Stan Bowles spent as much time dodging gangsters who had lent him money as he did eluding the defenders whom he invariably made fools of. Yet the picaresque Queens Park Rangers midfielder played the game with a joyful swagger. “There were no nerves,” he recalled. “It was better for me being out on the pitch than off it with these gangsters looking for their money.”
He belonged to a time when English football was blessed (or cursed) with a multitude of mavericks who were revered and often reviled for their flamboyance on the field and colourful lifestyles off it. The 1970s is a decade remembered for its dandies, womanisers, jesters and boozers — the likes of Peter Osgood, Frank Worthington, Rodney Marsh and George Best being exemplars of these categories respectively. And then there were the inveterate gamblers such as Bowles, whose own particular vice earned him as much notoriety as his performances earned him the status of QPR’s greatest-ever player.
Though more or less certified “unmanageable” from an early stage, Bowles was arguably the best player in the country in 1976 as QPR came within 14 minutes of winning the league championship only for Liverpool to score late goals at Wolves to deny them by a point.
Recognisable for his long hair, thick sideburns and shirt hanging out of his shorts, Stan “The Man” also had the rebellious demeanour and limpid blue eyes that made him attractive to women. And though he looked lackadaisical on the pitch most of the time, only a few moments of his genius in a game were required. Regularly he jinked his way into the opposition penalty box with delicious close control and often provided a finish to match. Two-footed, beautifully balanced and deceptively quick over ten yards, Bowles would also drop deep to spray passes with the outside of his boot or oil a flowing move with a deft flick or back-heel.
Like the rest of the “lost generation” of English flair players in the Seventies, including Marsh, Worthington and Alan Hudson, Bowles’s absence from a distinctly average England team was lamented. He did not help his cause by largely eschewing any training that involved hard work or running. His greatest stamina was for filling out another betting slip while his idea of a recovery run was dashing back to the bar for last orders. As a result he won only five England caps.
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It did not help that he had to play alongside people who he had often humiliated in league games. “The Liverpool players didn’t really talk to me. Kevin Keegan was all right, but the rest — Emlyn Hughes and Phil Thompson among them — were a bit frosty because I’d taken the piss when we played them.”
Stanley Bowles was born in Manchester and grew up in the Collyhurst district in the north of the city. He excelled at schoolboy football but after leaving to work in a coat factory he was not particularly interested in becoming a professional player. His father, a window cleaner, persuaded him otherwise. He was signed by Manchester City in 1967, scoring two goals on his debut against Leicester. City’s coach Malcolm Allison knew that the club had unearthed a gem, but quarrelled with the cocky young player about the company he kept. The disagreement ended in fisticuffs and Bowles’s abrupt departure from the club. “Most of the people I was hanging around with are in prison or dead now, so I suppose Malcolm was vindicated,” he later admitted.
His faltering career was rescued by Ernie Tagg, manager of fourth division Crewe Alexandra, who gave Bowles’s wages directly to his wife Ann, and observed: “If Stan could pass a betting shop like he can pass a football he would be all right.” Bowles moved up two divisions to join Carlisle United in October 1971. After 12 goals in 33 games he was transferred to QPR, also of the second division, in September 1972 for £110,000, a record fee for the west London club.
Rangers may have been a club of modest means, but were rich in ambition and played with an expansive style that suited Bowles. In 1973 the club won promotion to the first division and by the end of that season Bowles had largely subdued supporters’ anger at the sale of the club’s playmaker Rodney Marsh, whose No 10 shirt Bowles had blithely taken.
At the height of his powers in the summer of 1976 Bowles appeared in the popular BBC show Superstars, in which sporting professionals would compete against each other in disciplines such as sprinting, canoeing, cycling and squat thrusts. Bowles had the distinction of recording the lowest points total in the history of the show, even lower than the newly crowned Formula 1 world champion James Hunt, with whom he engaged in epic drinking sessions during the recording.
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• Stan Bowles: Maverick, gambler, entertainer – and a great of the game
Though he was the friendliest of men off the pitch, Bowles had a reputation for goading even the toughest opponents, such as the entire 90 minutes he spent reminding Liverpool’s Graeme Souness that his ex-girlfriend, the Swedish Miss World Mary Stavin, had been “nicked” by Bowles’s team-mate Don Shanks.
Accordingly, he was serially abused by opposing supporters but gave plenty back. At a game at Roker Park in May 1973, Sunderland proudly displayed the FA Cup they had just surprisingly won, which they left on a perch by the side of the halfway line. Bowles received the ball near the Sunderland goal, upon which he turned, dribbled back towards the centre and launched the ball, knocking the trophy off its resting place.
Naturally, he had done this for a £10 bet. Bowles had begun gambling at the age of 16, when he was given a tip on a horse at 10-1. He placed £5 and duly won £50, although he later claimed to have lost £18,000 on the horses in one day and retired from the game virtually penniless because of his habit. For Saturday matchdays at QPR’s Loftus Road ground, he would “show my face” at 1pm then disappear into the betting shop next to the ground and re-enter the dressing room just before kick-off.
During one home game, while defending the near post for a corner, he spotted someone in the crowd holding a copy of Sporting Life. Eager to see if a horse he had backed was running that afternoon, he grabbed the paper and began thumbing through it. When the corner came swinging in he headed the ball away, still clutching the paper.
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Gambling addiction is still a scourge of the modern-day footballer, but while the likes of Paul Merson made tearful public confessions and sought help, Bowles was of a more philosophical bent. His friend and QPR team-mate Gerry Francis once recalled being at the dinner table with Bowles and his first wife Ann only for bailiffs to take everything but the chairs they were sitting on. Bowles would flash a rueful grin or assume a childishly sheepish expression when reminded of such stories.
By the late Seventies QPR were being managed by Tommy Docherty, who had raised rowing with his players into an art form. When he told Bowles: “You can trust me, Stan,” the player replied: “I’d rather trust my chickens with Colonel Sanders.” For once, “The Doc” was stumped for a riposte, at least not one that was witty or printable. Docherty eventually sold Bowles to Nottingham Forest in 1980, but cordial relations with Brian Clough were predictably short-lived. Clough’s chief command to his players was to give the ball to the left winger John Robertson. Bowles would tell anyone who would listen to “give the f***ing ball to me”. After 19 appearances he walked out of the club on the eve of the 1980 European Cup final and moved to second division Leyton Orient, dropping down another tier the following year to join Brentford, where he ended his career in 1983.
In later years he worked as a pundit for Sky TV and was always in demand on the after-dinner speaking circuit. In 2015 his family announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. He was cared for in his later years by his eldest daughter, Andrea, who had previously been a pub landlady. He had Andrea with Ann, with whom he also had Tracy and Carl. He also had a son, Ben. All three of his marriages ended in divorce.
Bowles was entirely unrepentant for his lifestyle choices. “The thing I liked best about being a footballer was the women, the drink and White City dogs,” he recalled in 2016.
At the same time no one could question his love of the game that, to some extent, loved him back. Whenever QPR played near Manchester in the 1970s, Bowles would stay in his home city overnight, invariably not get much sleep and yet rise on a Sunday morning to turn out for a pub side with his old school friends.
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Stan Bowles, footballer, was born on December 24, 1948. He died of Alzheimer’s disease on February 24, 2024, aged 75
