Peter Swan, England football international whose career was ruined by a betting scandal – obituary

Peter Swan, who has died aged 84, was a centre-half for Sheffield Wednesday and a near-certainty for England’s 1966 World Cup squad when, in April 1964, The People revealed that he and his team-mates Tony Kay and David “Bronco” Layne had bet on a match they expected to lose. The scandal – the first such in half a century – shook English football to its core.

Instead of regaining his place as England’s first-choice centre-half which he had lost through illness, Swan was jailed for four months and banned from football for life. Jack Charlton took his place in Alf Ramsey’s victorious side.

The ban was eventually lifted, and Swan returned briefly to Wednesday’s first team. But his career never recovered from that one episode of rashness.

Handsome and leggy, but tough, Swan was the perfect centre-half. His England room-mate Jimmy Greaves rated him “a breathtaking player. His perfect physique made him a handful for opponents, and for a big man he possessed outstanding ball control, passing, tackling and heading ability.”

Swan’s trademark was hitching up the baggy shorts of the day to reveal his legs. “I got it off Albert Quixall,” he said. “He told me: ‘You look at athletes. They don’t wear big, baggy trousers’.”

He was capped 19 times, and, though out of the England side when the scandal broke, he was told years later by Ramsey that he had been “top of the list” for the World Cup squad.

Wednesday’s 2-0 defeat at Ipswich Town in December 1962 was the highest-profile of at least 18 matches fixed by the Mansfield Town forward Jimmy Gauld, acting for a shadowy syndicate of professional gamblers.

Gauld had bumped into Bronco Layne, with whom he had played for Swindon, at a Mansfield match. Gauld told him there was money to be made betting on certainties, and asked if any of Wednesday’s forthcoming games fitted that description.

The next day, over a cup of tea after training, Layne mentioned this to Swan and Kay. They agreed that Wednesday never did well against Ipswich at Portman Road, and stumped up £50 each for Layne to give Gauld. The money was placed at 2/1 on a treble including Lincoln v Brentford and York v Oldham, which Gauld had also fixed.

Wednesday duly lost, though Swan insisted that he had tried throughout, and Kay was named Man of the Match – ironically by The People.

Swan later reflected: “The game went like it always did at Ipswich. What if it had been 0-0 with five minutes to go? I don’t know what I would have done. My money was on us to lose, and money is the root of all evil. It’s easily done: I could have miskicked a ball into my own goal, I could have given away a penalty. But the only thing I had done wrong – and I knew I had done wrong – was the bet.”

Details of match-fixing involving clubs in the lower divisions began seeping out, and Gauld and some players were prosecuted. Kay moved to Everton for a record £55,000 and Swan, refused a transfer by Wednesday, was still challenging for his England place when The People – who had paid Gauld £7,000 for his story – broke the news of the match at Ipswich.

Wednesday suspended Swan as he was preparing to play against Tottenham, and the FA launched an inquiry, before which Swan and Layne denied the allegations.

They had just resumed training that July when Swan, Kay, Layne, Gauld and six other players were charged with conspiracy to defraud bookmakers. Committal proceedings in Mansfield that autumn resulted in all 10 being sent for trial at Nottingham Assizes.

Swan admitted making a bet, but denied knowing which games he was betting on, or about anything being “fixed”. Mr Justice Lawton said Gauld had “befouled professional football” and had been responsible for Swan and Kay’s professional ruin.

On January 25 1965, Swan was sentenced to four months in prison and ordered to pay £100 in costs, the amount he had won. He served 10 weeks, first in Lincoln Prison and then gardening in the more open Thorp Arch. “Prison was horrible”, he recalled. “There’s nothing more degrading, doing everything in a little pot in front of other prisoners.”

While Swan and Layne were inside, the Sheffield Telegraph photographer Frank Travers pulled off a scoop by snapping them playing football, through a telephoto lens from a chicken coop at the bottom of an adjacent garden.

