Trevor Francis - a prodigy and the harbinger of mega millions in football

Late England forward was first British player to attract £1m transfer deal, ushering in era of unprecedented riches for top players

Trevor Francis carried the burden of a hefty £1m transfer deal around for his whole playing career Reuters

The price tag almost always matters. Ask Eden Hazard, who in 2019 became the most expensive purchase in the history of Real Madrid, a club who have pierced the €100 million barrier for a single transfer fee more than most.

Hazard cost that much. He is currently unemployed, after four years in the capital of Spain spent looking increasingly burdened by the vast money that had been spent – with little yield – on him.

The price tag always seemed to follow around Trevor Francis, whose death at the age of 69 was announced on Monday. In the affectionate and admiring obituaries of Francis, the fact that he fetched a record-breaking price during his career is usually in the foreground.

Francis made a landmark transfer 40 years before Hazard, as the first footballer to move for £1 million when he joined Nottingham Forest, then a startlingly upwardly mobile team, from Birmingham City. It set a British record. He was to score the decisive goal in a European Cup final barely four months later, collect a second winners' medal in the same competition and played more than 50 times for England.

Yet there lingered around him the idea that he never consistently attained the peaks, the prolonged superstardom forecast for him first as a young tyro and then as the bearer of that £1 million price tag.

Take away the fee, and Francis might have been judged more generously. After all, he played the figurehead role in one of the most captivating fairytales in the story of the European Cup – now the Champions League – with Forest having added him to a squad that had only been promoted from England’s second tier less than two years before Francis headed in the only goal of the 1979 final against Malmo.

But the hefty fee meant he was viewed through a distinct lens than the lionised journeymen Forest players who upped their games and the inspirational manager, Brian Clough, who guided the so-called “Forest Miracle”.

Over his career as a striker – one intrepid enough to play in five different leagues, including Italy’s Serie A – and as a manager who enjoyed significant highlights in charge of Sheffield Wednesday, Francis often found himself obliged to reflect on his £1 million milestone and how the finances of elite football had swelled since one million in sterling seemed such an extravagant sum.

According to the Bank of England’s index of long-term inflation, £1 million in 1979 would buy you the equivalent of £4.7 million worth of goods or services in 2023. In the hyperinflationary economy of the world’s most popular sport, £4.7 million of today’s UK money buys you less than a 20th of Declan Rice, who this month set a new high for a British transfer with his £100 million move from West Ham United to Arsenal.

Rice is 24, as Francis was in early 1979. Rice is a central midfielder; Francis was an electric striker, a specialism generally valued more highly than mere midfield anchors.

Francis was to keep his value, too. Manchester City paid Forest around £1.2 million for him in 1981. In 2021, City would have needed to write 83 cheques of £1.2 million to buy Jack Grealish, City’s record transfer to date.

On the day Francis passed away, a bid of €300 million was being put to Paris Saint-Germain by Al Hilal of Saudi Arabia for Kylian Mbappe. Were that transfer to go through – Mbappe, in dispute with PSG, has his heart set not on Saudi Arabia’s Pro League but on Real Madrid – it would set a new global record, eclipsing the €222 million PSG paid Barcelona for Neymar in 2017.

The Francis legacy has many heirs, and one of them on a parallel path to his own. Francis had been a prodigy, given his first-team debut at Birmingham City at the age of 16. He held the record as that club’s youngest debutant until 2019, when it was overtaken by a dashing young midfielder named Jude Bellingham. Bellingham has since hurtled upwards in the same way Francis did, all the way, at the tender age of 19 to a €103 million move from Borussia Dortmund to Real Madrid earlier this summer.

On the day Francis, the precocious Birmingham City boy, the setter of legacy records, died, Bellingham, once of Birmingham, was making his debut for Madrid in a preseason friendly victory over AC Milan.

“It is rare to come across players of this quality,” beamed Madrid head coach Carlo Ancelotti about his performance. “He’s fantastic, and gives us something different.”

Not so long ago, Madrid felt the same of Hazard. Bellingham is aware of the precedent, the expectations, the burdens of his fee. But if he helps, as Francis did, to supply his new club with a European Cup in his first season, the weight of the pricetag will feel a little lighter.

Even if he does not, he can be sure that, soon enough, someone else will arrive at Madrid for an even bigger sum, because the game’s long inflationary spiral shows no sign of slowing.