No matter how much posthumous praise is lavished on him, nothing will make amends for Bobby Moore’s lack of formal recognition and proper appreciation during his lifetime. All the honours subsequently thrown at football people who do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as Moore only underline the injustice English football’s greatest ambassador suffered, so it is refreshing to see the achievements of another history maker, and one of his West Ham team-mates, Clyde Best, acknowledged and shared with the wider world while he is here to receive his flowers.
Transforming the Beautiful Game
Dan Egan’s film Transforming the Beautiful Game: The Clyde Best Story focuses on the teenager who came from Bermuda in 1968 to become English football’s first black superstar, and after seven years at West Ham, an even bigger star in the short-lived but spectacular North American Soccer League, which laid down the foundations for football’s continued, if somewhat belated, growing popularity in the United States now.
The West Ham Pioneers in America
Although Best is the film’s main focus, it also draws in the stories of two more of West Ham’s earliest black players, Clive Charles and Ade Coker. All three of them ended up in the US, with Charles going on to become one of the most important and influential coaches in the country, before his tragically early death. It also tips its hat to other pioneers in English football, most notably Jack Leslie, the first black player to be selected by England – and then, astonishingly, unselected when the colour of his skin was realised.
A Story for a Global Audience
The film has an on-screen narrator, Tony D Head, best known to audiences from his appearance in The Wire, which is a hint that, perhaps not coincidentally given its release close to the 2026 World Cup, the film’s main target audience may be in the States, and they could need guiding through some of the finer points of English football and society, a basic knowledge of which a British audience would take for granted.
Inner Steel and External Cool
Being the product of a disciplinarian father but also an easy-going society in Bermuda gave Best the perfect combination of inner steel and external cool to negotiate the challenges of flying halfway round the world as a teenager, being pitched in with World Cup winners, pushed out into a ferociously hostile environment, and coming out on top, as he spent seven years at West Ham bewitching opponents, dazzling team-mates, including Moore, Geoff Hurst and Harry Redknapp, and inspiring a pre-pubescent generation of future English stars, such as Ian Wright and Viv Anderson.
An Adventure Across the Atlantic
Best’s exclusion from the 1975 FA Cup final team was a sign his time in England was coming to an end, but then he went on for an even bigger, more successful adventure across the Atlantic. He stared major challenges in the eye, and saw them off without blinking. Maybe it is this modest unflappability, rather than having a more dramatic tale, that has kept his story out of the spotlight until now, because this is not a tale of plot twists, it is more about how far talent, dedication and the right attitude can take you, and how big a legacy they can help you leave for those who come in your wake. In the case of Best, that is a lot of people.
The Ultimate Tribute
As the public murals show, Bermuda is very proud of its footballing son. America, which has long led the way in producing sport documentaries, loves a winner, and in Best, it has certainly found one. English football likes to put up statues to its finest. Best may not have one yet, but in its absence, it has taken an American to make us realise what an inspiring story, and an inspiring individual, we have had under our noses all these years. This film is the monument that Clyde Best’s life and story deserve.
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