‘They tried to take the rip at Chelsea but I’d give it back. Perfect example: my nickname quickly became Weirdo. I just said to them, “I’m normal, you’re a bunch of weirdos”’ Pat Nevin on how his love for culture went down in the dressing ro

When it came to footballers in the 1980s, it’s fair to say Pat Nevin stuck out like a sore thumb.

Prefering culture to Carling and more likely to be listening to Joy Division and the Cocteau Twins than the era’s dressing room staples of Phil Collins and Lionel Richie, Nevin was dubbed ‘the first post-punk footballer’.

So when Nevin crossed the border to join Chelsea from Clyde for a fee of £95,000 in the summer of 1983, was his love of culture ever held against him?

Pat Nevin on his ‘Weirdo’ nickname

“I’d say so, but not as often as you’d think,” he tells FourFourTwo. “Nobody really cared. They tried to take the rip at Chelsea but I’d give it back. Perfect example: my nickname quickly became Weirdo.

“I just said to them, ‘I’m normal, you’re a bunch of weirdos.’ They respect you for it when you take on a whole group. Football is as near to a meritocracy as there is.”

Nevin, who was ranked at no.23 in FourFourTwo’s list of Chelsea’s best-ever signings, quickly settled in at Stamford Bridge, netting 14 goals in his first season as the Blues won promotion as Second Division champions.

Another trophy followed in 1986 when the Blues lifted the Full Members’ Cup and Nevin has recently caught up again with his former team-mates.

“You’re in the trenches with these guys week in, week out and suddenly that’s over when you leave. The last five or six years I bumped into a lot of them when I was working at Stamford Bridge, but recently we had a reunion – even the chairman Ken Bates, then 92 years old, came.

“Every player came except one. It could only be described as magical. There was bad blood between David Speedie and Paul Canoville that had festered for many years.

“It wasn’t easy, but Speedie walked into a room before the actual reunion and said, ‘I want a word with you’ to Paul. He said, ‘I’m sorry, everything I said back then was wrong. Can you forgive me?’ Paul, being the absolute dude he is, said, ‘That’s all I wanted’, and gave him a big hug.

“I told them we do that on stage later in front of everyone – and we did!”

For more than a decade, Joe Mewis has worked in football journalism as a reporter and editor. Mewis has had stints at Mirror Football and LeedsLive among others and worked at FourFourTwo throughout Euro 2024, reporting on the tournament. In addition to his journalist work, Mewis is also the author of four football history books that include times on Leeds United and the England national team. Now working as a digital marketing coordinator at Harrogate Town, too, Mewis counts some of his best career moments as being in the iconic Spygate press conference under Marcelo Bielsa and seeing his beloved Leeds lift the Championship trophy during lockdown.