Roy Massey: A Life in Football and a Coach to the Stars

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Massey said: “Arsenal have always been committed to producing their own talent - and when I played briefly for the A team there were six or seven lads who played in the Double-winning side of 1971. They had exchanged just one card each during the war. His girlfriend Audrey, whom he later married, was also waiting.

Roy signed for his local team in July 1964 aged 20. Prior to that he spent some time in the capital were he was an amateur with Division One club Arsenal, but turned down a professional contract with the Highbury club to return to South Yorkshire. Iwobi, who joined when he was in primary school and played 100 Premier League games before joining Everton in 2019, says Massey was "respected, loved and adored" and always a "perfect gentleman". I feel ever so sad when I look at the league tables over the last three or four years with the club more or less just avoiding relegation,” said former centre-forward Roy, who bagged 11 goals in his first 13 appearances for Colchester. He recalls finding the words of services very strange when he first joined the choir of St Martin’s, Birmingham, aged seven. He found the psalms quite difficult to read and chanting them even more bewildering at first, but he loved hymns and their tunes right from the start and soon discovered favourites among the anthems he sang, especially if they were composed by Haydn, Handel or Mendelssohn. He felt pride when walking in the great procession of men and boys as they entered the stalls in front of a large congregation – except when some senior had purloined the stud off his Eton collar and he had to make do with the last-minute substitution of an elastic band.Stay up to date with all the latest Tottenham Hotspur news from Alasdair Gold, Rob Guest and the football.london team across our social media channels.

Over the following months Mark continued to develop his game and no doubt his efforts helped him, in part, take his mind off the devastation of losing his father at such a young age.” Suddenly he stopped crying and a smile came to his face. When Joe was seven, he was playing for the pre-academy team against Watford. He did this again in Hereford six years later, gaining respect for his work with the choir. Hereford involved overseeing the events of the Three Choirs Festival, and Massey is proud of the works that he commissioned during his time as conductor of concerts there, including the Requiem by Geoffrey Burgon. Then Mark Metcalf (author of The Origins of the Football League), having read his short stories, convinced Roy to co-write a whole book with him.I was taken prisoner, which thousands of others were. If I had gone somewhere else I may not have lived. We could sign boys at 14 and on his 14th birthday, we wanted to sign him but his mum phoned me the next day to say he’d been approached by West Ham, which was just down the road for him.

Liam Brady got to know about me and said ‘Roy, would you like to bring your nines, tens and 11s over to our training ground to play ours?’ and I said ‘yes, of course’. Massey began to be involved in residential courses at the RSCM. Its director, Dr Gerald Knight, invited him to work at its HQ in those days, Addington Palace, where Massey became Warden in 1964, combining his duties with those of organist at Croydon Parish Church. This marked a change from Birmingham life, and the duties were onerous, but Massey managed to keep up his organ-playing. There is a chapter dedicated to various RSCM courses, including trips to America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Speaking of youth players, Massey has an interesting theory that the playoff-system has done a lot of harm to youngsters getting a chance to break through to senior level. Massey built a network of scouts and recruited top-class coaches, using methods honed by Ajax - who won the Champions League three years earlier with a team built around academy graduates - to develop youngsters and create a welcoming, family atmosphere while keeping them grounded.They are playing some lovely football under Mikel this season and if they can get over the line and win the title, of course I’d take some pride from it - but so should everyone else who played their part in helping Bukayo, Emile, Eddie and Reiss get where they are.