The Former Manchester United Captain Who Saved Barcelona

Patrick O'Connell was United’s captain at the outbreak of the First World War before moving to Spain

At Old Trafford on Wednesday evening, two of the world’s great clubs collide. Few fixtures in football are as glamorous as Manchester United versus Barcelona. It is Bryan Robson inspiring a dramatic comeback at Old Trafford in 1984. It is Mark Hughes slamming the ball home in Rotterdam in 1991. It is Hristo Stoichkov and Romário running rings around United at the Nou Camp in 1994. It is the brilliance of Xavi Hernández, Andrés Iniesta and Lionel Messi in the Champions League final in Rome in 2009 and again at Wembley in 2011.


The great figures of those clubs — Sir Matt Busby, Sir Bobby Charlton, Sir Alex Ferguson and George Best at United; Rinus Michels, Johan Cruyff, Pep Guardiola and Messi at Barcelona — echo through history. Far less celebrated is the story of the Irish wing half who was United’s captain at the outbreak of the First World War, moved to Spain, led Real Betis to the only league title in their history and helped to save Barcelona from bankruptcy after the murder of the club’s president by pro-Franco forces. In Spain, he is revered as “Don Patricio”, inducted into Barcelona’s hall of fame in 2015, yet he died penniless in London, where his grave was unmarked for 57 years.


Patrick O’Connell was far from the only former British or Irish player to enjoy coaching success overseas in the first half of the 20th century but, on a personal and a professional level, his is an extraordinary story. As detailed in The Man Who Saved FC Barcelona, written by his grandson’s wife Sue O’Connell, he led a double life; the wife and family he left behind in England had no idea at the time that he had bigamously remarried in Seville. He was part hero, part anti-hero.


Nobody knows how or why O’Connell, after a spell as player-coach of Ashington in the old third division north, ended up succeeding Fred Pentland as manager of Racing Santander in 1922 but it proved an inspired appointment as he led the club to five regional titles. From there, he managed Real Oviedo and then Betis, with whom he won La Liga in 1935, before moving to Barcelona.


“Until that point, Barcelona had a number of managers but never one as professional as Patrick O’Connell,” Jordi Finestres, the Spanish football writer and historian, said. “He came with the idea, as he explained in interviews, to become the hallmark of a great era for Barcelona.”


Barcelona won the Catalan regional championship and reached the Spanish cup final in his first season in charge but that “great era” did not materialise. As a symbol of the Catalan region, Barcelona, the club and the city, came under attack. Along with some of his players, O’Connell was told he was free to return home. Perhaps not least because of the entanglements of his private life, he stayed put.


In August 1936, soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona’s president Josep Sunyol, who was also an MP for the Republican Left of Catalonia party, was shot dead. With league football suspended, the club had fallen into severe financial peril. A lifeline arrived when Barcelona were invited to play a series of exhibition matches in Mexico. They would be paid handsomely for doing so.


O’Connell led the Barcelona team on a 15-day journey by boat to Veracruz. Over the summer of 1937, they would play ten matches in Mexico before stopping off on the way home to play another four games in New York. “It is probably thanks to this tour,” Finestres says, “that FC Barcelona still exists today.”










O’Connell, second from right, led Racing Santander to five regional titles




Several of his players stayed in exile but O’Connell returned to Barcelona and led a depleted team to the Catalan regional league title in 1938 before moving to Seville. When he and his second wife, Ellie, prepared to leave Spain in 1955, he wrote to his brother Larry, saying that “it is not excessive of me to say that football in this country would not be where it is today without my contribution”.


As he noted, though, he would leave Spain as he arrived: with a single suitcase. His final years in London were spent in penury: estranged from Ellie after she discovered that Daniel, the “nephew” who had written to him and visited him in Seville, was in fact his son from his undeclared previous marriage. “Patrick O’Connell’s football career was exceptional, but it was won at a certain cost,” Sue O’Connell wrote. “He was an outstanding sportsman, but as a husband and a father, he was a non-starter.”


For 57 years, after his death in 1959, he lay in an unmarked grave but, after a fundraising drive, his grave has been restored. The headstone declares that he is “remembered by many in Ireland, England and Spain”. Through the book and a documentary film, Don Patricio, his extraordinary story can now be told. Barcelona’s millions of supporters, all over the world, have much to thank him for.