“Offer Accepted, will be there Friday.”
These six simple words delivered by telegram in January 1939 concluded the most extraordinary transfer in League of Ireland history. The recipients were Sligo Rovers but more importantly the sender was William Ralph ‘Dixie’ Dean.
The most prolific goalscorer England has ever produced, in the 1927-28 season Dean scored 60 league goals for Everton despite only playing in 39 of their 42 matches. Nearly a century later this record remains unbroken and Dean remains the ultimate yardstick against whom all strikers are measured.
Universally recognised as Everton’s greatest ever player during his 13-year stay at Goodison Park, Dean won the league championship twice and captained the club to their FA Cup triumph in 1933. Inevitably, Dean found the net at Wembley in a 3-0 victory over Manchester City, perhaps the most important of the 383 goals he scored in 433 appearances for Everton.
Incredibly Dean was even more prolific at international level, scoring 18 goals in just 16 matches for England with his final cap coming in a 1-0 victory over Ireland in 1932 when he was still only 25-years-old. No fan of the blue half of Merseyside, former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once insisted that if Everton were playing in his garden he would pull the curtains.
But Shankly’s praise of Dean was unqualified, observing: “Dixie was the greatest centre-forward there will ever be. His record of goalscoring is the most amazing thing under the sun. He belongs in the company of the supremely great, like Beethoven, Shakespeare and Rembrandt.”
So what brought this supremely great striker to Sligo when he had just turned 32? The unromantic, but probably accurate, answer was money.
In an era when English clubs were bound by strict maximum wage rules that did not apply here, Irish clubs could offer lucrative short-term deals that were attractive even to star players like Dean, whose subsequent post retirement occupations would include working in an abattoir and running a pub.
Initially Sligo Rovers contacted Dean in his capacity as a scout to help find them a striker and unable to locate one he eventually agreed to join himself. This created such excitement that hundreds of people joined the mayor and a brass band at Sligo railway station to welcome Dean’s train – but unfortunately he wasn’t on it. Instead an old man carrying a pig under his arm disembarked leading one disappointed spectator to ruefully observe “he’s not going to score too many effing goals”.
Arriving on a later train, Dean attracted huge attendances from the start with the Irish public so keen to catch a glimpse of him that his mere inclusion on the team sheet would add thousands to the gate.
Even when not playing Dean attracted a crowd, illustrated best perhaps on St Patrick’s Day when he spent the afternoon refereeing a Donegal v Sligo match and in the evening delivering a lecture on ‘Modern Football Tactics’ to a capacity crowd at the Wolfe Tone Memorial Hall in Letterkenny.
Appropriately his four-month stay in Ireland finished with the 1939 FAI Cup Final in which Sligo faced Shelbourne, a match remembered as ‘the Dixie Dean Final’. Having already had a goal controversially disallowed for offside, Dean opened the scoring at Dalymount Park, becoming the first man in history to score in both the FAI and FA Cup Finals. But that was to be as good as it got for the Bit O’Red with Shelbourne recovering to secure the cup after a replay.
Dean didn’t even enjoy the consolation of going home with his runners-up medal which vanished from his hotel room, only to be mysteriously returned to him several years later in an envelope posted in Ireland with no return address provided.
After a period of ill health that included having a leg amputated, Dean suffered a fatal heart attack at his beloved Goodison Park in 1980 just after the final whistle of the Merseyside derby. Such was the impact of his passing, for the first time ever the closing theme tune to Match of the Day, which screened highlights of the game that night, were silenced with a black and white image of Dean filling the screen instead.
On Friday, Everton will play their first preseason friendly against Sligo Rovers. Leading Everton out at a sold out Showgrounds will be Séamus Coleman, who in January 2009 made the reverse journey to the one taken by Dean exactly seven decades earlier, when he joined the Toffees from Sligo Rovers for £60,000.
Fifteen years later Coleman has proven to be Everton’s greatest ever bargain, playing well over 400 games and scoring 28 goals for the club. Such is his legendary status at the club, this week Everton TV will be releasing a feature-length documentary simply entitled – Seamus.
Having recently signed a one-year contract extension, Coleman will remain a blue until June 2025, when the club will leave Goodison Park to play at the newly-built Everton Stadium. Also likely to depart at that time is Coleman himself.
There will doubtless be reams of newsprint dedicated to his leaving. Yet those looking for a simpler tribute to Coleman that captures both his humble nature off the field and his extraordinary contribution to the club on it, might find suitable inspiration from the three words engraved at the foot of the Dixie Dean statue that stands proudly outside Goodison Park which simply reads: “Footballer. Gentleman. Evertonian”.
