Farewell, John Robertson – ‘Little fat guy’ who became Nottingham Forest’s greatest player
John Robertson in his days at Nottingham Forest Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton
There was a time, before I got to know him properly, when John Robertson turned up as the pub landlord in the village where me and my mates used to hang out as teenagers.
Growing up, listening to the stories of Nottingham Forest winning back-to-back European Cups, he’d been one of my heroes. So it was kind of thrilling for a bunch of lads, with our sixth-form stubble and fake IDs, to see him, close-up, pulling pints behind the bar of the Old Greyhound in Aslockton.
Close my eyes and I can picture him now: the cigarette drooping between his fingers, the orange-brown loafers that had been a running joke among his team-mates, the look of sheer glee on his face — “who fired the cannon?” — when he delivered the punchline to his favourite joke.
He’d gone into the pub trade because that’s what former footballers tended to do in that era. But it didn’t last long. And, by his own admission, if the ashtrays were full, or there were ‘empties’ to be collected, that would have to wait if he was holding court with the regulars, as he usually was.
“Son,” he’d tell me years later, with that Glaswegian burr and nicotine-laced chuckle. “It’s fair to say I was better at football than I was at running a pub.”
Oh, Robbo.
The announcement today of his death, aged 72, still feels shattering, even if the club where he spent most of his 16-year playing career have had time to prepare their eulogies.
We are heartbroken to announce the passing of Nottingham Forest legend and dear friend, John Robertson.A true great of our Club and a double European Cup winner, John’s unrivalled talent, humility and unwavering devotion to Nottingham Forest will never ever be forgotten.
The truth is, some of us have known for a few weeks that this was coming, that his condition was deteriorating and that we should brace ourselves for bad news. These words, as such, have been put together during the time when the nurses and carers sought to make his final days as comfortable as possible. And it’s achingly sad, to say the least, to be given this kind of writing assignment when it is someone who started as your hero and became, over time, your friend.
Brian Clough, Forest’s legendary manager, called him the “Picasso of our game”. Others, however, from a younger generation might require another form of introduction to understand Robertson’s precious magic.
“When I try to tell people how good he was, it can be difficult, because it was over 40 years ago,” John McGovern, Forest’s two-time European Cup-winning captain, used to say. “So what I say is: ‘You know a few years ago there was a guy called Ryan Giggs who played until he was 40 and was regarded as one of the best left-wingers of all time? Well, John Robertson was like Ryan Giggs but with two good feet, not one’. He had more ability than Giggs, his ratio of scoring goals was better and overall he was the superior footballer.”
Robertson’s brilliance was one of the primary reasons why Luiz Felipe Scolari, Brazil’s manager as they won the 2002 World Cup, once said he had “fallen in love” with Clough’s team.
“Get the ball to Robbo,” was the instruction from Clough — a strategy that also helped to explain why, in 2015, Jose Mourinho contributed the foreword for the book I was writing, I Believe in Miracles, to accompany the film about that Forest side’s glory years.
Mourinho, in short, was another Forest enthusiast, going back to his youth in Portugal. So I went to meet him to find out more. I have never forgotten the way his eyes lit up when one player, in particular, was mentioned. “I don’t generally believe in miracles,” Mourinho said. “I always think it needs talent to create what you might call a miracle. And this guy, Robertson, had incredible talent.”
Others will say the same: that he was the best winger in Europe for two seasons, maybe longer, and the creative force of a team that knocked Liverpool off their perch — long before Alex Ferguson patented that line — to dominate the competition we now call the Champions League.
Yet how often does Robertson’s name get mentioned among the greats of European football? He was never shortlisted for the Ballon d’Or and, judging by a line in Craig Bellamy’s autobiography, your average modern-day player would probably have to type his name into Google to find out who he was.
Bellamy, now the Wales national-team manager, played for Norwich City in the late 1990s when Robertson was part of their coaching staff. Yet, even as a keen student of the game, he had never heard of him.
“Someone told me he had been a proper player once,” Bellamy wrote. “I know that now. I know that people thought he was a genius, that he was Brian Clough’s favourite player and won European Cups. But back then, I’d look at him with bandages round his knees, puffing on a cigarette and think: ‘No chance’.”
Over the years, you came to realise that was part of Robertson’s charm: his unpretentiousness, the chip-pan grin, the fact he never had the aura of an orthodox superstar. “Robbo was one of those blokes who could never look smart,” said Stan Bowles, another Forest team-mate. “No matter what you did with him, he always looked like an unmade bed.”
But heck, the “little fat b*****d” (copyright: another Forest team-mate Larry Lloyd and said, friend to friend, with unmistakable affection) sure put his mark on two European Cup finals, setting up the winner for Trevor Francis against Malmo in 1979, then rifling in the decisive goal a year later against Hamburg.
Perhaps you have seen that piece of television gold, the night before Forest took on Hamburg, when Clough is asked about Manfred Kaltz, their West Germany international right-back.
“We’ve got a little fat guy who will turn him inside out,” Clough declares, eyes twinkling.
“John Robertson?” asks the interviewer.
“Oh yes,” Clough says, at his telegenic best. “A very talented, highly-skilled, unbelievable outside-left . . . he will turn him inside out.”
