67 Facts About Bob Paisley

Robert Paisley OBE was an English professional football manager and player who played as a wing-half.

Bob Paisley spent almost 50 years with Liverpool and is regarded, due to his achievements with the club, as one of the greatest British managers of all time.

Bob Paisley is the first of three managers to have won the European Cup three times.

Bob Paisley is one of five managers to have won the English top-flight championship as both a player and manager at the same club.

Bob Paisley came from a small County Durham mining community and, in his youth, played for Bishop Auckland before he signed for Liverpool in 1939.

Bob Paisley was made club captain in 1951, and remained with Liverpool until he retired from playing in 1954.

Bob Paisley stayed with the club, and took on the two roles of reserve team coach and club physiotherapist.

Bob Paisley filled an important role as tactician under Shankly's leadership, and the team won numerous honours during the next twelve seasons.

Bob Paisley went on to lead Liverpool through a period of domestic and European dominance, winning twenty honours in nine seasons: six League Championships, three League Cups, six Charity Shields, three European Cups, one UEFA Cup and one UEFA Super Cup.

Bob Paisley won honours at a rate of 2.2 per season, a rate surpassed only by Pep Guardiola.

Bob Paisley retired from management in 1983 and was succeeded by Joe Fagan.

Bob Paisley died in 1996, aged 77, after having Alzheimer's disease for several years.

Bob Paisley was born on Thursday 23 January 1919, in the small County Durham coal mining village of Hetton-le-Hole which is seven miles from Sunderland.

Bob Paisley described it as "a close-knit community where coal was king and football was religion".

Bob Paisley's father Sam was a miner and his mother Emily a housewife.

Bob Paisley attended a local school until he was thirteen and, like his friends there, had to rely on soup kitchens to supplement a meagre diet.

Life was difficult for working-class families and, as Bob Paisley recalled: "We lived in a small terraced house, and although we never went short of life's essentials, there was never much money left over by the end of the week".

Bob Paisley was an outstanding footballer at Eppleton Primary School and helped his team win seventeen trophies in a four-year period.

Bob Paisley had joined Hetton Football Club after leaving school in 1933 and continued to attract notice as a member of their junior team.

Bob Paisley had a boyhood dream of playing for Sunderland but when he was recommended to them by Hetton he was rejected as being "too small".

Bob Paisley played for "the Bishops" for two seasons until he was signed by Liverpool in May 1939, a few months after his twentieth birthday.

The Bishops were one of the top non-league teams in England and Bob Paisley called them "the Kings of Amateur Football".

Bob Paisley kept his promise even though Sunderland reconsidered and made another approach.

Bob Paisley signed his contract and began an association that would last half a century.

Bob Paisley had got to know Matt Busby, who was then Liverpool's club captain and was grateful for the advice and encouragement which Busby gave him.

Bob Paisley said that Busby was "a man you could look up to and respect".

Bob Paisley took part in 34 of these matches between 1939 and 1941, scoring ten goals.

Bob Paisley was stationed at several camps throughout Great Britain including one at Rhyl.

Stan Liversedge describes one occasion when Bob Paisley was given clearance by the Army to play for Liverpool against Everton in the 1940 Liverpool Senior Cup final.

Bob Paisley left the bike in Birkenhead and hitched a lift through the Mersey Tunnel.

Bob Paisley was captain of the 73rd's team and, when his battery was due to be posted, his commanding officer transferred him to another battery so that he could remain in Britain and lead the regimental team.

Bob Paisley went in a troopship to Egypt, the voyage lasting ten weeks because they had to sail around South Africa.

Bob Paisley spent Christmas in Egypt and then received his first mail from England which turned out to be a postcard from George Kay asking him if he would be available to play for Liverpool against Preston North End in the season opener three months earlier.

Bob Paisley learned to ride himself and he retained this interest after the war, often studying form in his spare moments.

Bob Paisley was stationed south of Cairo and learned to drive a 15 cwt.

Bob Paisley represented the Combined Services football team as well as playing for his regiment.

