My grandad saw George Best play.
Not on television. Not on a highlights reel. In person. At Old Trafford, in the flesh, close enough to see the way he moved with the ball at his feet and to understand, in the way that only being physically present at a football match allows you to understand, that what he was watching was something that did not belong to the normal category of professional sport.
My grandad was not a Manchester United fan. He was not even particularly interested in following a specific club with the kind of devotion that defines most football supporters. But he talked about George Best for the rest of his life. Not constantly, not obsessively, but with a quiet reverence that surfaced whenever the conversation turned to the question of who the greatest footballer was. He had his answer and it never changed.
My dad inherited the reverence without the first-hand experience. He grew up hearing about Best the way I grew up hearing about Keegan, through stories told by someone who had been there and who could not quite find the words to fully convey what they had seen. The footage helped. The grainy black and white clips of a young man in a red shirt doing things that looked impossible in any era and that looked genuinely supernatural in the context of 1960s English football. But footage is not the same as presence. My grandad knew what Best looked like in motion, at full speed, in real time, and the knowledge of that stayed with him in a way that no recording could replicate.
Three generations of my family have carried George Best’s name as part of the answer to the question of what football can be at its absolute peak. My grandad saw it. My dad heard about it. I read about it and watched the highlights and tried to understand why a player who retired before my parents were married still generates the kind of conversation that players currently winning Ballon d’Or awards struggle to produce.
The answer, when you finally piece it together from the footage and the stories and the statistics and the mythology, is simultaneously simple and heartbreaking. George Best was the most naturally gifted footballer these islands have ever produced. And the game that worshipped his talent did almost nothing to protect the person who possessed it.
Belfast and the Boy Who Was Too Good for His Own City
George Best was born in Belfast in 1946, the eldest of six children in a working class Protestant family in the Cregagh estate on the east side of the city. His father Dickie worked as an iron turner. His mother Ann worked in a variety of jobs to supplement the family income. The circumstances were modest in the way that most footballing childhoods of that era were modest, defined by limited resources and the understanding that opportunity, if it came at all, would come from somewhere outside the world you were born into.
Best was playing football from the moment he could walk. The street games, the park games, the informal kickabouts that were the development pathway for every working class footballer in Britain before the academy system existed. He was immediately and obviously different to everyone around him. Not just better. Different in kind. The ball behaved differently when he had it. The game looked different when he was playing it. The other children on the Cregagh estate knew they were playing with someone who was operating in a dimension they could not access.
Bob Bishop, a Manchester United scout operating in Northern Ireland, watched Best play and sent a telegram to Matt Busby at Old Trafford that has become one of the most famous communications in football history. The exact wording varies depending on the source but the sentiment is consistent. I think I have found you a genius.
Best arrived in Manchester at fifteen. He was homesick almost immediately. The distance from Belfast, the unfamiliarity of the city, the loneliness of a teenager separated from his family and everything he knew, nearly ended the story before it began. He went home. He told his parents he did not want to go back.
Busby persuaded him to return. The genius that Bishop had identified was too obvious to abandon. Best came back to Manchester and within two years he was in the first team. Within four years he was the most exciting footballer in the world.
The homesickness that nearly sent him back to Belfast is one of those details that only becomes significant in retrospect. A fifteen year old boy, alone in a city he did not know, without the support structures that modern football provides for young players, trying to cope with the pressure of being exceptional in an environment that had no framework for managing exceptional talent. The vulnerability was there from the beginning. Nobody saw it as a warning.
The Footballer Who Made the Impossible Look Casual
What George Best did on a football pitch between 1963 and 1970 has been described by people far more qualified than me in language that ranges from the technical to the poetic and that consistently fails to fully capture what they are trying to convey.
The dribbling. The balance. The courage to receive the ball in positions where defenders were waiting to hurt him, in an era when hurting was not just permitted but actively encouraged, and to take them on anyway with a confidence that bordered on arrogance and a technique that justified every ounce of it. The ability to beat one man, then two, then three, at full speed, on muddy pitches that would have slowed anyone else to a walk, in boots that weighed twice what modern boots weigh, against defenders who had no disciplinary reason not to kick him as hard as they could.
