The forgotten captain who built an empire at Villa Park
Aston Villa at one time held the record for the most FA Cup successes, seven, but now Arsenal and Manchester United are joint best with 11 trophies each. As the current team wait on the winners of the Liverpool v Blackburn replay for a place in the final, time perhaps for a reflective on one of the first Villa captains to lift the FA Cup, John Devey.
John Devey was born in Birmingham on Boxing Day 1866. He joined Aston Villa aged 25 after a grounding with several junior clubs in the Birmingham area. By the time he was 34 he had established himself as perhaps the greatest captain in the club’s history. As a forward he was peerless, and throughout his career he maintained the top ‘goals to games’ ratio of one in two. Even in his scandalously nondescript England career of just two appearances, mainly due to him being a contemporary of two of the finest players ever produced in these islands; John Goodall and Steve Bloomer, he scored a goal.
The two men who kept Devey out of the England reckoning deserve a moment. John Goodall was the finest centre-forward of the 1880s, a Preston North End stalwart who was instrumental in their unbeaten Double of 1888-89 and widely regarded as the first truly complete centre-forward in the English game. Steve Bloomer was, if anything, even more prolific: a Derby County forward who finished his career with 352 goals in 598 appearances and 28 goals in 23 England caps, a ratio that stood as a national record for decades. Being kept out of the side by those two was not embarrassment, it was simply very bad timing.
In the extremely physical game that was late 19th century professional football, Devey stood out because of his dribbling prowess and his uncanny ability to stop abruptly, pivot and get off a powerful shot.
It is worth pausing to understand exactly what professional football in the 1890s involved. The ball was a hand-stitched leather casing stuffed with an inflated pig’s bladder, heavy when dry, a dead weight when wet, and apt to lose its shape entirely over ninety minutes. There were no shin pads as standard issue, the offside law required three defenders rather than two between an attacker and the goal, and tactical fouling was so routine that serious injury was a near-weekly occurrence across the league. Pitches in November and February were frequently mud from penalty box to penalty box. Goalkeepers could be charged into the net, legally, whether or not they had the ball. In that environment, a forward whose primary weapon was close control, sudden changes of direction and a powerful shot was not just skilful, he was genuinely unusual.
Devey’s Aston Villa career was liberally sprinkled with trophies and goals after the first two campaigns failed to bring any silverware to Villa Park. His first season, 1891-92, yielded 34 goals in 30 appearances as Villa finished fourth in the League and lost the FA Cup Final to near neighbours West Bromwich Albion. Many Villa fans blamed goalkeeper Jimmy Warner for that reverse as the Albion had been comprehensively beaten in the two league games and, suspecting bribery, caused severe damage to the custodian’s public house.
The Warner story is too good to abandon in a single sentence. The 1892 FA Cup Final finished 3-0 to West Brom, a scoreline that stunned Villa supporters who had watched their side beat the same opposition twice in the league that season. Warner’s performance, he conceded three goals, including what contemporary reports described as elementary errors, struck Villa fans as so inexplicably poor that bribery was the conclusion many reached. His public house in Birmingham was attacked by a mob and extensively damaged in the aftermath. The Football Association investigated and found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, but Warner never played for Villa again. He spent two more seasons at other clubs before disappearing from the football record entirely. Whether he was corrupt, simply had a dreadful afternoon, or was the victim of supporters who needed someone to blame, will never conclusively be known.
Although it was an even poorer second season for the club, Devey still maintained his superior goals record, with 19 in 31 appearances for a staggering tally of 63 goals in 61 matches over two campaigns.
It was the third season, 1893-94, when the trophy ‘duck’ was broken, not inappropriate as John Devey was also an accomplished cricketer, scoring 6,500 runs for Warwickshire between 1888 and 1907. On the football field, Villa stormed to the Football League Championship and Devey finished top scorer with 20 goals in 29 league appearances.
6,500 first-class runs for Warwickshire across nearly two decades is not a pastime, it is a parallel career. Devey played county cricket from 1888 to 1907, which means his cricket and football seasons overlapped for the entirety of his Villa career. Summer was Warwickshire; autumn and winter were Villa Park. Dual-sport professionalism of that kind was not uncommon in the late Victorian era, CB Fry famously played football and cricket at international level, and several Football League players turned out for county sides, but Devey’s sustained output in both disciplines over such a long period was exceptional even by those standards. He never earned an England cricket cap, which given his football fate at international level gives him an unfortunate symmetry across both sports.
Over the next six seasons Aston Villa claimed the mantle of League champions five times, including only the second ‘Double’ of League and FA Cup in 1897, with the FA Cup being won in 1895 for good measure.
