#501 | George Best: The Wild Life of Football's Lost Star
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Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English. I'm Alistair Budge, and today is the start of another three-part miniseries. This one is going to be about controversial sports people, talented men and women from the world of sport who left a complicated legacy.

Part 1, today's episode, is going to be about a man many consider to be the most naturally gifted footballer in history, George Best. Part 2 is going to be on the American figure skater Tonya Harding, who got embroiled in one of the greatest controversies in skating history. And part 3 is going to be on Lance Armstrong, the record-breaking cancer-surviving cyclist who lost it all.

Parts 2 and 3, the ones on Tonya Harding and Lance Armstrong, are going to be member-only episodes, so if you'd like to listen to those, as well as follow along and take your English to the next level with our interactive transcripts, translations in 12 languages, and study packs, the place to go is LeonardoEnglish.com. Okay then, let's get right into it and talk about the wild life of George Best.

There are few more divisive questions to ask a group of football fans than who is the greatest footballer of all time. Pele, Maradona, Johan Cruyff. Or more recently, you might find names like Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi thrown in the hat.

In most of these cases, certainly with the more recent 21st century footballers, they were incredibly disciplined, treating their bodies as tools, temples even, to be attended to and cared for. They were professional athletes. Football was their world. And they also had and have vast teams of people supporting them.

nutritionists, physiotherapists, agents and managers, people whose entire job it is to ensure that they are in peak physical and mental condition and are able to perform at the top of their game on the pitch. The subject of today's episode, George Best, was not in this category. If you have heard of George Best, and especially for those of you who are not die-hard football fans, you will probably associate him with other things.

Alcohol, womanising and an early grave. In fact, it is quite the miracle that George Best is even mentioned in the same breath as people like Ronaldo and Messi. People like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi have both been playing professionally for over 20 years and are still doing so as they approach their 40th birthday.

They have long and storied careers, have won dozens of trophies at club and national level, and scored going on a thousand professional goals. The career of George Best, on the other hand, peaked when he was 22. He is remembered as a legend in Manchester United history, one of the club's greatest players, but he was pushed out when he was 27.

and spent the rest of his career playing for clubs so obscure that I imagine even the most passionate of football fans won't have heard of all of them. Unlike Messi or Ronaldo, or in fact any of those players I mentioned at the start, he didn't get anywhere near a World Cup final. He didn't even play at the World Cup.

He was perhaps the ultimate example of a player who could have had it all. A sportsman so naturally talented that he might just have been the undisputed greatest player of all time. But he let his smorgasbord of vices get in the way. He was born in 1946 in a working-class area of Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland. He was a talented boy, both academically and sportingly.

He was smart, funny and witty. It would be his footballing talents that were first noticed. He was playing for a local youth club when he was noticed by a scout for Manchester United. The scout saw the then 15-year-old best playing and immediately knew he had found something special. He sent a telegram straight away to Matt Busby, the Manchester United manager, which, legend has it, read

I think I found you a genius. Best was given a trial and promptly signed up for the Manchester United youth team. But he was a shy, quiet boy who had never travelled more than 10 kilometres away from home. He was a Belfast boy and there he was in Manchester, away from his family, in a strange, unknown city where people looked and spoke differently.

He only lasted two days before getting so homesick that he got on the next boat back to Belfast. He was persuaded to return to Manchester and ended up training with the Manchester United youth team for a couple of years before making his official debut when he was 17. This was in 1963, so only a few years after the Munich air disaster, which killed eight Manchester United players and seriously injured six more.

The Manchester United manager, Matt Busby, was one of the few survivors of the crash and was trying to rebuild his squad. And after Best's first team debut in 1963, the squad came to be moulded around him. Now, I don't want to talk too much about the football of George Best in this episode, but we clearly have to do some of this. The first thing to note is that he was very small.

When he was first discovered, he was 160cm tall and weighed 47kg. And even as a full grown man, he was only 1.75m. He was much smaller than everyone else on the pitch. And in fact, plenty of other scouts had come to see him before the Manchester United one.

decided that he was simply too small. He was tiny, with legs like matchsticks. He wouldn't last a minute professionally. Of course, they were wrong. He was incredibly fast. He was skilful. He was equally comfortable with his right foot as with his left. And he could dribble the ball past his opponents with ease.

