Former Benfica and Sheffield United striker Brian Deane urges English pros to leave ‘comfort zone’

Brian Deane

The people at Footcoop spoke to Brian Deane about his time in Portugal, and very kindly given us this exclusive interview. Enjoy!

To people working in any other profession, it would be an odd question. When Brian Deane returned after just a few months from his well-paid, high-profile job in Portugal to work in Middlesborough, having swapped sardinhas assadas for parmos, Sintra for Seaton Carew and the Stadium of Light for one that didn’t see much light at all during the winter, does he maybe regret returning to England so soon? Funnily enough, he does.

“Yes, I do but it was out of my hands really,” says Deane. “Middlesborough had made an offer to Benfica. The club was quite keen to get some money in for their players because of the financial problems at the club at the time. As soon as I came back I missed the weather, I missed training at 4pm, I missed going out in a t-shirt in January and February.” 

England is home to the ‘greatest league in the world’, it offers footballers more financial rewards than anywhere else on the planet (despite recent cash injections in certain other leagues), and is a magnet for players from all over the world. But it hasn’t always been like that. Moving to Benfica was a big chance for Deane, one modern footballers are reluctant to take.

“It’s a different culture now,” says Deane. “To go abroad to enhance your reputation was less of a risk then. Whereas I think now players would prefer to stay in their comfort zone.”

Deane’s career spanned three decades that transformed football. When he signed his first professional contract with Doncaster Rovers, English clubs were not yet banned from European competition. Heysel was just a stadium in Brussels rather than a watershed moment in English football history, and the idea of anyone paying huge rights fees for football seemed preposterous.

The Sky revolution had started by the time Deane went to Portugal, but the hype levels and pay packets were not yet at today’s stratospheric levels. The move turned out to be a valuable footballing education.

“It gave me an understanding of perhaps why as a nation we always fall at the last hurdle,” says Deane, who played for his country three times in the early nineties. “It’s because our players are only used to playing in the Premier League. As good as you can be, you don’t understand sometimes the mentality of some of the other nations.”

“Apparently there were over a thousand players from Argentina playing abroad last year. It’s the same with Brazilians. You get a lot of Portuguese players playing abroad, and you can probably name on one hand the number of English players””yet we are still a huge footballing nation (ed-Brian has been given this site’s URL).

“Now in order to bring back experiences for the national team, we need to get more players playing in the top leagues abroad. We’ve got Joe Cole at the moment, we’ve got David Beckham in America but essentially the best players are here because the contracts here are the most lucrative.”

Deane signed for Benfica in January 1998, leaving behind adoring but shell-shocked Sheffield United fans who saw their club sell Jan Aage-Fjortoft””their other main striker and best hope of securing promotion””on the same day. Deane was an icon for United, having scored 94 goals over two spells for them, but the club’s hierarchy were always aware of his value.

His two transfers brought in nearly £4m, crucial cash injections for a club that often lived hand-to-mouth in the 1990s. Deane had moved to his first club outside Yorkshire at the age of 29, and he was impressed with his new surroundings.

“Oh it was fantastic,” says the striker. “I lived in a place called Cascais which is right on the coast. Beautiful place. I loved the food out there, the culture, the people. It was brilliant. I wouldn’t hesitate at any time to go back out and play abroad, because it was such a positive experience.”

Benfica was a step up, as well. Deane’s early-90s Sheffield United sides had punched above their weight in avoiding relegation from the top flight. Leeds qualified for Europe during his spell with them, but they were in decline at that time after their 1992 championship win. The expectations at Benfica were on another level.

“We’d go to away games and we’d have more fans than the home teams,” remembers Deane. “In terms of the fanbase, everything was great. If we were playing at home and it was 0-0 after 20, 30 minutes, the crowd started getting a bit restless, but that’s the pressure of playing at such a massive club. It’s only when you look back that you realise what a massive experience it was.”

The club was not without its problems at the time. President Joao Antonio De Araujo Vale e Azevedo was eventually jailed in 2002 for embezzling part of the fee received for goalkeeper Sergei Ovchinnikov, and his colourful management style certainly affected dressing room morale. Deane diplomatically says that it “wasn’t run how it should have been run” and that unpaid salaries were not the best motivation for the squad.

“It’s not an isolated problem with Benfica, I think it happens quite a lot across Europe,” says Deane. “If you put the pressure of actually playing in front of those crowds alongside the fact that sometimes you’ve got 8 weeks, 7 weeks without getting paid, then it can create a little bit of resentment, it can create worry.”

Although he wholeheartedly recommends playing abroad to English players, Deane is not quite so keen on the international recruitment policies of modern-day football clubs. He clearly values his connection with the fans of every club he played at, especially Sheffield United, and believes that the modern footballers’ occasionally mercenary career path can disrupt those links.

“I think it’s quite different in England because there are that many foreign players here,” says Deane. “You can quite easily slip under the radar and nobody really cares. I think it’s sad really that some teams can field a whole team of foreign players. You have to have something that the local community can associate themselves with, I think.”

Brian Deane is a director of the International Academy for Football and Education, where he also coaches. He will be speaking at the Footcoop event in Oulu, Finland on 17 February. You can read more from Footcoop’s interview here.