George Best

George Best: The Gift and the Bill

When Manchester United's Belfast scout Bob Bishop found a fifteen-year-old from the Cregagh estate, he sent Matt Busby a telegram of exactly the right length: "I think I've found you a genius." Nine years later the boy had two league championships, a European Cup, a Ballon d'Or and the freedom of any defence in Europe. Nine years after that he was finished, at twenty-eight, and would spend the remaining three decades of his life demonstrating that a gift and a life are two different things.

Cregagh

Best was born in Belfast on 22 May 1946 and raised on the Cregagh estate — working-class east Belfast, a place that produced footballers because there was nothing else to do with a ball. He was slight, and he was homesick: sent to Manchester as a boy, he lasted two days before going home. United got him back. He made his First Division debut on 14 September 1963, aged seventeen, against West Bromwich Albion.

What He Actually Did

The technical description matters, because the myth has largely eaten the football. Best was a dribbler in an era when dribbling was punished by tackling that would now bring red cards, and he was almost impossible to knock over. He was slightly built, and the balance, pace and technique on top of that frame left defenders, in the standard phrase of his obituaries, tackling thin air.

He scored 179 goals in 470 appearances for Manchester United — his obituaries put it at 180 in 465, the sort of discrepancy that attaches to careers played before anyone was counting carefully — and he was the club's leading scorer for six consecutive seasons. That last figure quietly demolishes the idea of him as a flair player who did not produce: he was the team's most reliable source of goals for the better part of a decade, from a wide position, in a side containing Denis Law and Bobby Charlton. He was part of the sides that won the league twice and took two Charity Shields.

Two nights define him. In March 1966 United went to Lisbon to face Benfica and Best gave a performance so complete that the Portuguese press christened him El Beatle — the first time a footballer had been described in the vocabulary of pop stardom. Then, in the 1968 European Cup final against the same opponents, he scored in extra time in a 4–1 win, delivering Matt Busby the trophy that had defined the manager's career. That year Best won the Ballon d'Or and the Football Writers' Association award, the youngest man to take it.

The Long Second Half

He was twenty-two. Nothing in the remaining thirty-seven years matched it. His career deteriorated after 1968 amid the personal struggles that would define the rest of it, and he left Manchester United for good in 1974. What followed was a circuit of clubs that wanted his name more than his legs — Fulham, the Los Angeles Aztecs, Fort Lauderdale Strikers, Hibernian, San Jose Earthquakes — until he retired in 1983 after a spell with Brisbane Lions.

His international career was played for Northern Ireland, a country of a million and a half people that could not qualify for tournaments however good he was: 37 caps and nine goals between 1964 and 1977, and never a World Cup. He called it recreational football, which was both a joke and an admission.

In 1984 he served a three-month prison sentence for drink-driving and assault. In 2002 he received a liver transplant and was told never to drink again. He drank again. He was hospitalised on 1 October 2005 after an adverse reaction to medication and died on 25 November 2005, aged 59, of multiple organ failure and infection compounded by the immunosuppressants his transplant required. Around 100,000 people lined the streets of Belfast for his funeral.

Why George Is Called a Genius

The word here means something narrow and physical, and it should be said plainly rather than dressed up. Best's genius was motor intelligence: an ability to compute, at speed and under contact, where a defender's weight was going and to be past him before the answer arrived. It is the same faculty a great improvising musician has — pattern recognition and execution fused so tightly that deliberation is skipped. The people best placed to judge said so without hedging. Bob Bishop used the actual word in the telegram. Pelé called him the greatest footballer he had ever seen. Tony Blair, on his death, called him probably the most naturally gifted footballer of his generation. José Mourinho said he was thirty years ahead of his time. Twenty-five years after he retired, British sportswriters voted him the greatest British athlete of any sport.

And now the counter-case, which is not moral but factual. This was a gift entirely of the body and the reflexes; Best was not a tactician, a leader, or a builder of teams, and he left no method behind him. His career at the top lasted roughly five years — Denis Law, who played beside him, put the great period at 1964 to 1969 and thought the potential was never fulfilled. He never played at a World Cup, so the largest stage in the sport has no record of him. He was an alcoholic from early in his career, and alcoholism is a disease rather than a character defect; but its consequences here were a career abandoned at twenty-eight, a second liver used up, and a death at fifty-nine. The honest verdict is that the genius was real and the evidence for it is thinner than it should have been, and that the same restless, unmediated appetite that beat defenders was not something he could switch off at the touchline.

Legacy

Belfast City Airport carries his name; he entered the English Football Hall of Fame in 2002; roughly a hundred thousand people came out in his home city to bury him. He was among the first footballers to be famous the way pop stars were famous, and the first to be destroyed by it — the template for everything the modern game now employs armies of people to prevent. What survives is the film: a small dark-haired man with the ball apparently attached to him, going past people who were trying very hard to hurt him, and smiling.

Achievements

• Ballon d'Or
• English Football Hall of Fame