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Eleven years after Sir Alex Ferguson won his first European Cup, he was still manager of Manchester United, a season after his third final, a season before his fourth. Eleven years after José Mourinho’s first triumph, he was on his second spell at Chelsea, winning the Premier League title for the third time. Eleven years after Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona rose to glory in 2009, he endured a rare off year at Manchester City, the only time in the last seven seasons he failed to lift the Premier League title.
And the only manager to have made Aston Villa European champions? Eleven years after beating Bayern Munich in Rotterdam, Tony Barton agreed to become manager of a club in the Wessex League, the ninth division of English football, the fifth non-league tier.
Barton feels like the forgotten winner of the European Cup, perhaps the most understated manager to ever win the club game’s most prestigious prize. While Guardiola has coached Barcelona, Bayern and Manchester City, while Mourinho moved from Porto to Chelsea to Internazionale and Real Madrid, Barton has held two managerial positions: at Villa and Northampton Town. And, in 1993, Barton was to take over at Petersfield Town, the Hampshire club in a division with Whitchurch and Wimborne. Barton, scourge of Bayern Munich in 1982, could have faced the Harlequins of Brockenhurst or Bernerton Heath. “I thought, ‘Gee, this is a bit of a coup,’” said Mark Nicoll, longtime secretary of the Petersfield club.
Which is rather an understatement. Petersfield Town were actually a new club, formed when Petersfield United folded, with a new owner. “In 1993 we came out of the Isthmian League, we couldn’t afford to stay at that level,” added Nicoll. “We then had a fairy godfather in the person of Pierre de Sisto, who took over and became president.” De Sisto’s reign was going to collapse. He was, Nicoll recalls, “a bit of a rogue character”, but he arrived with ambition.
“One of the first things he said was he was going to bring in a well-known manager and he said Tony Barton,” Nicoll recalls. “How he knew him, I don’t know. But days after becoming president, he said he found that manager. And then, a week or two later, he called another meeting and said that, unfortunately, his doctor had recommended that Tony Barton not take on this role. This medical advice unfortunately proved correct: Barton had suffered a heart attack while in charge of Northampton. He had another in August 1993 and died aged just 56; this says something about its relative obscurity while The Independents The report on his death was only 99 words long.
There was a postscript. Petersfield got a date accustomed to football at senior levels. “De Sisto had two other players lined up, Gary Stevens and Alan Devonshire,” Nicoll said. “He pulled the rabbit out of the hat when it came to the two marquee alternatives.” Stevens, the former Tottenham defender who was part of England’s 1986 World Cup squad, took the job.
And although Barton never managed Petersfield, their Love Lane ground hosted a memorial match for him, in October 1993. According to Nicoll, the crowd was between 1,000 and 1,500, but the cast list was remarkable . A Villa team was based around the majority of Barton’s European Cup winners: the team sheet includes the late Gary Shaw, final scorer Peter Withe, captain Dennis Mortimer, as well as Tony Morley, Gordon Cowans , Des Bremner and Kenny Swain.
They were joined by Tony Cascarino, a later Villa recruit, a striker who would play in the World Cup the following summer and, one day, a goalscorer at Petersfield. Their opponents, the Petersfield stars, included then-Chelsea player-manager Glenn Hoddle, his former Spurs team-mate Stevens and a host of ex-Portsmouth players. “De Sisto organized it with Gary,” Nicoll said. “How they brought Aston Villa down, I don’t know. We had some brilliant names there. There was almost another one. Alan Ball was due to play but withdrew late.
A star-studded lineup shows the esteem in which Barton was held. The link with Petersfield came partly because Barton lived in Hampshire: a former Portsmouth player, he had been assistant manager at Southampton to former Villa defender Chris Nicholl, then returned to Fratton Park.
Most famously, he was assistant to Ron Saunders when Villa, who had not been champions since 1910, won Division One in 1981. The following February the abrasive Saunders retired, soon to take over as manager of Birmingham . His more amiable sidekick, Barton, was put in charge. His sixth match in charge was a European Cup quarter-final against Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv. His 13th was the first leg of a semi-final against an Anderlecht side who were to win the UEFA Cup the following season. His 25th match as coach came against a Bayern team featuring Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Paul Breitner, Klaus Augenthaler and Dieter Hoeness. The 16 players Barton named in Villa’s squad finished their careers with just 34 caps between them. They nevertheless beat Bayern.
There is a sense in which this is an extraordinary anomaly. Consider Barton’s subsequent managerial career: he lost six of his first seven games at Northampton and, following his heart attack, resigned before an end-of-season rally still left them 91st of 92 in the Football League; it was only three years after the glory in Rotterdam.
But then he and his Villa side may have been a remarkable mix of ordinary and extraordinary. Under Barton, they won the European Super Cup in 1983, beating Barcelona 3–0 in the second leg of the final. They were only knocked out of the 1982-83 European Cup by a Juventus team featuring a core of Italian World Cup winners, garnished with the talents of Michel Platini and Zbigniew Boniek.
But after finishing fourth in the old Division One in 1977, their next 10 league finishes were eighth, eighth, seventh, first, 11th, sixth, 10th, 10th, 16th and 22nd: they were relegated five years after being conquered Europe. Barton was fired in 1984; Doug Ellis, the president whose two terms did not include the glory of 1981 and 1982, removed him from office. Instead, job offers came from Northampton and, later, Petersfield. But when Villa host Bayern on Wednesday, it will be a reminder of the marvelous achievements of Barton, the unassuming, unsung and unlikely European Cup winner.