Swan and several others were banned from football for life. He got on with providing for his wife Norma and five sons, delivering milk, selling bicycles and then cars, running a hardware shop near Doncaster Rovers’ ground (“You could hear the crowd when the wind was that way. It always brought a lump to my throat”), and finally a pub.

He turned out for the pub’s football team until the FA got wind of it, then he played in charity matches under an assumed name. “I wanted to play that much. What annoyed me was some of the things people would say on the touchline. It hurt, but I would never show it.”

Away from the pitch he did lash out when baited. Swan’s six brothers, all miners, stuck up for him in their home village of Armthorpe, near Doncaster, where a teenage Kevin Keegan was the current prodigy.

In 1972 the Labour MP Joe Ashton, later Wednesday’s chairman, took up Swan’s case, with backing from Sir Matt Busby, and the life bans were lifted.

Swan, now 35, was taken back by Wednesday. Picked for the first match of the season against Fulham, he recalled: “As I’m going down the tunnel, they gave me the match ball to carry. The players stopped and I went out on my own. It was a terrific welcome back. The crowd cheered everything I did.”

Swan made 15 appearances as Wednesday led the Second Division, but as their challenge faded he lost his place. Wednesday’s manager Derek Dooley offered him a further contract, but he wanted first-team football and moved to Fourth Division Bury.

He scored on his debut for Bury after just three minutes, having played 300 matches for Wednesday without finding the net. He captained Bury to promotion, but left in the summer of 1974.

He became manager of non-league Matlock Town. In his first season they got through the qualifying rounds of the FA Cup, then defeated Scarborough 4-0 at Wembley to lift the FA Trophy.

Swan quit after two seasons hoping for a full-time position in management. But after spells with Worksop Town and Buxton he returned to Matlock in 1980, staying just over a year. He ran a pub in Chesterfield until his retirement; he had been struggling with Alzheimer’s.

Peter Swan was born into a mining family at South Elmsall, near Pontefract, on October 8 1936. They moved to Armthorpe, where he attended the local secondary modern, but all he ever wanted to be was a footballer. The boys played on waste ground with an inflated pig’s bladder scrounged from a slaughterman. Peter played for his school, initially on the right wing, and also for Doncaster Schools.

Leaving at 15, he joined Wednesday, initially as an amateur, working part-time at Armthorpe Colliery. Turning 18, he signed as a full professional. He did his National Service as a physical training instructor in the Royal Signals – and given leave to turn out for Wednesday.

Swan made his first-team debut against Barnsley in November 1955, but only at the start of the 1958–59 season did he become first-choice centre-half. He played an influential part as the club finished fifth in the First Division in 1959–60, runners-up to the double-winning Tottenham side in 1960–61 and then sixth in the next three seasons. He was pivotal in Wednesday’s European campaign of 1961-62, the highlight being a 4-0 thrashing of Roma.

First selected for England Under-23s in November 1959, he stayed in the international reckoning despite breaking a shoulder when Wednesday’s coach crashed on the A1 returning from a game against Arsenal.

In May 1960 the England manager Walter Winterbottom gave Swan his debut against Yugoslavia. He held his place for 19 matches, the last being against Switzerland in May 1962. This run included England’s successful World Cup qualifying campaign.

Swan flew to Chile as England’s first-choice centre-half but picked up tonsillitis before he left, and on his arrival contracted dysentery. He took no part in the tournament, which ended in a quarter-final defeat by Brazil.

On his return Swan fell out with Wednesday over wages and asked for a transfer; the manager Vic Buckingham twice refused. Swan was still a mainstay of the team when The People broke its story.

Deeply hurt by a 1997 television docudrama depicting Layne and himself as corrupt and Kay as misled, in 2006 Swan published an autobiography, Setting the Record Straight. His lasting regret was that the FA had never written back when he asked them for a new England blazer badge to replace the one he had lost.

Peter Swan married Norma Clifton in 1957; of their five sons one, Carl, played for Doncaster Rovers and Rochdale. Another, Gary, died in 1998.

Peter Swan, born October 8 1936, died January 20 2021