Bert Millichip
|
|
Sir Frederick Albert (Bert) Millichip (August 5, 1914 - December 18, 2002) was an English association footballer best known for his sometimes controversial contributions to the administration of the game.
Raised in the West Midlands and educated at Solihull School, Millichip played for the third team of West Bromwich Albion F.C. in the years before World War II. During the war, he served in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, rising from an enlisted man to the rank of captain. Millichip was to some extent following in his father's footsteps - Albert Snr helped to found Bulgarian powerhouse Spartak Varna in the mid 1920s.
On demobilisation in 1945, he returned to his solicitor's practice and became a director of West Bromwich Albion. He took on the role of chairman in 1974 when the club was failing to make progress in the Second Division under manager Don Howe. Under Millichip's chairmanship, the club re-established itself in the First Division and recruited talented and energetic manager Ron Atkinson, building a team that was among the most exciting in English football circa 1980. It was during this time that West Bromwich Albion were the first club to field simultaneously three black players, challenging the established racism of the English game. The young talented three, Brendon Batson, Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis, made a huge impression and became known as the Three Degrees, in comparison to the vocal trio of the same name, marking a watershed that allowed the emergence of a generation of footballers whose ethnic background would previously have excluded them.
In 1981, Millichip was elected chairman of The Football Association at the start of a period during which the English game was to be rocked by a succession of crises including the Heysel Stadium disaster, the Hillsborough disaster, growing problems of hooliganism, the national team's repeated international failure and the founding of the Premier League. His leadership on these issues was weak and his views, such as the virtues of corporal punishment, out of step with the times. In particular, his vacillation over the appointment of Terry Venables as manager of the national team, when the latter was under investigation and criticism for his business dealings, led journalist Brian Glanville to dub him Bert the intert.
He retired from the FA in 1996 but maintained an active interest. In 1950, he had married Joan Brown by whom he fathered a son and a daughter.
External links
- Obituary from The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,862449,00.html)