Bob Paisley was involved in the Second Battle of El Alamein and subsequently fought his way across North Africa until the final defeat of the Afrika Korps in 1943.

In 1943, Bob Paisley went with the Eighth Army into Sicily and then into Italy.

In June 1944, Bob Paisley took part in the liberation of Rome and rode into the city on top of a tank, an event he recalled 33 years later when Liverpool won the 1977 European Cup Final in Rome's Stadio Olimpico.

Bob Paisley's regiment moved on to Florence where they encamped at ACF Fiorentina's Stadio Artemio Franchi.

In Florence, Bob Paisley saw boxing exhibitions by Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson which generated another sporting interest and one for which he and Bill Shankly shared a passion while they worked together.

Bob Paisley finally returned to England in 1945 and was stationed at Woolwich Arsenal until he was demobbed.

Bob Paisley recalled her father being unimpressed that she had met a soldier who was a professional footballer in civilian life so she added that Paisley had worked as a bricklayer too.

Bob Paisley's father said: "Oh, that's a proper job so that's alright then".

Bob Paisley eventually made his official debut on 5 January 1946 in Liverpool's first post-war competitive match, which was an FA Cup 3rd round, 1st leg away match at Sealand Road, the home ground of Chester.

Bob Paisley later said that the experience stood him in good stead when it came to telling players they were not going to play in big games as he knew how they felt.

Bob Paisley later became the reserve team coach and then, in August 1959 when Albert Shelley retired, first team trainer.

The arrival of Bill Shankly as manager in December 1959 transformed the fortunes of the club and Bob Paisley recalled that "from the moment he arrived, we got on like a house on fire".

Bob Paisley wanted to work with them and so guaranteed them their jobs.

Bob Paisley had always been keen on training with the ball and was, like Fagan and Bennett, delighted to implement Shankly's methods.

Bob Paisley was an unassuming character and "happy to play second fiddle", but Kelly recognises his influence because although Shankly was "the great motivating force behind Liverpool, it was Bob Paisley who was the tactician".

Between 1978 and 1981 Bob Paisley's team went 63 league games unbeaten at Anfield, a club record until it was surpassed by Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool side in November 2020.

Bob Paisley, having won 20 major honours in his time as Liverpool manager, remains, to this day, the most successful manager in the club's history and the most successful English manager of all time.

Bob Paisley won honours at a rate of 2.2 per season, a rate surpassed only by Pep Guardiola.

Bob Paisley remained the only man in history to manage three European Cup winning sides until Carlo Ancelotti and Zinedine Zidane matched the feat in 2014 and 2018 respectively.

Bob Paisley won an unprecedented six Manager of the Year Awards.

The only trophies that Bob Paisley failed to win as manager were the FA Cup, although Liverpool would be runners-up in the 1977 final, the European Cup Winners' Cup, and the Intercontinental Cup.

Bob Paisley was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1977 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews on board a coach in central London.

In January 2020, a statue which depicts a scene from 1968, when Bob Paisley carried the injured future Liverpool captain Emlyn Hughes off the field, was unveiled outside Anfield.

Bob Paisley was replaced by Joe Fagan, who would win Liverpool their fourth European Cup.

Bob Paisley worked informally as a consultant and advisor to Kenny Dalglish for two years after the latter's appointment as player-manager in 1985, before being appointed as a club director.

Bob Paisley continued to serve Liverpool as a director until he retired in early 1992 due to ill health, having been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, something which had become apparent in his early seventies when he was unable to remember his way home when driving back from Anfield.

Bob Paisley died on 14 February 1996 at the age of 77, several weeks after moving into a nursing home in Merseyside.

Bob Paisley was buried in the churchyard of St Peter's Church in Woolton, Liverpool.

Bob Paisley was married to his wife Jessie, a school teacher in Liverpool, from 1946 until his death 50 years later.

Jessie Bob Paisley died in February 2012 at the age of 96.

Jessie Bob Paisley had attended the celebrations to commemorate Liverpool's last game in front of the old Spion Kop terrace in 1994, but without her husband, who was not well enough to attend.