Football's Pioneers: Dixie Dean
In 1927/28, William ‘Dixie’ Dean (1907-1980) scored a now scarcely believable 60 league goals for Everton in 39 games, breaking by one the records set the season before by Middlesbrough’s George Camsell.
Dean had been signed from his local club Tranmere Rovers in 1925, but the following year he sustained serious injuries following a crash on a motorbike. Everton later banned its players from riding them.
In 1927/28, Everton won the First Division Championship with 102 goals. Dean scored seven goals in the final two games to break the record. ‘Dixie’ became the most potent goalscorer English football had ever seen at that time.
He netted 349 goals in 399 league matches for the Toffees between 1925 and 1937. His overall league strike rate of 0.867 is similarly unlikely to be broken. For good measure, Dean scored 18 goals in 16 England appearances.
He was rugged in build and in play, possessed a powerful shot with both feet, but was mostly famed for his heading ability. ‘Dixie’ epitomised the description of a ‘typical English centre-forward’.
Everton regained the First Division championship in 1932, and with him as captain won the FA Cup the year after, in which he scored in the final.
Probably the greatest player in Everton’s history, the origins of his nickname are unclear but they may have been a combination of his swarthy appearance and black curly hair and a reference to American jazz.
It is undeniable that Dean had been fortunate in that the best years of his career coincided with the change in the offside law.
Before 1925 a player was offside if, when the ball was played to him – in the opponent’s half – he was not in front of at least three opponents; from the 1925/26 season, that number was reduced to two.
There was a dramatic increase in goals scored. In the 1924/25 season, there were 4,700 goals in the league: 6,373 were scored the following season in the same number of games.
In making the change to the law the FA had been increasingly concerned with the growing use of offside tactics. The ‘offside trap’, perfected by Newcastle’s Billy McCracken, was stifling the game, and it wanted to increase soccer’s entertainment value.
Eventually, defences got to grips with the change and by 1937/38, the number of goals per game had fallen back to its pre-1925 level.
Nevertheless, the game became more open with greater emphasis placed on athleticism at the expense of previously close, inter-passing play.
Perhaps just as remarkable as Dean’s achievement was that this was the last major change in association football’s laws, reflecting soccer’s simplicity and mass appeal as the world game.