David Pleat: ‘The joy of beating a great team – that was a great happiness’ | Football

‘No. I’m afraid it’s an addiction or an obsession – whatever you want to call it,’ laughs David Pleat. We’re sitting in a hotel just off the M1 motorway, where the 79-year-old recalls selling defender Matt Jackson to Everton manager Howard Kendall for £600,000 in 1991. ‘He’d only played nine games for us … that was one of my best business moments.’

Pleat, whose long association with Tottenham ended a few weeks ago when he stepped down from his role as consultant scout, has just been asked if he has any interests outside of football. It later transpires that the former Luton, Spurs, Leicester and Sheffield Wednesday manager has already attended an astonishing 14 games this season, despite it only starting a month ago, including a National League match at Wealdstone and an academy game at Watford.

“I’ll keep watching games,” Pleat says. “I’m not sure who I’m watching for and at what level. A few people have spoken to me and Tottenham won’t stop me because they know I want to work. I made that clear when I left.”

From becoming the youngest debutant in Football League history to score in 1962 to leading unpopular Luton to the old First Division, the story of his life has been dominated by what Pleat’s hero Bill Nicholson called “the greatest game of them all”. Like the fitting 90 minutes he spent in his company, Just One Goal – a new book written by Pleat in collaboration with journalist Tim Rich over the course of several years – is filled with anecdotes from a long managerial career that began when he was given provisional badges as a teenager at Nottingham Forest.

Half of the book’s proceeds will go to charities researching motor neurone disease, after he was inspired by the work of rugby league stars Kevin Sinfield and Rob Burrow, the latter of whom died in June. “It’s so amazing what they’ve done,” said Pleat, who lost his wife Maureen to the disease in 2020. “It’s so devastating when people can’t communicate or do anything for themselves – it’s a sad regression.”

Peter Taylor, Brian Clough’s long-term assistant, took Pleat under his wing and arranged for him to take over at non-league club Nuneaton Borough at the age of 26 after he had suffered a broken leg following a move from Forest to Luton. That spell ended after a 4-0 thrashing at the hands of a 34-year-old Ron Atkinson’s Kettering. After three months of selling lottery tickets while he waited for the role to become available, Luton’s Harry Haslam eventually made him assistant at Kenilworth Road and the rest is history.

“I definitely went in as a very young manager,” Pleat said of his appointment to the top job at the age of 33, just two years older than Brighton’s Fabian Hürzeler, who this season became the youngest permanent manager in Premier League history. “But they had me as a reserve manager for a few years, so they knew what I could do. They obviously trusted me and hoped I would do well. I may have been good, but I was so lucky.”

The ability to spot a player is a skill Pleat mastered at Luton, plucking Brian Stein, Ricky Hill and Mal Donaghy from obscurity and transforming them into stars. Our conversation is interrupted by a phone call from Paul Elliott – the former defender who is now Charlton vice-chairman – who recalls being one of seven black players to play for Luton in a League Cup tie against Leyton Orient in September 1984. “I just picked the team on merit – it didn’t really matter to me,” says Pleat, whose parents were born in London’s East End after their families escaped Jewish pogroms in Latvia and Poland. “Looking back, I’m very proud of that.”

Pleat recalls several incidents of anti-Semitism in his career, including one when he ignored a comment from one of his Luton players. “I let it go. You become a bit immune to it over the years.”

But the memories of perhaps Pleat’s most famous day remain unblemished. He can still recall the tiniest details of the build-up to the 1983 match against Manchester City, when Raddy Antic’s late winner led to his celebratory jig across the Maine Road pitch.

“I ran onto the pitch like an Australian wallaby,” Pleat laughs. “It was really out of character for me because I never used to go crazy about a win. The great thing about Man City was that not only did we survive, we stayed at 10,000 gates for another eight years.”

By the time Luton stunned Arsenal in the 1988 Littlewoods Cup final to win their first senior trophy – “a double whammy for me” – Pleat’s career had taken some dramatic turns. He left Luton for Tottenham in 1986 to begin a long love affair with the north London club, guiding them to third place in the league before losing to Coventry in the FA Cup final. But he resigned a few months later amid unsubstantiated newspaper claims that he had been given a warning for kerb-crawling, an accusation Pleat has always strenuously denied. Elton John, then owner of Luton’s biggest rivals Watford, sent flowers in support.

“I didn’t know him well,” Pleat says. “But he really sympathized with me, as did a lot of people. They told me to forget it and said, ‘Whatever they paid someone to say about you, you have to move on.’ I was told I could win the (defamation) case, but I just wanted to get on with my life. That was hard because I had lost my self-esteem and confidence. I had to start over.”

After a spell at Leicester and a return to Luton, Pleat’s final managerial post was at Sheffield Wednesday before returning to Tottenham in 1998 as the club’s first director of football. He describes Alan Sugar as a “visionary” for introducing the role that has since been adopted by most top clubs. “I remember some journalists asking why they were needed when I was appointed,” he says. “It’s really important that they have a good relationship with the manager, but I don’t think they need to know him too well because one day you might have to make a difficult decision.”

After three spells as interim manager and a brief departure before returning in 2010 as a consultant scout to help discover the likes of Dele Alli and Son Heung-min, that day finally came for Pleat in late July. Tottenham were now relying on a more data-driven approach under new Danish technical director Johan Lange and he had been deemed surplus to requirements.

“I’ve come to terms with it now – I understand stats and data and how they can be useful,” Pleat insists. “But data can only help eyes and ears. The more people you know in the game, the more they’ll talk. The analysts I see at games now are all smart guys who’ve written their PhDs and they can tell you which player and which player from all over the world. They’ve got everything at their fingertips – how many runs they’re making, how many goals they’re scoring. But they don’t see everything.”

Pleat admits he will always question whether he left frontline management too early. But when asked whether he would have been successful if he had managed a big team for a significant period after achieving a 54.9% win rate when he was in charge of Tottenham, he is less convinced. “That’s a very good question – I don’t know how I would have dealt with that. I was perhaps better at talking to slightly lesser players, rather than people who were in awe. I consider myself an underdog from the Luton days. The joy I got from beating a great team – that was very fortunate for me.”