He scored 179 goals in 470 appearances for Manchester United. He was named European Footballer of the Year in 1968, the same year he scored in the European Cup final as United beat Benfica 4-1 at Wembley to become the first English club to win the competition. He was twenty two years old. The best player in Europe. Playing for the biggest club in England. Managed by Matt Busby, the most respected figure in British football.
The European Cup final goal against Benfica is the moment that Best’s career is most often distilled to and it is worth describing because it captures everything about what made him unique. He received the ball in his own half, carried it forward, rounded the goalkeeper with a touch so delicate and so precisely weighted that it looked like the ball was attached to his foot by an invisible thread, and scored into an empty net with the composure of someone completing a routine exercise rather than scoring in the biggest club match in the world.
My grandad saw moments like that in person. I understand now why he never stopped talking about them.
The footage from that era does not do him justice. The cameras were limited, the angles were few, the quality was poor by modern standards. What survives is enough to confirm the genius but not enough to fully communicate the experience of watching it live. The people who were there carry something that the rest of us can only approximate through their descriptions, and the consistency of those descriptions, the way they all reach for the same words and the same sense of inadequacy in using them, tells you that what they saw was real and was extraordinary.
The Fifth Beatle
George Best became famous in the mid 1960s in a way that no British footballer had ever been famous before and that fundamentally changed the relationship between football and popular culture.
He was handsome. He had the hair, the cheekbones, the look of a pop star in an era when pop stars were the most visible cultural figures in Britain. He dressed well. He opened boutiques in Manchester. He went to nightclubs. He dated models and actresses and beauty queens. He appeared on magazine covers that had nothing to do with football and everything to do with celebrity.
The nickname The Fifth Beatle was not ironic. It was an accurate description of his cultural position in Britain during the late 1960s. He existed alongside the Beatles, alongside the Rolling Stones, alongside the cultural revolution that was transforming British society, as one of the most recognisable and most discussed figures in the country. A working class kid from Belfast who happened to be able to do things with a football that nobody else could do, elevated by that ability into a world of fame and attention and temptation that nothing in his background had prepared him for.
The fame arrived before any infrastructure existed to manage it. There were no PR teams. No agents in the modern sense. No media training. No support network designed to protect a young man from the consequences of being the most famous twenty two year old in Britain with unlimited access to everything that fame provides and no guidance about how to navigate it.
Best handled the fame the way a twenty two year old with his looks and his talent and his appetite for life might be expected to handle it. He enjoyed it. Enthusiastically, publicly, without restraint. The nightclubs, the women, the drinking that started as social and became something else entirely within a few years. All of it consumed with the same fearlessness that characterised his football, the same inability to hold anything back, the same absence of caution that made him brilliant on the pitch and vulnerable off it.
The world watched and was entertained. The tabloids loved him. The public loved him. The attention fed on itself and grew and Best, who had no template for managing it and no one around him equipped to provide one, was consumed by it incrementally and then completely.
The Decline and What Manchester United Failed to Do
The drinking started properly in his early twenties. By twenty four he was missing training sessions. By twenty six he was disappearing for days at a time. The retirements started, dramatic announcements followed by quiet returns, a pattern that repeated itself across several years and that became its own form of public spectacle.
Manchester United, the club that had signed him at fifteen and benefited enormously from his genius for nearly a decade, did not know how to help him. It would be unfair to judge them entirely by modern standards. The understanding of addiction, of mental health, of the duty of care that institutions owe to the people within them, was fundamentally different in the 1970s. The structures that exist today to support players in crisis did not exist then.
But the absence of those structures does not fully excuse the absence of intervention. Best was visibly deteriorating. His performances were declining. His absences were increasing. The drinking was not a secret. It was public knowledge discussed openly in the media and within the club. And yet the response from United and from the people around Best was largely to wait for him to sort himself out, to treat the problem as a character flaw rather than an illness, to hope that the genius would eventually overcome whatever was consuming it.