The 1897 Double deserves to stand on its own rather than share a sentence with other honours. Preston North End had achieved the first Double in 1888-89, going the entire league season unbeaten. Villa’s version, eight years later, was accomplished in a Football League that had expanded to 16 clubs, against stiffer competition and over a longer campaign. They won the title by 11 points, a commanding margin, and beat Everton 3-2 in the FA Cup Final at Crystal Palace in front of a reported 65,891 spectators, the largest attendance at any football match to that point in history. Devey captained the side throughout. It would be 64 years before Tottenham Hotspur completed the next Double in 1961, which should give some indication of how rarely the feat was managed and how significantly Villa’s achievement was regarded by those who followed the game.
The 1895 FA Cup win over West Brom, a neat reversal of the 1892 final humiliation, carried its own satisfaction. Villa won 1-0 at Crystal Palace, with the winner coming from Bob Chatt after just 39 seconds, still one of the fastest goals in FA Cup Final history. Devey, as captain, collected the trophy. It was the first of three FA Cups he would lift as Villa skipper.
The 1897 Double deserves to stand on its own rather than share a sentence with other honours. Preston North End had achieved the first Double in 1888-89, going the entire league season unbeaten. Villa’s version, eight years later, was accomplished in a Football League that had expanded to 16 clubs, against stiffer competition and over a longer campaign. They won the title by 11 points, a commanding margin, and beat Everton 3-2 in the FA Cup Final at Crystal Palace in front of a reported 65,891 spectators, the largest attendance at any football match to that point in history. Devey captained the side throughout. It would be 64 years before Tottenham Hotspur completed the next Double in 1961, which should give some indication of how rarely the feat was managed and how significantly Villa’s achievement was regarded by those who followed the game.
The 1895 FA Cup win over West Brom, a neat reversal of the 1892 final humiliation, carried its own satisfaction. Villa won 1-0 at Crystal Palace, with the winner coming from Bob Chatt after just 39 seconds, still one of the fastest goals in FA Cup Final history. Devey, as captain, collected the trophy. It was the first of three FA Cups he would lift as Villa skipper.
Aston Villa were not about to say goodbye to their captain and icon. He retired as a player in 1902 having played and scored in his final game against Grimsby on December 14th 1901, for a career tally of 186 goals in 306 appearances. In July 1902, John Devey was elected to the board of Aston Villa FC, and he served his beloved Villa in that capacity until 1934. He died in 1940 aged 73.
Thirty-two years on the board is a significant stretch of Villa history to compress into a single sentence. Devey joined the board in 1902 when Villa were still the dominant force in English football. By the time he left in 1934 the game had changed almost beyond recognition, professionalism was fully established, the maximum wage had been in place for decades, and Villa had endured their first genuine lean period after the glut of championships under his captaincy. As a director he sat through the appointment and dismissal of several managers, the rebuilding of the squad through the 1910s and 1920s, and the club’s 1920 First Division title, their last top-flight championship until 1981. His presence on the board provided a direct human link between Victorian football and the modern game, and his influence on the culture and expectations of the club during that transitional period should not be underestimated simply because directors leave fewer visible traces than players.
Contemporary press accounts of Devey describe a man of quiet authority rather than vocal leadership, a captain who led by performance rather than exhortation. The Birmingham Daily Post referred to him in 1897 as ‘the most complete forward in the Association game’ and noted that his influence on younger players in the Villa dressing room extended well beyond what happened on the pitch. Frederick Rinder, the Villa chairman who oversaw much of the club’s golden period, reportedly regarded Devey as the single most important figure in the club’s success, a judgement that history has not fully reflected, given how little Devey is discussed outside of dedicated Villa historical circles.
Despite winning only two England caps, John Devey remains one of the top players from the early days of English football and few would exclude him from any Best XI of select of players who plied their trade while Victoria was queen.
The relative obscurity Devey occupies today is partly a consequence of the era he played in, footage does not exist, statistical records are incomplete, and football history before 1900 is poorly served by popular writing. But the facts that do exist make the case without embellishment. Three FA Cups. Five league championships. The second Double in English football history. A goals-per-game ratio that modern strikers with the benefit of pitches, equipment and sports science would be satisfied with. Thirty-two years of service to the club after his boots were hung up. A career at Warwickshire cricket that would have been the defining achievement of most Victorian sportsmen.
He was not overlooked for England because he was not good enough. He was overlooked because two of the finest forwards the country ever produced happened to be playing at the same time. That is not a footnote to his career. Given the company, it is almost a compliment.