1980s Sheffield United hero laments loss of football's working class culture
Two-time Sheffield United Player of The Year Mike Trusson has spoken to The Star after the release of his new book ‘One For The Frog’
It’s no secret that football has vastly changed in the last 30-plus years, and not just as a sport, but in every sense of what it stands for. The premise remains the same: 22 players, one ball, one pitch, two sets of goalposts.
As much as the aim of the game is unchanged, the different ways of winning have seen a real shift as football has moved through the eras. It’s not just that either. Football has moved from being an escapism of people’s hardship in life, to becoming life itself. Although the men on the pitch who decide whether we go home happy on a Saturday evening or have our weekend ruined leave people scratching their heads as to how much they really care.
Of course, there are notable anomalies: Billy Sharp, Chris Morgan and the late George Baldock, just to name a few, but few footballers of the 2020s play for the badge; they’re simply playing for their monthly pay packet, which for some fans is more money than they’ll ever see.
Mike Trusson was a Blade between 1980 and 1984, winning Sheffield United’s ‘Player of the Year’ in 1981/82 and again in 82/83. He enjoyed a 20-year playing career that saw him make over 600 professional appearances, and shared the pitch with some of the greatest Blades to ever wear the red and white stripes, such as 1966 World Cup winner Martin Peters and legendary goalscorer Keith Edwards.
During his years at Bramall Lane, he says that he could see what football meant to people in the Steel City, a time when the economy and political climate ‘massively’ had an impact on the game, which is maybe one of the few similarities it shares with football as we know it in 2026.
“Sheffield was struggling [when I joined]. There was a lot of unemployment. It wasn't a particularly wealthy city. Coming down south and coming up here, what I found with the people was that it kind of hardened and toughened them in a real kind of good way.
“If the Blades fans were with you, they were with you. And that first year we got relegated, Don Givens missed the penalty in the last minute of the game; if he'd scored, we’d have stayed up.
“And I just vividly remember, being heartbroken myself, but the fans, that this was their club and the emotion, the outpouring of emotion was quite intense. And equally, when we won the championship [League Two] the following year, the joy and the chaos and the carnival and the fun was just brilliant.”
As football has grown into one of the biggest businesses in the world, the sporting aspect has been lost in some ways. Most decisions that clubs take are based on finances; what that means for the club in a sporting aspect is irrelevant for many owners. Naturally, this has been, and continues to be, objected to by football's faithful, but it’s taken ever further in Sheffield.
Working-class grafters embody the city’s nitty-gritty culture, and Trusson identifies the club as mirroring that then, and still does now.
But these very fans are often priced out of supporting their own team, as a result of the shift.
“Football has definitely gone more corporate, and it's become more expensive,” he says.
“But it was the escape for not just Sheffield United fans, I think fans all over. And quite rightly, they demanded hard work and effort.
“If you could do nothing else, if you didn't run around and have a go, the fans would let you know about it.
“I think then it was a real working-class sport still. And I enjoyed it because of that. And I think that also is something that embodies Sheffield as well.
“When we got relegated, it was like a smack in the face.”
The average weekly wage of a Championship player is believed to be around £13,000 per week - that’s 10 times more than what second division players were earning during Trusson’s United days.
“Some of the money the players earn is quite frightening. And I can only imagine; I've never earned that kind of money.”
“The amount of money the players earn cushions you from the realities of what people face who are supporting them. And it makes you selfish.
“You only think about, ‘am I earning, am I playing, am I fit, am I injured.’ So you're earning a load of money, and your team's possibly going to get relegated, and they're struggling. As players, a lot of them are thinking, along with their agents, ‘How do I get out of this? How do I stay in it?’ Not ‘how do I help this club survive, it's what's my way out of this?’
“At the end of the season when clubs get promoted,” he continued. “They won't take a drop in the wages to go, ‘yeah, I was responsible for this, cut my wages in half and I'll only get promoted if they get a chance or not.’ And I think that's the reality of professional football today.”
Trusson clearly felt partially responsible for people’s state of mind at the weekend. But this has become something of a rarity in the English game. Many players are merely there to collect a wage. If playing a high level of football didn’t provide the financial security that it does, how many players would still play?
But Trusson has insisted that it’s not just the ‘corporate’ element of the sport that’s seen a shift - it’s the tactics as well.
“Teams [in the 80s] wanted to try and get the ball forward a lot more often. A lot of pitches had something to do with that, because the pitches weren't conducive to playing out from the back.
“Teams generally didn't want to lose the ball in their own third because of the turnover. We knew statistically if we lost the ball in our own third there was a fair chance that from that we were going to concede an opportunity, potentially a goal. So we would play the ball out of our own third so that if it was then lost further up the pitch we had more time to recover and get shape back and it was more difficult for the teams to score. So the game was a lot simpler, massively less tactical.
“Generally the wide players would be quick and tricky, and you'd try and get the ball to them, and they'd try to cross it.”
“If you take Arsenal, the best team in the country last year, won the Premier League, for large parts of the season they weren't an enjoyable watch. I was in America watching the Champions League final, and it was painful in many ways; only one team wanted to play.”
Trusson worked as an assistant under Tony Pulis, inclusing at Sheffield Wednesday, and identified the way in which young players are coached early in their careers as a factor in why the game has become more possession-based.
“A lot of academies, there's a lot of technical practices that go on about passing and moving. Not so many of them will play games with goals in. If you're doing a practice that doesn't have an end result in it, why would you get the ball wide and put the ball in the box if you're not doing that in training? Because the training is about keeping the ball. You need goals because that's the focus of what the game is about.”
The insight from an 80s player into how the game has changed is an interesting point of view. For most of us, we won’t know how it feels to play football at Bramall Lane in front of thousands of people, but for Trusson, it’s interesting how he recognises that the everlasting culture of Sheffield has remained, while the sport we all love changes in ways that he and his teammates would never have imagined.
Mike Trusson’s book ‘One For The Frog’ published by Legends Publishing is available for purchase now.