It did not. Best left Manchester United for the final time in 1974 at the age of twenty seven. The greatest talent in British football, a man who at twenty two had been the best player in Europe, walked away from the biggest club in England having produced only a fraction of what his ability should have generated across a full career.
Matt Busby, the manager who had signed him and built the team around him and loved him, later said that he wished he had done more. The regret was genuine. It was also too late.
The Wandering Years and the Final Chapter
What followed Best’s departure from United was a slow, painful, public unravelling that lasted three decades and that tested the limits of how much sympathy the public could extend to someone whose self-destruction was so visible and so apparently voluntary.
He played in South Africa. He played in the United States, for the Los Angeles Aztecs and the Fort Lauderdale Strikers and the San Jose Earthquakes, names that sound exotic but that represented a level of football so far below what Best was capable of that the gap was almost cruel to witness. He played for Fulham in England. He played for a series of clubs in a series of countries, each engagement shorter than the last, each departure accompanied by the same stories of drinking and missed commitments and wasted opportunities.
The talent never fully disappeared. Even in his thirties, even diminished by years of alcohol and the physical toll it had taken, Best could produce moments on a football pitch that reminded everyone watching why they had cared about him in the first place. The skill was still there. The instinct was still there. The body and the mind that housed them were no longer capable of sustaining them across a match or a season or a career.
He was married twice. He appeared on chat shows. He was arrested for drink driving. He became as famous for his alcoholism as he had once been for his football, the trajectory of his public life a cautionary tale that the country watched unfold with a combination of fascination and sadness and, eventually, resignation.
In 2002 he received a liver transplant. The operation was successful. The recovery was not. He continued drinking after the transplant, a decision that generated enormous public criticism and that revealed, more clearly than anything else in his story, the nature of the addiction that had controlled his life for decades. Alcoholism is not a choice. It is not a character flaw. It is an illness. And the public response to Best’s relapse, the anger, the accusations of selfishness, the sense that he had wasted a second chance that someone more deserving should have received, reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of what addiction actually is and how it operates.
George Best died on November 25, 2005, in a London hospital. He was fifty nine years old. The cause of death was a lung infection and multiple organ failure, the cumulative consequence of decades of alcohol abuse. His father Dickie was at his bedside. His son Calum was there. The people who had loved him most were present at the end of a life that had contained more talent, more fame, more joy and more waste than almost any other in the history of British public life.
What Football Lost
I want to be careful about how I frame this final section because there is a version of the George Best story that treats his decline as purely his own responsibility and a version that treats him as purely a victim of circumstance and neither version is honest.
Best made choices. He chose to drink. He chose to continue drinking after the transplant. He chose, at various points across his life, to prioritise the things that were destroying him over the things that might have saved him. Those choices were real and they had consequences that he bore and that the people who loved him bore alongside him.
But Best also existed in a world that was not equipped to help him. A football culture that celebrated his genius and ignored his vulnerability. A media environment that profited from his celebrity and treated his addiction as entertainment. A support structure that did not exist in the form it needed to exist for a young man whose talent had placed him in circumstances that nobody around him understood.
Football failed George Best. Not completely. Not exclusively. But significantly. The game that made him famous and wealthy and adored did not protect him from the consequences of the fame and the wealth and the adoration. The people who managed his career and his club and his public image did not see the danger until it was too late, or saw it and did not know what to do about it, or knew what to do and chose not to because the genius was too valuable to interrupt.
My grandad watched him play and talked about it for the rest of his life. My dad grew up hearing those stories and passed them on to me with the same reverence and the same sadness. Three generations carrying the memory of a footballer who was, by every account of every person who saw him, the most naturally gifted player these islands have ever produced.
He could have been the greatest footballer who ever lived. The talent was there. The ability was there. Everything was there except the things that might have allowed it to survive.
George Best. Born in Belfast. Died in London. Somewhere in between, the most beautiful football anyone had ever seen.
The game has never fully reckoned with what it lost. It probably never will.
