Patrick Barclay, who has died aged 77, was among the very best football writers of the last half-century. And as an all-round communicator on the game he was even nearer the pinnacle.
He spent 20 years on the Guardian and was shaped by this newspaper, and another six close to home on the Observer. In time he worked for every newspaper company at the respectable end of Fleet Street and built a new career as a pundit on Sky TV that made him instantly recognisable to supporters inside the grounds.
But he had talked about football pretty much all his life. It is rare to find a journalist quite so in love with his speciality. His insights into the game allowed him to be taken seriously by managers and the hierarchy. Yet he could also chat about anything to anyone else, and talk hind legs off donkeys, too, without – except when he moaned about subeditors – ever becoming a bore. Even his latter-day TV fan base, calling, if he passed by, “Oi, Paddy, what did you make of that?” would get a proper answer. He was “Paddy” to just about everyone, and he is irreplaceable.
He was born in London to Guy Deghy, a Hungarian-born actor, and Patricia. The relationship did not last, and both Patricia and Paddy soon moved to Dundee, where they took the name Barclay. The boy soon acquired, and never lost, both a Scottish accent and a love for Dundee FC (not to be confused with Dundee United) who, when he was 14, gave him the thrill of winning the Scottish League for the first and last time. Two years later he left High School of Dundee and became a trainee on the local Evening Telegraph. Thus began a tortuous journey vaguely in the directions of both the south and the top.
He was still barely out of his teens when he got a job as a subeditor on the Guardian in Manchester. But bylines were hard to come by in his first nine years, at least in the London edition.
The first mention of Patrick Barclay in the digital files came in 1971 for a match report from Old Trafford, when Matt Busby had a brief reprise as manager and a forward line including Best, Charlton and Law lost 2-1 to Derby. Five years later, Paddy finally won promotion and became the northern football correspondent, making him No 2 to David Lacey.
But, for Paddy, this was still frustrating. Lacey would be in place as a star turn for another 27 years, and the sports desk’s Monday conferences were relayed to Manchester on a primeval squawk box, making it difficult for him to make constructive interventions.
By 1986 he was desperate enough to take the first chance to become a No 1, when Eddy Shah opened a shortlived tabloid, Today (Lacey’s parting comment was: “It’s the end of an earache”). But then came the Independent, which was an immediate – if also not eternal – success. Paddy switched horses and reached for the sky.
Lacey’s great gift was to make football writing entertaining and witty enough to attract readers who had little interest in the game. Barclay spoke directly to the fan base, and as football recovered from the hooligan-haunted 1980s to become bigger than ever, his restless mind led him towards the future.
In 1989, when the European Cup final was an un-enticing match-up between Milan and Steaua Bucharest, other British writers stayed at home and watched on television; Paddy turned up – making contacts, talking, listening.
In 1992, by which time he was on the Observer, with a lighter workload than on a daily paper, he went to the African Nations’ Cup, the only frontline British journalist in sight. This was two years after Cameroon almost beat England in the World Cup: “For a time,” Barclay wrote of that, “Cameroon treated England like a chainsaw would a balsa canoe.” Now he gave himself and his readers a masterclass on the development of African football.
In 1996, having jumped to the Sunday Telegraph, he was in his element when Scotland played England in the 1996 Euros at Wembley. Scotland’s sense of superiority, he explained without any partisanship, was rooted in the 19th century, when they beat England far more often than not.
“That was an era in which Scots took the role filled today by the wily continentals; they administered lessons in technique, and that was why English clubs started to lure them south. They could pass and dribble. The English seemed to treat football as just another reason to crash into each other.”
Whichever paper he was playing for – and a stint on the Times and a column in the Evening Standard lay ahead – he was beloved and respected by colleagues. “He had effortless charm,” said Jeff Powell, doyen of the Daily Mail. “He had a good eye, understood what he saw, judged players well and wrote interestingly without being extravagant.”
Amy Lawrence, who covers Arsenal for the Athletic and became a staunch friend, said: “He was such a purist, a romantic and a man of principle about the game. He was enchanted by football and he really wanted it to be dazzling and amazing and food for the soul.”
Small wonder that a pall hung over every football press box this weekend.
Paddy wrote four books about football managers: Busby, José Mourinho, Alex Ferguson and the Arsenal manager of the 30s, Herbert Chapman.
He is survived by two children, Jennifer and Duncan.
• Patrick Barclay, journalist, born 15 August 1947; died 12 February 2025
