20 Brilliant Old School Footballer Adverts

Dan Fitch recalls a more innocent time where footballers were more likely to advertise car parts than Nike.

In an age where footballers earn more money than movie stars, they're unlikely to sign up for any commercial deal that is going to make them look silly.

Today, adverts starring footballers have Hollywood production values and the stars are made to look cool. In the past, things were different. Footballers wages weren't so high and as a consequence they could live with being made a fool with in a cheap looking commercial, as long as it earned them an extra few quid.

Here are 20 brilliant old school footballer adverts.

20. John Barnes - Lucozade

Considering that John Barnes' performances for England were normally frustrating affairs, in which he shuffled up and down the touchline to no great effect, then he was always on a hiding to nothing with this advert, in which he appeared in the national team strip and claimed that he needed to drink Lucozade after "90 minutes of sheer hurt".

19. Kevin Keegan - Green Cross Code

A flamboyantly dressed King Kev takes us back to a bygone age in which men could shout angrily at young boys, before putting a tender arm around them and not have to worry about being arrested for either action.

18. Pele - Atari

The world's most famous footballer Pele was signed up to sell the beautiful game to the Yanks and Atari also recruited him along with the baseball star Pete Rose, to get Americans addicted to video games. One of these ideas worked and the other didn't.

17. Paul Gascoigne - Woolworths

In other countries they give advertising campaigns to winners. In good old Blighty, we prefer to use examples of heroic failure as an opportunity to rip the piss out of our favourite sportsmen. Here's Gazza cashing in on his Italia 90 tears.

16. Stuart Pearce, Chris Waddle and Gareth Southgate - Pizza Hut

In the same vein is this Pizza Hut advert in which England penalty failures Pearce, Waddle and Southgate find that receiving large sums of money to look stupid, is actually quite cathartic. Stuart Pearce's antithesis-of-RADA voice is the star of this commercial.

15. Brian Clough - East Midlands Electricity

When she was the star of 'The Manageress' a lot of football fans dreamed of taking Cherie Lunghi upstairs, but few had notions of doing so in an attempt to beat her at Subbuteo, as Brian Clough does in this ad for East Midlands Electricity.

14. Pat Jennings - Frosties

We sense that the quiet and self-effacing Pat Jennings probably felt a bit of a berk pratting around with an imaginary Tony Tiger. His acting wasn't greeeeaaaaatttttt either.

13. Terry Venables - Walkers Crisps

A world in which not all Walkers Crisps adverts starred Gary Lineker? Believe it or not, there was such a time, although as we see with Terry Venables here, they weren't much better in those days.

12. Saint and Greavsie - KFC

Ian St John and Jimmy Greaves continue their comedy double act, in which Greavsie acts as a loveable rogue and Saint as a much less loveable straight man, to flog KFC to the masses.

11. Brian Clough and Peter Shilton- Shredded Wheat

If ever there was a football man who looked just as natural in front of the cameras, it was Brian Clough. Here he sells Shredded Wheat with the aid of his old goalkeeper Peter Shilton, who probably isn't such a good actor, considering that he's not trusted to deliver a line.

10. Jack Charlton - Shredded Wheat

In 1994 Shredded Wheat went for another football manager in their commercial. The concept was built around Jack Charlton's fear that he and his Republic of Ireland side might get fed some funny foreign food at the World Cup. The main problem with this idea is that the 94 World Cup was held in the USA, where the cereal is freely available, albeit with the probable addition of dangerous amounts of sugar.

9. Bobby Moore - Pubs

The one thing that the British have surely never had to be convinced about, is the merits of going to the pub, Yet in the sixties it was considered necessary for Bobby Moore to tell us to 'look in on your local', while Martin Peters lurks around in the background and tries to avoid getting his round in.

8. George Best - Eggs

Another thing that you wouldn't have thought needed promoting to the British are eggs. Nevertheless, George Best was signed up for the task of convincing people that there is value in those things that chickens produce. It's a good job that the boy in this advert is a good actor, because we can barely understand a word that Bestie says.

7. Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne - Walkers Crisps

Proof that Gazza really did sweep up every last bit of cash that was available for him to repeat his World Cup tears, as he teams up with Gary Lineker in a Walkers Crisps advert. Lineker has subsequently gone on to make so many of these commercials, that we're now the ones who feel like crying whenever they come on.

6. Ian Wright - Chicken Tonight

Lineker might have pushed things with the amount of adverts he's made, but let's just think ourselves lucky that we haven't had to sit through the same amount of commercials for Chicken Tonight starring Ian Wright. Few men have ever been so punchable as Wrighty as he pretends to be a toff, presumably in a vain effort to position Chicken Tonight as a sophisticated product.

5. Pat Jennings - Unipart

Poor Pat Jennings. Footballers didn't earn as much when he was playing as they do nowadays, so you had to take advantage of whatever commercial opportunities were given to you. If you thought having to act alongside an animated tiger was degrading enough, it had nothing on being dressed up as a goalkeeping oil filter.

4. Kevin Keegan - Brut

Gay men on television in the seventies were represented by such realistic figures as Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served, so at the time no one thought that there was anything remotely homoerotic about two butch blokes having fun together in the showers, as Kevin Keegan and Henry Cooper star in their own version of 'Brut-back' Mountain.

3. Peter Schmeichel - Danepak

With educational standards slipping in this country to the point where very few people know anything about Hamlet, Peter Schmeichel was the natural choice as the Dane to promote Danepak to the British. His singing might be off key, but this advert is all the better for the fact that he is wearing Reusch goalkeeper gloves.

2. Jimmy Hill - Public Information Film

Rarely have we seen anything as grisly as Jimmy Hill going through a play-by-play analysis of a motorcyclist being killed in a collision with a car. As far as controlling behaviour by scaring the living daylights out of people goes, this could give the Catholic church a run for it's money.

1. Trevor Brooking - Atari

While Atari recruited the biggest name sportsmen in the US for their Stateside commercials, they went for the strange triple act of Brooking, Morecambe and Wise for their UK advert. Quite why Atari thought that the fifty-something Eric and Ernie would be the best people to turn kids on to video games is a mystery, but regardless of the success of the campaign, this advert is comedy gold.

Published: 12 Jan 2011