Robert Paisley (23 January 1919 – 14 February 1996) was an English professional football manager and player who played as a wing-half. He spent almost 50 years with Liverpool and is regarded as one of the greatest managers of all time. Reluctantly taking the job in 1974, he built on the foundations laid by his predecessor Bill Shankly and went on to become the most successful English manager in history. Paisley is the first of five managers to have won the European Cup three times. He is also one of five managers to have won the English top-flight championship as both a player and manager at the same club.
Paisley came from a small County Durham mining community and, in his youth, played for Bishop Auckland, before he signed for Liverpool in 1939. During the Second World War he served in the British Army, and could not make his Liverpool debut until 1946. In the 1946–47 season, he was a member of the Liverpool team that won the First Division title for the first time in 24 years. He was made club captain in 1951, and remained with Liverpool until he retired from playing in 1954.
He stayed with the club, and took on the two roles of reserve team coach and club physiotherapist. By this time, Liverpool had been relegated to the Second Division and its facilities were in decline. Shankly was appointed Liverpool manager in December 1959, and he promoted Paisley to work alongside him as his assistant in a management/coaching team that included Joe Fagan and Reuben Bennett. Under their leadership, the fortunes of Liverpool turned around dramatically and, in the 1961–62 season, the team gained promotion back to the First Division. Paisley filled an important role as tactician under Shankly's leadership, and the team won numerous honours during the next twelve seasons.
In 1974, Shankly retired as manager and, despite Paisley's own initial reluctance, he was appointed as Shankly's successor. He went on to lead Liverpool through a period of domestic and European dominance, winning twenty honours in nine seasons: six League Championships, three League Cups, six Charity Shields, three European Cups, one UEFA Cup and one UEFA Super Cup. He won honours at a rate of 2.2 per season, a rate surpassed only by Pep Guardiola. At the time of his retirement he had won the Manager of the Year Award a record six times. He retired from management in 1983 and was succeeded by Joe Fagan. He died in 1996, aged 77, after having Alzheimer's disease for several years.
Early life
Bob Paisley was born on Thursday 23 January 1919, in the small County Durham coal mining village of Hetton-le-Hole. Paisley described it as "a close-knit community where coal was king and football was religion". His father Sam was a miner and his mother Emily a housewife. They had four sons: Willie, Bob, Hugh and Alan in age order. On the day Paisley was born, 150,000 miners nationwide went on strike for a shorter working week. Paisley attended a local school until he was thirteen and, like his friends there, had to rely on soup kitchens to supplement a meagre diet. In 1926, during the General Strike when he was seven, he had to scramble over slag heaps to collect coal dust that his parents could mix with water to create a crude fuel. Life was difficult for working-class families and, as Paisley recalled: "We lived in a small terraced house, and although we never went short of life's essentials, there was never much money left over by the end of the week". Instead, he signed for Bishop Auckland before the 1937–38 season for three shillings and sixpence per match. He signed his contract and began an association that would last half a century. His signing on fee was £25 and his wages were £8 a week in the season and £6 a week during the summer. He recalled: "I was full of beans that day, but it was very quiet really. I was met at the station and after that long trek up Scotland Road in a tramcar, I found there were only one or two youngsters at the ground – Billy Liddell, Eddie Spicer and Ray Lambert. The rest had been recruited for the territorials". Paisley took part in 34 of these matches between 1939 and 1941, scoring ten goals.
Paisley was stationed at several camps throughout Great Britain including one at Rhyl. For a long time, he was stationed at a camp near Tarporley in Cheshire which was about thirty miles from Anfield. Stan Liversedge describes one occasion when Paisley was given clearance by the Army to play for Liverpool against Everton in the 1940 Liverpool Senior Cup final. To get there, he had to use his bicycle and cycle nearly the whole way. He left the bike in Birkenhead and hitched a lift through the Mersey Tunnel. After the match, he had to do the same journey in reverse to return to camp. Although it was a relatively unimportant match of local interest only, Paisley recalled that "an estimated 30,000 turned up". Everton, the reigning league champions, won the match 4–2. That was Paisley's first encounter with Everton. He got his revenge soon afterwards on 1 April 1940 when he played alongside Matt Busby and Billy Liddell in a depleted Liverpool team who "sprang a surprise" by defeating Everton 3–1 at Goodison Park.
John Keith recounts that Paisley's football skills saved him from a posting to the Far East which would inevitably have resulted in his becoming a prisoner of war of the Japanese. He was captain of the 73rd's team and, when his battery was due to be posted, his commanding officer transferred him to another battery so that he could remain in Britain and lead the regimental team. His old unit was subsequently overrun by the Japanese. While he was in Egypt, Paisley became interested in horse racing through friendship with jockey Reg Stretton and trainer Frank Carr. Paisley learned to ride himself and he retained this interest after the war, often studying form in his spare moments.
He was stationed south of Cairo and learned to drive a 15 cwt. truck. More importantly, he had a month's training on firing anti-tank guns, a skill he needed in the desert as a member of the Eighth Army in Operation Crusader which relieved the Siege of Tobruk. During periods of leave from the conflict, Paisley returned to Cairo where he was mostly involved in team sports, not only football but also cricket and hockey. He represented the Combined Services football team as well as playing for his regiment. Paisley was involved in the Second Battle of El Alamein and subsequently fought his way across North Africa until the final defeat of the Afrika Korps in 1943. He only suffered an injury once when he was temporarily blinded by sand sprayed into his face by explosive bullets fired from an aircraft during a Luftwaffe attack on his unit.