This meant that he was typically man-marked. There would be someone on the opposition team who was on his back at all times. And opposition players would be very physically aggressive towards him. But somehow he managed to evade them. By 1964, when he was only 18, he was a first team regular.

He soon became a fan's favourite and in March of 1966 he was catapulted to global, or at least European, fame when he scored two goals and dominated the match in the European Cup quarter-final against the Portuguese side Benfica. But it wasn't just his footballing abilities that caught people's attention.

He was incredibly handsome, and he had long, wavy hair, which was a rarity for football players at the time. Most kept it cut very short. He looked more like he should be on stage or on a film set than on a football pitch. Indeed, after that quarterfinal match in Portugal, he was dubbed the fifth Beatle because that's what people thought he looked like.

And alongside his glittering career on the pitch, which included winning the league with Manchester United and then winning European Player of the Year in 1968, he had quite a busy life off the pitch. He was a famous womaniser and could be seen in the nightclubs of Manchester or the fashionable streets of London with a different woman on his arm.

He was also one of the first football players, in the UK at least, to tap into his celebrity to supplement his football income. He promoted everything from sausages to cigarettes. He did cameos for movies. And he said that by 1969, his income from outside football was greater than what he was paid by Manchester United.

This did make him a rich man by anyone's standards. But two things. Firstly, he was incredibly generous and would reportedly give £10 notes to homeless people. £10 is just under 12 euros today. It might sound like a pretty generous amount of money to give to a stranger. Back then, it was the equivalent of something like 150 euros.

And secondly, footballers back then, even megastars like George Best, were really not paid very much by modern standards. George Best made history in 1969 when he became the first footballer to earn a thousand pounds a week. That's around 16,000 euros a week in inflation-adjusted terms, something like 830,000 euros a year.

Sure, it is a lot of money, but it is a pittance, it is nothing compared to what the footballing stars of today are paid. And what's more, this was in the era of tax rates that went up to 90% for the highest earners, a rate so high that it would even result in the Beatles releasing a song in protest, appropriately called Taxman.

The point is, yes, George Bast was a highly paid celebrity and football player. But compared to modern players, this was a very different league. And his expenses were significant. The money seemed to go out just as quickly as it came in. He was a funny and witty man throughout his life. And one of his most famous quotes was in response to a journalist who asked him where all of his money went.

Before I tell you what he said, I'll just explain a few words. Booze is slang for alcohol, an informal term for alcohol. Birds is a slang term for women, one that is certainly less acceptable now than it was at the time. And to squander means to waste something, normally money, on something stupid or foolish. So, to a journalist who asked him where all of his money went, he thought for a moment and then said...

I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. Now, you might laugh, you might find this to be a witty response, but beneath it is a sad truth and a truth that Best was clearly acutely aware of. He was a raging alcoholic. Alcohol destroyed his life, two marriages, his playing career and eventually killed him at the age of 59.

While many of his Manchester United teammates would go out for a big night out after a game on a Saturday, or they would have a few beers in the evening, by his mid-twenties, George Best found that alcohol controlled him. There are all sorts of theories about why he succumbed to alcoholism and failed to control himself, while others managed to maintain a healthier, non-destructive relationship with alcohol.

One is that alcoholism ran in his family. His mother was an alcoholic and also died from alcoholism when she was 55. He was genetically predisposed to alcoholism, so while other players could manage to drink in moderation, he simply couldn't help himself. Another was that there was simply so much pressure on him to succeed. So much pressure from fans, teammates and his manager to lift up Manchester United.

that when the team started winning, he sought solace, some kind of escape with drink. Another is that he was such a celebrity that this was his way of escaping the real world. He was hounded by the press. He simply couldn't go out and live a normal life, so he retreated into the world of drunkenness.

Another was that he was a shy and reserved person by nature, and that alcohol gave him the confidence to be the outgoing, playboy-type character that the tabloid newspapers were making him out to be. It gave him the confidence to talk to women, and to be the rock star that people thought he was, but that didn't come naturally to him. Whatever the reasons, it was something that he was unable to control. By the time he was 25, he was missing training sessions,

his fitness got worse, everything deteriorated. I mean, alcoholism can take over anyone's life, but it is certainly completely incompatible with a career as a professional footballer. He was pushed out of Manchester United when he was 27, and he went on to play for 12 different teams everywhere from South Africa to the United States, Australia to Ireland.

