‘The King’ Denis Law is dead – long live The King
The Man United legend was the last of a generation of working-class footballing heroes.

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The death of Manchester United and Scotland legend Denis Law, aged 84, closes an unrepeatable chapter of football history. It marks the end of the era of when hungry working-class boys pulled themselves up by their second-hand bootstraps to conquer Planet Football – in Denis’s case, to be crowned ‘The King’ – and became lifelong heroes for millions like me.
Law, United’s best-ever centre-forward, was the last of the famous United Trinity that lit up football in the 1960s, alongside England’s greatest-ever player, Bobby Charlton (died aged 86 in October 2023), and the peerless Belfast genius, George Best (died aged 59 in November 2005).
The Trinity made Manchester United the first ever English club to win the European Cup in 1968; they remain the only three players each to win the Ballon D’Or (then awarded annually to Europe’s best footballer) while playing together for the same team. They also made this Surrey boy a United fan for life, through thick and very thin.
Law was a different breed from the hyper-toned physical giants of today’s game. A seemingly slight, wiry figure, he was a whiplash unleashed in the penalty box, ghosting in to volley home from impossible angles or outjump the lumbering, leg-breaking defenders of his time. Some of them learned he could punch above his weight literally as well as figuratively.
The Lawman was ever his own man, unworried about demanding a wage rise from outraged United boss Matt Busby, or being pictured smoking in the Wembley dressing room. He quickly won and held the hearts of the hardcore Stretford End crowd, who hailed him as The King. It is no insult to the later undisputed King of Old Trafford, Eric Cantona, to say that he never quite dethroned Denis the First for some.
Law, Best and Charlton all came from the humble backgrounds common to earlier generations of professional footballers. But few were as humble as Denis’s upbringing as the son of an impoverished Aberdeen fisherman.
The youngest of seven children, Law was a frail, underfed boy with a squint. He did not own a proper pair of shoes until he was a teenager; he was given a neighbour’s cast-off football boots. He said that, when he first met his wife, Diana, in an Aberdeen dance hall, he knew she was a different class from him because her family home had an inside toilet and running hot water.
The young Denis was a ‘hungry fighter’ for whom football was a way out. Having rejected a place at a rugby-playing grammar school, Law went on to sign for Bill Shankly’s Huddersfield Town, where he flourished after having his eye fixed, while the legendary Scottish manager fed his scrawny frame with steak and milk. It would prove Manchester United’s lucky break that, when Shankly moved to Liverpool FC to build his Anfield dynasty, the Merseyside club could not afford his request to take Law with him.
Before ending up at Old Trafford, Law would first sign for Manchester City in 1960, for a British record transfer fee of £55,000, and then (after scoring 21 goals) for Torino in Italy in 1961 for £110,000 – another record. Denis admitted that ‘the lure of the lira’ had been hard to resist; British football had only just abolished the rule that capped players’ wages at a maximum of £20 a week. But while he still scored goals against the dark arts of defensive Italian football, he was soon heading home again and signed for United in 1962, for another British record transfer fee of £115,000.
The King would score 237 goals in 404 appearances for United, becoming the team’s top scorer as they won the old First Division title in both 1965 and 1967. The bitter disappointment was that Law missed the historic 1968 European Cup final, with a long-term knee injury aggravated by being repeatedly forced to play with pain-killing injections; European football’s dark arts were not confined to Italy.
The next season, when United qualified as holders, Law was arguably (for us United fans, there is no argument) robbed of another European Cup Final when the referee refused to give his goal in the semi-final second leg vs AC Milan at Old Trafford, despite the shot being a yard over the goal line. (European football’s dark arts were not confined to dirty defenders, either.)
Law became Scotland’s only Ballon D’Or winner, and once described England’s victory in the 1966 World Cup final as the ‘end of the world’. He took particular pride in scoring for the Scotland team that defeated the World Cup holders 3-2 at Wembley in April 1967, establishing themselves in Scottish folklore as ‘the real world champions’.
Law’s United teammate, England midfield enforcer Nobby Stiles, said: ‘I knew the Scots were taking it seriously when Denis came on to the pitch wearing shinpads. I had never seen him wear them before.’
From the end of the Sixties, things went badly wrong for United, and Law’s injury hampered his contribution until he was given a free transfer back to Manchester City in 1973. At the end of the following season, United were relegated to the old Second Division after losing at home to City in April 1974.
With the sort of twist that you could not script, King Denis delivered the coup de grâce by backheeling home the winner for the Blues. (It turned out United would have been relegated even if he had done the unthinkable and missed.) Looking as if he wished the hallowed Old Trafford would swallow him up, Law asked to be substituted and walked off as thousands of United fans invaded the pitch. He then went to the 1974 World Cup in Germany with Scotland, but only played once as the team were knocked out despite not losing a game.
In the early Seventies, even top footballers were unlikely to retire rich. Law tried to scrape a living as a salesman, before finding a second career as a warm and witty TV pundit, although his insights didn’t always go beyond the trademark, ‘You’ve got to fancy United’, which made sense in the Nineties.
Until the widespread coverage of his death, Law’s name and fame had largely faded from notice in an age when many seem to believe football only began with the dawn of the Premier League and satellite TV coverage in 1992. But for those of us of an age, the King’s crown still shone. Yes, we were traumatised by the 1974 relegation (I wore a black armband to school on the Monday after the City defeat), but no blame was ever attached to Law. Look back at the images of those pitch-invading Reds, dressed in authentic Seventies gear, showering Denis with love as he trudges off the pitch after scoring that final goal for the Blues. Asked about that day years later, Denis would answer: ‘Next question.’
Football is one area of life where we can afford to be a bit nostalgic. Denis Law was the last of my boyhood sporting heroes, several of whose obituaries I have written on spiked in recent years. That infamous 1974 game has never really ended, since the referee abandoned it as the fans invaded and the FA ruled the score should stand. The legend of Law, Best and Charlton should also go on forever. When United’s rootless owners bulldoze Old Trafford to build their new super stadium (hopefully after scrapping the rotting hulk of our overpriced team), they had better remember to move the statue of the Trinity, too.
Mick Hume is a spiked columnist. The concise and abridged edition of his book, Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?, is published by William Collins.
Picture by: Getty.
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