"I'll break your legs!" Mark Bright reveals vile racist letter sent by Everton fan over Sheffield Wednesday transfer link

The forward, who remains the club’s Premier League top scorer with 61 goals, has revealed that he received a racist threat warning him off the move, signed by someone claiming to be an Everton fan.

And speaking to The Star, the Owls icon said he has kept the note to this day, despite the advice of forward partner David Hirst to throw it away.

“I’ve still got that letter,” he said.

“I kept it, I don’t know why, I just did.

“It went along the lines of “I’ll break your legs you f***ing n***er”, “we don’t want any n***ers at our club”.

“It was written on a piece of paper, in an envelope.

“That person had to go out, buy a stamp, put a stamp on it, walk to the letterbox and post it.

“There’s a process there.

“Somewhere along the line surely you’d think ‘you know what? I’m throwing this in the bin’. But no.”

An Everton bid never materialised and to Bright the note acts as a reminder of how far life in the UK has come even since the mid-90s.

“It wasn’t something I wanted to make a fuss out of or take to the press,” Bright said.

“One or two of the players saw it, Hirsty saw it, and they said to throw it in the bin.

“Did it make me not want to go to Everton? Not really, I wasn’t fussed either way. I was concentrating on Sheffield Wednesday.

“I’d had that sort of treatment all through my career. I was racially abused at schoolboy level, pretty regularly. It was just the done thing in those days.”

It’s a reality that reared its head a number of times during his time at Wednesday, though never at Hillsborough, Bright said.

And when explaining to The Star the kind of treatment black players had to face, even in the 1990s, one occasion sprung to his mind.

“We were playing Southampton away at The Dell, a ball went out of play near the dugout and the guy pretended to throw it back at me and he told me to ‘f*** off you black c***’,” he said.

“All the people around him laughed. You just feel sick. That was in 1996.

“The ref blew the whistle at half-time, I stopped and spoke to a policeman and gave him a very specific description, told him exactly where he was, reporting that he had racially abused me.

“I said something to the referee, too.

“When I came out for the second half, I jogged out towards the touchline and I could still see him, staring at me laughing as if to say “What?” The policeman obviously didn’t know what to do there and nowadays I guess if you reported that they’d have to do something. You’d certainly hope so.

“Times have changed, those things are just not acceptable now and it’s improved.”

My Story: From Foster Care to Footballer by Mark Bright is published by Constable on 7 November in hardback, £20.