He still had the star power and whenever a club announced that they had signed the legend that was George Bess, he would pull in the crowds. Ticket sales would increase. And even as he got older and less fit, he was still capable of some electric football.

If you watch videos on YouTube from his time in the United States, for example, there are amazing clips of him running around defenders as if they were little children and scoring fantastic goals. Despite the demons off the pitch, the natural talent was there for all to see. But his alcoholism went from bad to worse.

He would go on huge drinking sessions, days at a time, unable to be located by friends, family or his teammates. By 1984, after wandering from club to club for ten years after leaving Manchester United, he hung up his boots for good, retiring as a professional football player. After retiring, he tried his hand at several different things.

being a football pundit and becoming involved in various business ventures. But nothing really stopped. His life was unfortunately dominated by alcohol. By the year 2000, his body was giving up and he needed to have a liver transplant. He was told in no uncertain terms by doctors, "If you keep drinking, it will kill you." But he couldn't stop. In November of 2005, at his request,

The British News of the World tabloid newspaper published a particularly sad photo of him in hospital with the headline, Don't Die Like Me. The picture shows the former footballing legend and heartthrob as an old man with red eyes and yellow jaundiced skin, oxygen being pumped in through his nose. He weighed barely 40 kilograms. He was a shadow of his former self.

Less than a week later, he was dead at the age of 59. It was an ignominious end for one of the greatest footballers in history and a man whose playing career only really lasted for five years. As you might imagine, in the months and years after his death, friends, former teammates and commentators have asked themselves what went wrong. He arrived in Manchester as a shy, quiet boy.

And by the time he left, he was a raging alcoholic on a self-destructive path. Was it the pressure? From the age of 15, he had this genius tag hung around his neck. He was incredibly talented. The crowds loved him. He was cheered by the opposition too. He was fiendishly handsome and soon found that women would throw themselves at him.

According to one report, he tried to name all of his former lovers, but decided to give up after he got to a thousand. He married twice, but both ended in divorce, with his second wife claiming that he had hit her multiple times, once punching her in the face. He was not only a drunk, but a violent one at that, and one that did mental and physical damage to everyone who tried to help him.

And, to his critics, he had the choice to drink. Alkalism might be a disease, but every time he decided to buy another bottle of vodka or stay at the pub for another double whiskey, he was choosing destruction. But, to others, this was his escape. Or at least, it started out as a way of escaping what must have been a completely surreal world for a shy young boy from Northern Ireland.

He thought it was just a few innocent beers to take the edge off, to give him some confidence and help him relax after a tough match. But little did he know, it would destroy everything. Now, that's a sad note to end on. So let me end with a little language lesson on the theme of religion, Northern Ireland and George Best.

As you heard, George Best was one of those rare footballing talents who was just as comfortable with his left foot as with his right. He was both a right-footer and a left-footer. There are some jokes about this, because in English, left-footer is somewhat derogatory slang for Catholic, and right-footer is slang for Protestants.

And, as you'll remember, George Best came from Belfast in Northern Ireland, an area of intense tension and rivalry between Catholics and Protestants. The thing about George Best was that he was someone who seemed to transcend all of that. He was Protestant by birth. He was loved by Protestants and Catholics alike. A footballer who truly played with and played for both feet.

So to wrap things up, George Best must surely go down in history as one of the greatest wasted talents in sporting history. A man who had it all, who could have had even more, but let his demons get in the way. Okay then, that is it for today's episode on the wild and sad life of George Best. I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learned something new.

As a reminder, this is part one of a three-part mini-series on controversial sports people. Next up is going to be Tonya Harding, the figure skating would-be champion, and after that will be Lance Armstrong, the champion cyclist.

Those are both going to be member-only episodes, so now is the time to remind you that if you'd like to unlock all of the bonus episodes, plus the interactive transcripts, subtitles, and key vocabulary, then the place to go for that is leonardoenglish.com.

And if you aren't yet ready to become a member, but you would like to do something to support the show, then I would love for you to think about leaving a review or a star rating on your favourite podcast app. It takes less than 30 seconds to do, but they are super helpful and each one brings a smile to my face. You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alistair Budge. You stay safe and I'll catch you in the next episode.