Remembering Tom Youngs, an extraordinary ordinary footballer

If there is such a thing as a typical footballer, he was never it.

“Tom Youngs has got A-levels,” the Cambridge United fans used to chant about their rookie striker who had chosen to follow his football dreams rather than study law at Birmingham University.

In another sense, Youngs was very much your average footballer, navigating his way through the puddles and potholes of England’s lower divisions and reluctantly having to accept he was never going to make it to the Premier League.

“It’s not quite what dreams are made of,” Youngs wrote in his autobiography. “It could have been better. I didn’t play for England or in the Premier League. Heck, I’m not even the most famous sportsman with my own name, thanks to my rugby-playing namesake with a stash of international caps.

“But it could have been a whole lot worse. I’m lucky to have played so many times as a professional and scored more than a few goals. Despite some low points, this is no sob story.”

Youngs, whose career also included spells at Northampton Town, Leyton Orient and Bury, died on Sunday, far too early. He was 45 years old and, if you are unfamiliar with his story, the title of his autobiography should make things a little clearer: “What Dreams are (Not Quite) Made of: No Fame, No Fortune, Just Football… and Multiple Sclerosis.”

His diagnosis came in 2014, aged 35, after he started having problems with the vision in one eye and the optician could not find anything wrong. Youngs was given eye drops and told to come back in a couple of weeks if the issue persisted. Nothing changed and eventually he was directed to the neurology department of his local hospital. That was when the father-of-two realised life would never be the same again.

“I haven’t been keen to talk about it with people, mainly because the words ‘multiple sclerosis’ sound horrific when said aloud and drive extreme reactions,” he writes in one of the autobiography’s more emotive passages.

“Mum looked pretty horrified when I told her. As most people aren’t too aware what MS actually is and does — like I wasn’t, initially — I don’t want anyone to start looking at me differently. But I realised that it’s important to be open about it, to raise awareness and prevent those overreactions. So I thought I’d write this book.”

It isn’t easy to locate Youngs’ book in the shops these days because, when your entire career has been spent in England’s third and fourth divisions, it is never going to be straightforward attracting one of the really big publishers. So it was only a smallish print run when a Sheffield-based publisher, Vertical Editions, agreed to take on his memoirs in 2016.

But it is worth hunting down a copy if you want an honest, warts-and-all account of life in the lower reaches of English professional football from someone who, by his own admission, did not always fit seamlessly into its often macho dressing-room culture.

Youngs used to describe himself as “an undercover agent trying to avoid being unmasked in a world for which I was unsuited”. And maybe that went back, in part, to his school years, when he took the unusual step of declining Cambridge’s offer of a YTS place (youth training scheme) because he wanted to concentrate on his A-level studies.

Youngs stood out as an unusual footballer (AllsportUK/Allsport)

He was still talented enough to be offered a full-time contract at the end of those exams.

Youngs’ full senior debut came in December 1997 at age 18, against Bristol Rovers in the EFL Trophy, and he tells the story in his memoirs about that being the first reality check as to where, realistically, his career might take him. The teenager ended up being substituted 61 minutes into a 1-0 away defeat. “I guess debuts are a bit like losing your virginity, only with more spectators,” he writes. “Lots of hype, lots of expectation, but your inexperience can be all too obvious.”

The verdict on Youngs in the local newspaper, the Cambridge Evening News, the following day read simply: “Not ready.” Nor was the teenager quite prepared for a dressing-room culture in which his nickname varied from ‘Professor’ to ‘Boffin’, ‘Statto’ or ‘Tory Boy’ (for having the academic qualifications you’d expect of a privileged public schoolboy, rather than in relation to any political leanings).

Towards the end of his career, he obtained a degree in sports writing and broadcasting from Staffordshire University. He was even invited by two Bury fans to join them in applying for a place on BBC quiz show Only Connect.

