ticket at Spurs subject to availability. Subject to availability. Ha! Mind you, Bob did much more for Arsenal than I ever did for Tottenham.”
There are plenty of Spurs supporters who might well argue with that suggestion.
Just One More Goal by David Pleat is published on September 12 by Biteback Publishing