In 1943, Paisley went with the Eighth Army into Sicily and then into Italy. Whilst he was on active service in Italy he received the news that his younger brother Alan, aged fifteen, had died at home from scarlet fever and diphtheria. In June 1944, Paisley took part in the liberation of Rome and rode into the city on top of a tank, an event he recalled 33 years later when Liverpool won the 1977 European Cup final in Rome's Stadio Olimpico. Paisley's regiment moved on to Florence where they encamped at ACF Fiorentina's Stadio Artemio Franchi. In Florence, Paisley saw boxing exhibitions by Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson which generated another sporting interest and one for which he and Bill Shankly shared a passion while they worked together.
Paisley finally returned to England in 1945 and was stationed at Woolwich Arsenal until he was demobbed. Shortly before that, he met his future wife Jessie, a schoolteacher, on a train at Maghull. She recalled her father being unimpressed that she had met a soldier who was a professional footballer in civilian life so she added that Paisley had worked as a bricklayer too. Her father said: "Oh, that's a proper job so that's alright then". On 17 July 1946, Bob and Jessie were married in Liverpool at All Souls Church, Springwood. They raised a family of two sons and one daughter: Robert, Graham and Christine. The family always lived in Liverpool and Jessie outlived Bob by sixteen years until she died in the early hours of 8 February 2012 as the result of a heart infection, aged 96.
Liverpool playing career
In the 1945–46 season, the Football League decided not to revive the championship programme as, with the war only recently concluded, many players were still in the forces and travel could still be difficult to arrange. Instead they organised North and South divisions on a geographical basis to keep travel to a minimum and enable clubs to re-establish themselves without the pressure of official competition. The FA Cup was staged but all ties up to the quarter-final stage were played over two legs to increase the number of meaningful matches in the season.
Paisley eventually made his official debut on 5 January 1946 in Liverpool's first post-war competitive match, which was an FA Cup 3rd round, 1st leg away match at Sealand Road, the home ground of Chester. Liverpool won the game 2–0. Paisley's league debut would be against Chelsea at Anfield on 7 September 1946, a game Liverpool would win 7-4. His first goal would come on 1 May 1948 in a League game at Anfield, against Wolverhampton Wanderers. Paisley's 22nd-minute strike along with a Jack Balmer goal in the 80th were enough to help the Reds win 2–1.
In the first full season after the war, 1946–47, he helped Liverpool to their first league title in 24 years, making 34 appearances in the 42-match season. He remained a fixture in the side, appearing in 30+ matches in 1947–48 and 1948–49 and 28 in 1949–50, a season of both highs and lows for Paisley who scored the opening goal of a 2–0 FA Cup semi-final win over Merseyside rivals Everton only to be dropped for the final against Arsenal, the club's first appearance at Wembley. Paisley later said that the experience stood him in good stead when it came to telling players they were not going to play in big games as he knew how they felt. Paisley became club captain the following season.
Coaching career
After retiring in 1954, Paisley joined the Liverpool back room staff as a self-taught physiotherapist and was said to have the knack of being able to diagnose a player's injury just by looking at them. He later became the reserve team coach and then, in August 1959 when Albert Shelley retired, first team trainer. The arrival of Bill Shankly as manager in December 1959 transformed the fortunes of the club and Paisley recalled that "from the moment he arrived, we got on like a house on fire". Under Phil Taylor, training had been the traditional slog of physical exercise and road running. Shankly insisted on training which was "based on speed and using the ball". Fagan is credited with converting a storage area at Anfield into a "common room" for the coaches and it became the now-legendary Boot Room. Shankly began a Liverpool tradition, later upheld by Paisley and Fagan, of holding daily meetings in there to discuss strategy, tactics, training and players.
Training strategy was key to Liverpool's success in the 1960s and afterwards. There was more to it than using the ball and playing five-a-side matches. Influenced by Paisley, Fagan and Bennett, Shankly cottoned on to the importance of allowing players to cool down after training before having a bath or shower. Paisley, as a trained physiotherapist, argued that a person needs to cool down for about forty minutes after heavy exercise because, if they go into a bath while still sweating, their pores remain open and they are more susceptible to chills and strains. Fagan had advocated getting changed at Anfield before going via team bus to the club's training complex at Melwood. They would return to bath, change and eat. This routine satisfied the need for a cooling down period and had the added advantages of encouraging team bonding during the two journeys and ensuring familiarity with Anfield, an important need for them as home team. Everton, by contrast, did everything at their Bellefield training complex and their players only went to Goodison Park for home matches every two weeks or so. Shankly claimed that the cooling down period resulted in "an astonishing lack of injuries over many seasons". For example, in 1965–66 when Liverpool won the league title and reached the European Cup Winners Cup final, they only used fourteen players in the entire season.
Shankly's biographer Stephen F. Kelly describes Paisley as "the perfect number two: never a threat to Shankly but always offering wise counsel".]]
Following victory in the 1974 FA Cup final, Shankly unexpectedly announced his retirement; the Liverpool directors appointed Paisley as his replacement in the hope of maintaining continuity. Though initially reluctant to take on the role, Paisley became a huge success and, apart from his first season, won at least one major trophy in each of his nine years as manager.