A player who was in the right place at the wrong time.
Bobby Campbell was one of a string of quality young players who emerged from the Villa youth policy of the early seventies, several of whom went on to become full internationals. Unfortunately for Campbell, he played in a position where Villa were particularly well-stocked at the time. He was born in Belfast on 13th September 1956 and joined the Villa after leaving school at sixteen.
Campbell was highly thought of as a promising centre-forward, playing in the successful 1973 Southern Junior Floodlight Cup winning side and making his first team debut towards the end of 1973-74. He came on as a substitute at home to Nottingham Forest and scored in a 3-1 win, making two more appearances as a substitute towards the end of a disappointing season where Villa finished fourteenth in division two, which in turn led to the departure of manager Vic Crowe.
Campbell made seven more appearances in 1974-75, including a run of three games at centre-forward during December 1974 as Villa began to pick up form after a poor start and the team finished runners-up to Manchester United, winning promotion back to the first division.
Bobby was a traditional old-style centre-forward, the sort of player Villa supporters love. New manager Ron Saunders, though, clearly didn’t think that Campbell had a future at Villa Park and after a loan spell with Halifax Town during which he failed to score in fifteen appearances, he moved permanently to Huddersfield Town, who had been relegated to division four, in the summer of 1975.
If Saunders had believed that Campbell lacked the discipline to make his mark at the top level he could have been proved right as the player seemed incapable of staying long at one club – in the four years after leaving Villa he had two spells with Huddersfield and also played for Sheffield United, moved permanently to Halifax and had time in the NASL with Vancouver Whitecaps and the Australian National Soccer League at Brisbane City.
However, Campbell’s arrival at Bradford City, then in division four, saw a transformation in his career. He played for Bradford until 1986, except for a short-lived time with Derby County, making 320 appearances and scoring a club record 143 goals as they moved from the fourth division to the second.
In 1975, while still with Villa, Bobby had been banned from appearing for Northern Ireland representative teams after he was involved in a car crash while taking part in an under-18s tournament in Switzerland. After lengthy demands, including a petition by supporters and sympathetic press coverage, the ban was lifted six years later.
Bobby scored 29 goals in 1981-82 as Bradford won promotion from the fourth division and, with the ban lifted, he was duly called up for that summer’s Home Internationals. The timing couldn’t have been better for him because the tournament was to be followed by the 1982 World Cup in Spain, Northern Ireland’s first-ever appearance in the finals of a major tournament.
During his debut against Scotland at Windsor Park, which ended in a 1-1 draw, he was up against a central defensive pairing of Villa legend Allan Evans and future manager Alex McLeish, while his second game, when he came on after an hour against Wales at Wrexham, resulted in a 3-0 defeat. Although being included in Northern Ireland’s squad for the World Cup, Bobby didn’t feature in the side’s memorable run to the quarter-finals and he was not picked for his country again.
Campbell finished his career with two seasons at Wigan Athletic, where he was their top scorer twice and finally retired in 1988 at the age of 38, after scoring 233 goals in 585 senior games. Bobby had always been a larger than life character but retirement saw him making headlines for the wrong reasons when he was sacked from a job as steward at a working men’s club in Huddersfield after being accused of fraud.
The accusations against him and his wife were later dropped in court but the case had an effect on his health and Bobby began suffering from physical and mental problems. Sadly, on 15th November 2016, Bobby took his own life, aged sixty. His Northern Ireland colleague Norman Whiteside described him as “a footballer of the old school” and his biography, published four years earlier, had been aptly titled – They Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore.
