ADDING A KICK OF SPICE

With the new Premier League season about to get under way, biographer SPENCER VIGNES uncovers the unlikely story of Chilean George Robledo, who became the first overseas star of English football

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HE was the first overseas star of English football, the Chilean trailblazer who came to the UK as a boy, grew up in poverty in a Yorkshire pit village, scored goals for fun at Newcastle United, and appeared on the front cover of a John Lennon album.

And yet, at a time when almost threequarters of all Premier League players come from overseas, few people in his adopted homeland have heard of George Robledo.

Now, as the centenary of his birth approaches, and with a new book about Robledo’s remarkable life being published, so the man who opened the door to a foreign legion of talents such as Eric Cantona, Thierry Henry and Erling Haaland is about to be discovered by new generations of football fans.

Born in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, to a Chilean father and an English mother, George Robledo came to England aged six when his parents chose to move the family from South America to West Melton near Barnsley, the village where his mother had grown up.

His childhood was a hard one. On the day of the family’s departure from Chile to Liverpool on board the passenger liner Reina del Pacifico, George’s father walked out on his wife and three sons, nipping ashore supposedly to buy cigarettes for the journey with their luggage already aboard. It was the last they saw of him.

As a result, George grew up fast, spending much of his time caring for two younger brothers in a one-parent household with little income. When he wasn’t looking after his brothers, George could usually be found with a football at his feet or, when the Second World War came, working as a “Bevin Boy” at Wath Main Colliery, conscripted to dig for coal underground instead of being sent to fight.