Watford Forever: How Graham Taylor and Elton John Saved a Football Club, a Town and Each Other

Summary

The unforgettable story of Watford Football Club’s seemingly impossible rise from the Fourth to the First Division, led by the unlikely duo of Hornet’s manager Graham Taylor and rock star–turned-owner, Elton John.

Long before English soccer became an American passion, Watford Football Club—a team located in a working-class industrial town that time and prosperity had passed by—languished at the bottom of the English Football League. Despite their pitiful record, the club enthralled a local boy by the name of Reginald Dwight, who began attending games with his father, an avid fan, in 1953.

More than twenty years later, having shed his given name, Elton John had become the most successful rock star in the world. With his six-inch platforms, spangled jumpsuits, and peroxide-colored hair, Elton was glamorous, gay, and seemingly a universe away from the village where he had supported Watford FC, yet his boyhood love of Watford and its dogged players remained. When tempted to buy the sputtering team in 1976, everyone begged Elton not to invest, but they were his team, as they were his father’s, and he refused to believe that Watford was beyond redemption.

Watford Forever, then, is the remarkable account of Elton John’s ownership of Watford FC, and its transformational journey to the top of the First Division under iconic manager Graham Taylor, who was, in the words of award-winning journalist John Preston, “as traditional as Elton was unconventional.” Inspiring, funny, and ultimately heartrending, this is a tribute to soccer’s unlikeliest duo as Elton and Taylor—a straight-talking former fullback with literally no interest in rock music—both beat the odds and their personal demons to save a club and a community.

Immersed in the grit of Seventies Britain, Watford Forever tells the story of this “indissoluble bond,” revealing how the power of sports and respect for the “other” brought about a reclamation whose reverberations can be felt to this day.