The Nutmeg Mysteries #1 Cruyff to Dumbarton? You won't believe how close it came!

How the secret of Scotland's greatest transfer coup was finally uncovered on the Old Course, St Andrews

IT was the day I bamboozled Johan Cruyff – the moment my conversational Cruyff Turn rendered the Dutch master speechless. The Old Course, St Andrews. 2012. The Ajax and Barcelona legend – then aged 65 – had just finished his round at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, a European Tour golf event which also includes a pro-am. I had spoken to Cruyff several times that week already, in my capacity as a communications officer at the event; mostly questions concerning his round and thoughts on the course. This day was different. This time I had a myth-busting inquiry teed up for one of the true footballing greats.

“Johan, is it true that you almost signed for Dumbarton in 1980?”

---

Let’s rewind. December 9, 1980. In Scotland – and around the world – the front pages of every morning newspaper were dominated by the tragic news that John Lennon had been shot dead outside his New York apartment. If readers of the Express had made it to the back page that morning, then the headline would have been every bit as shocking.

‘Sons in for Cruyff’

The byline on that story was Gerry McNee, an established Scottish journalist who would become a household name in the ’80s and ’90s in Scotland as a commentator and pundit. Then, two days later, on December 11, the Express ran another back page. This time, the headline ran:

‘Sons fail in brave bid to land Dutch star: NO-GO Cruyff’

The December 11 splash (above) is now mounted on the wall of a lounge at Dumbarton FC’s stadium.

But what was the truth of it? Was it real? Or just another back page ‘flyer’?

In 2009, I left my full-time job as a sportswriter to start a publishing company called BackPage Press. The focus was – and remains – on publishing high-quality sports writing. Three years later, we commissioned a book on Sean Fallon, Celtic’s legendary player, coach and scout, who is perhaps best known for his role as assistant to the great Jock Stein (not to mention unearthing the talents of a certain Kenneth Matheson Dalglish). The author, Stephen Sullivan, wrote the book with the full co-operation of the Fallon family and spent many hours with Sean, then in his late eighties (sadly, Sean would pass away before the book was published to critical acclaim in 2013). The story of Fallon’s life unfolded like a film script. From his upbringing in County Sligo through to his improbable move to Celtic, aged 27 – and the start of a lifelong love affair with the club – it was a human tale as much as a football one; the book, Sean Fallon: Celtic’s Iron Man, was later made into a documentary by BT Sport.

One of the many remarkable tales to emerge from the book concerned Fallon’s spell as Dumbarton manager from 1980 to 1981. Through Fallon’s own recollections – and assiduous research from Sullivan – the full tale started to emerge.

Sean Fallon was Dumbarton manager during season 1980-81

Sullivan first spoke to McNee, whose back page story in 1980 had Scottish readers spitting out their cornflakes. McNee recalled: “I was with the Express at the time and I got a call in the evening, very close to the first edition deadline, from a contact I trusted. ‘Dumbarton are trying to sign Cruyff’, he told me. But when I got in touch with the Express to tell them to hold the back page, I had a hell of a job trying to convince them that it wasn’t an April fool. I remember phoning Sean during a reserve match at Boghead to confirm the story with him and, typically of Sean, he was up front about it. ‘Yes, we’ve spoken to the boy,’ were his famous words. It was a massive story.”

Fallon (left) was assistant to Celtic’s legendary manager Jock Stein

However, as Sullivan soon realised, the origins of the story went deeper. All the way back to 1964. Sixteen years before ‘Cruyff to Dumbarton’, Celtic attempted to sign a 36-year-old named Alfredo di Stefano. This was four years after he had scored a hat-trick in Real Madrid’s legendary 7-3 win over Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960 at Hampden. That legendary match, which Fallon had taken in alongside Stein, was the fifth successive European Cup final in which the Argentine had played, scored and emerged victorious.

Celtic enlisted the help of their reserve centre-half John Cushley, who spoke Spanish. Cushley and manager Jimmy McGrory were dispatched to Madrid – with three Scottish journalists in tow – to try to pull off the biggest signing in the club’s history. However, the plan quickly fell flat. “Di Stefano had already gone to his holiday home in the north of Spain,” Cushley told Sullivan. “In the end, we had to track him down on the phone. Mr McGrory was telling me ‘Offer him this’. I couldn’t believe the figures – it was more than the rest of us put together were getting. But in any case, Di Stefano said that he had already agreed a deal with Espanyol, so it was a bit of a wasted trip.”

