Jock Stein, first British football manager to win the European Cup

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jock Stein, first British football manager to win the European Cup, picked by composer Sir James MacMillan and aided by Jock Stein’s biographer, Archie MacPherson. Jock Stein was manager of Celtic FC when they won the European Cup in Lisbon in 1967. He later died while managing Scotland in a world cup qualifier against Wales – the date, September 1985, exactly forty years ago.

"I saw in my grandfather and my father certain characteristics that I saw in Jock Stein." Sir James MacMillan

Includes archive of Jock Stein, Gordon Strachan and Billy Connolly, a big fan of the European Cup winning Celtic team.

Archie MacPherson is the author of Jock Stein: The Definitive Autobiography, and a familiar face to viewers of Scottish football in the eighties and nineties and beyond. The presenter is Matthew Parris and the producer for BBC Studios is Miles Warde

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
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0:34.4	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:41.4	It's a fine thing on great lives when a guest champions the life of someone famous in the same field as them. But I do like it when occasionally a guest
0:48.3	looks beyond their own world. Imagine, say, a classical composer picking a football manager, which is exactly what we have
0:56.6	this time. Today's guest is a classical composer and a conductor whose work takes him all over
1:03.3	the world, but it's his Scottish upbringing that has influenced his choice today. Sir James
1:09.0	Macmillan, not an expert in the field of music. I asked a friend
1:13.0	in Radio 3 and he said, oh yes, Sir James, he said, is one of the best living British composers. So, Sir
1:20.9	James, tell us whom you've picked and why. Jock Steen, Scottish football manager of the first British team to win the European Cup in 1967 when I was a little boy.
1:32.6	The team was Celtic.
1:34.5	It's a team that I and all my relatives and friends and neighbours supported back home in Ayrshire.
1:40.2	Do you come from a similar background to him?
1:43.1	I would say yes.
1:45.3	The interesting thing about Joxtein and many of those men were that they're from mining stock.
1:50.5	In fact, Joxtein was a coal miner before he started playing football.
1:55.4	And there are a number of his colleagues who were equally successful.
	...

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