Yet he also had what people in the sport know as football intelligence and, in his peak years, this helped him finish as Cambridge’s leading goalscorer for two successive seasons.

The obituary posted on Cambridge’s website this week noted his “probing, darting runs, intelligent positioning and poise in front of goal”, qualities that helped him climb to 11th place on their all-time list of scorers. John Taylor, Cambridge’s manager for his final two seasons there, summed him up: “I don’t think you’ll find a forward in the lower divisions who understands the game as much as Tom Youngs.”

It makes you wonder whether Youngs might have made a decent manager himself, passing on his knowledge to a new generation of players and forging a longer career for himself in the sport that had shaped much of his life.

Because he was not actually an outsider. He had plenty of friends within the football bubble, lots of happy memories and enjoyed himself immensely at times. It just turned him cold when the laddishness in the dressing room crossed a line, as it often did. 

Youngs moved to Northampton after starting out at Cambridge United (Pete Norton/Getty Images)

As it turned out, his first coaching appointment, as assistant manager at non-League Mildenhall Town, had to be abandoned after his diagnosis.

As a player, Youngs had never had to concern himself about MS, how it causes the body’s immune system to attack its nervous system, and how it can affect its sufferers in all sorts of different ways. Now he had to learn what a cruel, indiscriminate disease it can be, along with his wife, Chelle, and their young daughters, Hannah and Orla.

There were times when his legs would buckle, as if someone was twanging the nerves behind his knees. He developed a habit of tripping when walking up stairs, not lifting his foot as high as he expected it to go.

Youngs, raised in Bury St Edmunds, a short drive east of Cambridge, also became susceptible to Uhthoff’s phenomenon, a complication of MS that means symptoms worsen when the body heats up. He had to avoid long showers and give up hot baths. “Even just walking on a warm day, or having hot soup for lunch, can make my eyesight go completely haywire,” he explained, two years into his diagnosis.

More than anything, there was a level of fatigue that left him questioning whether Derren Brown, the famous UK TV illusionist, had secretly popped in to hypnotise him. MS is not itself fatal, but it is unpredictable and in some cases can lead to complications that will endanger or take your life. The pressures were immense. And, unless you have been in that position, who can really understand how scary it must have been?

Even so, the boyhood Tottenham Hotspur fan sounded hopeful, upbeat even, in an interview with the Cambridge fans’ website Under the Abbey Stand in October last year.

He had kept his office job, he explained, as an accounts manager with the brewing and pub company Greene King and was still working two days a week. But his right hand was starting to play up, which was making it hard for him to use a computer, whereas previously the issues were in his left hand and leg.

“I’ve got another brain scan next month and it’s just seeing how much it progresses,” he said. “The hardest thing is not knowing because MS is so enigmatic and affects everyone in a different way. I’ve got my eyepatch and my wheelchair. I’m getting by, it’s not too bad. Once it gets to a certain point, it will continue to deteriorate, but as long as you get nothing new, you can deal with it.”

Youngs earned himself cult-hero status at Cambridge United (PA Images via Getty Images)

That was one of his last interviews and, seven months on, those words can feel heartbreakingly poignant after the deterioration that left him, a once supremely fit sportsman, spending his final days at St Nicholas Hospice in Bury St Edmunds.

Youngs had also played in non-League with Stafford Rangers, Cambridge City, St Albans City, Norwich United and Mildenhall. He had 18 years as a footballer, including 10 as a professional. And he was right about MS: for whatever reason, people find it a tough subject to discuss, perhaps because they do not really understand what it is. Youngs would recommend the MS Society.

“I continue to feel lucky,” he writes in the final passage of a sad yet often humorous and strangely uplifting autobiography. “I have a wonderful family and friends. I’m not going to let MS get in the way of that, if I can help it. And if it’s a bit of resilience I need, that’s just one more reason to be thankful for a football career that means I’ve got plenty.”

(Top photo: Gareth Fuller – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

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