#OnThisDay in 1980
John Robertson scored the only goal in the European Cup Final against Hamburg & seal back to back European Cup victories for Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest #NFFC
🎙from Brian Moorepic.twitter.com/cv02xHplFs
— 80s&90sFootball ⚽ (@80s90sfootball) May 28, 2024
A personal memory? That goes back to 2016, when I accompanied Robertson to the National Football Museum in Manchester to see him being inducted into English football’s Hall of Fame.
Robertson had been honoured that way by its Scottish equivalent 10 years earlier. It bugged me that he hadn’t been given the same recognition in the country where he had lived since the age of 15. So, for a long time, I lobbied on his behalf, sending emails to the selection panel without him ever knowing. Then, finally, the invitation arrived.
This was before Parkinson’s disease started to get the better of him. The red wine flowed. And at some point that night, he got a celebratory kiss on the cheek from me. At least he seemed quite pleased with it.
The saddest thing, perhaps, is that, within Robertson’s inner circle, they have lost more than just a former team-mate. He was the glue that bonded them together.
Every Thursday, a regular gang of Forest’s European Cup winners, now in their sixties and seventies, would meet for lunch in Nottingham to reminisce and chat about football or the world in general. Last year, they lost big Larry. The year before, it was Francis. And now it’s Robbo, the main man.
Sometimes, I would be invited along, and those were the moments when you absorbed every word, boxed away the stories and realised why the other players were so incredibly fond of him.
Almost always, he would end up holding court. He was a raconteur, a joke-teller, a people-pleaser and a natural entertainer, armed with a fierce intellect, an inquisitive mind, a vast pool of anecdotes and the football insights that made it easy to understand why Martin O’Neill hired him as his assistant manager, everywhere from Grantham Town to Glasgow Celtic.
If the mood took him, you might even see Robbo break out in song, rising to his feet in the middle of a restaurant to channel his inner Bryan Ferry. Sounds a bit much, doesn’t it? But don’t get the wrong impression: he had this rare knack of making it work, putting everyone at ease and making people feel better about themselves and life in general.
It made him the unofficial king of Nottingham, even if there were times in his last few years when he might need help getting out of his chair, or he would quietly ask for an early lift home from an event. Robertson talked openly about his Parkinson’s and accepted its challenges with a resilience that came, perhaps, from experiencing tragedy earlier in his life.
His daughter, Jessica, was born with cerebral palsy and diagnosed as a spastic quadriplegic. She died, aged 13, in 1996. And consider her father’s mental fortitude to play in a 1979 European Cup semi-final against German champions Cologne — and score with a diving header — three days after learning his brother, Hughie, and sister-in-law, Isobel, had been killed in a car crash just outside Glasgow.
The funeral was the day after the game, but Robertson drove down from Scotland to play the hardest match of his life, then travelled straight back up to be at the service. “And when I scored,” he later reflected, “I said to myself: ‘That one was for my brother’.”
Put everything together, and it is easy to understand why most Forest fans automatically nominate Robertson as the greatest player in the club’s 160-year history, even if he did have two seasons at arch-rivals Derby County in between his two spells in Nottingham. I would also repeat what I wrote here in June: that it is time for Forest to create a permanent tribute by renaming the end of the stadium where that diving header went in. What a tribute it would be to have a John Robertson Stand at the City Ground.
“Over the years, I’ve seen any number of left-wingers, including the likes of Gento, the famous Real Madrid player who everyone used to rave about,” Peter Taylor, formerly Clough’s assistant, wrote in Robertson’s testimonial programme. “Well, you can have the lot for me – nobody compares with John.”
Better than all the rest? Yes, that was what Jimmy Gordon, then Forest’s trainer, used to say, too: “I saw a lot of Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews, and it was difficult to choose between them. But when you look at what Finney and Matthews had to offer, John has a bit of both – and something extra on top.“
As for Mourinho, he was spot-on: Robertson’s legacy is as solid as the foundations of the City Ground itself. Every club has a player whose name is synonymous with their very soul. Liverpool have Kenny Dalglish. For Manchester United, it was George Best. Forest’s was ‘JR’, with magic in his boots and a crowd that always felt better when the ball was at his feet.
He was, in Lloyd’s words, an “absolute magician”. And it was always a particular joy to remind Clough’s favourite player about that sweet-scented evening in Madrid — May 28, 1980 — when he turned himself from a great footballer into a football great.
“You see other guys running to the supporters or doing somersaults when they score,” Robertson used to say. “I must have been in a state of shock. Or maybe I was just knackered — it had been a long run by my standards.
“I stood rooted to the spot, put my hands in the air and thought: ‘Whoa there, I just scored in the European Cup final’. When I was a kid, the European Cup was for Puskas, Di Stefano, legends like that. I caught the shot with the outside of my boot. I saw it head towards the corner. And then, of course, I was mobbed.”
John Robertson, 1953–2025
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Daniel Taylor was named Sports Journalist of the Year at the 2025 British Press Awards, the third time he has won the award. He is also a four-time Football Journalist of the Year and the winner of numerous other awards for his reporting, investigative work and feature writing. Daniel, a senior writer for The Athletic, is based in Manchester and was previously the chief football writer for The Guardian/The Observer. He has written five books. Follow Daniel on Twitter @DTathletic