Celtic had offered the Argentinian £200-per-game, double what the highest-paid player in Britain at the time, Johnny Haynes, was earning. PR-wise, though, the Madrid expedition could have been considered a success. Fallon suspected that the presence of three journalists on the trip meant that the club’s pursuit of the Real Madrid legend was geared more towards obtaining headlines than acquiring a star player. As Fallon told Sullivan:

I always thought the Di Stefano thing was a publicity stunt. I would have loved nothing more if he’d said yes because it would have been tremendous to have someone like that at Celtic. But the board knew there was no chance. If he had accepted their offer, they would have had a heart attack. There just wasn’t money for a player like that floating around at the time. It was a story that got the fans excited but that wasn’t a good time for the club, and I felt it was put out there to relieve a bit of pressure.

Alfredo Di Stefano before his 1967 farewell match against Celtic, the club which had sought his services three years earlier

However, the audacity of the move planted a seed with Fallon which bloomed 16 years later in the plan to entice Johan Cruyff, a three-time Ballon d’Or winner and the embodiment of Dutch ‘total football’, to Boghead. In 1980, Dumbarton were a mid-table side in Scotland’s second tier – a fact which made the move all the more far-fetched. Had Fallon remembered the coverage generated by Celtic’s pursuit of Alfredo di Stefano and simply employed an old headline-grabbing trick?

There was a bit of that involved. I knew it was always unlikely we would get Cruyff, but the way I saw it we couldn’t lose. At worst, it got Dumbarton on the back pages for a few days and boosted the club’s image and profile, which was very low at that time. At best, if we were really lucky, we might get a magnificent player. Cruyff was struggling a bit financially in those days because he’d lost all his money in a bad investment, so we felt offering him a few thousand pounds per game might tempt him. If you don’t try, you’ll never know. And he did agree to meet us. I went over with the chairman to Amsterdam and found him to be very polite and knowledgeable about the whole Scottish scene. But although I was normally quite good at talking players into signing, that one I couldn’t manage. I set things buzzing though, didn’t I? And I think I was closer to making it happen than some people think.

So, how close did Cruyff actually come to playing in Scotland? Dumbarton director and vice-chairman Colin Hosie threw some fresh light on Fallon’s trip to Amsterdam — in the company of executive director Alex Wright — to try and claim the signature of an icon.  “The Dumbarton chairman at the time was Robert Robertson, who owned a sheet metal company,” he explained.  “The company also had a place in Holland and so he had business associates there who knew Cruyff.  The offer was that Johan could fly in on a Friday, Dumbarton would put him up in a hotel, he would play on the Saturday and fly back to Amsterdam at 8pm from Glasgow Airport.

“It was a pay-per-play idea, with Johan getting a cut of the gate money. Moving to the West of Scotland would have been a culture shock, but he did the gentlemanly thing of listening to the offer. Robertson had a vision for Dumbarton — to make them the third force in Scottish football. So, that ambition came together with Sean’s football knowledge to pursue the deal.”

The writing of the Fallon book coincided with my one-week-a-year moonlighting as a communications officer at the Dunhill Links. And, so there I was, standing behind the most famous 18^th green in the world, asking one of the most famous footballers of all-time if he did, indeed, consider a move to Boghead.

After his initial bamboozlement, Cruyff gazed over my shoulder as he riffled through his memory boxes. After a few seconds, he spoke. “Yes, I remember that. Was I tempted? Yes, of course. Playing in England, or Britain, was something I had always wanted to do. But I thought I was too old at that stage to go to Scotland, where you know the weather will be difficult. When you’re old your muscles get stiff, and moving to a cold country is asking for problems.” The Dutch legend also admitted that he initially believed Dumbarton to be in Scottish football’s top flight, but his interest cooled after learning they were in the second tier.

Maybe the truth of ‘Cruyff to Dumbarton’ is that he simply realised that he couldn’t have done it on a cold, rainy night at Boghead…