Neville Southall: from Goodison legend to teaching assistant

The binman who became a great

Long before Neville Southall was diving to keep out the best forwards in Europe, he was doing rounds as a binman, waiting tables and carrying hods on building sites. He never expected football to become a career at all, as a teenager, his ambition was simply to be a postman. That grounding, and the slow, unglamorous route he took through non-league football at Llandudno Town, Bangor City, Conwy United and Winsford United before Bury finally paid £6,000 for him in 1980, shaped a player who never lost the sense that the game was a stroke of good fortune rather than a birthright.

What followed at Everton was extraordinary. Bought by Howard Kendall for £150,000 in 1981, Southall became the club's first-choice goalkeeper by the 1983–84 season and stayed there for the best part of two decades, making a club-record 750 appearances in all competitions. He won two First Division championships, an FA Cup twice over, a European Cup Winners' Cup and three Charity Shields, and was named FWA Footballer of the Year in 1985, still the last goalkeeper to receive the honour. He remains, by most reckonings, the best goalkeeper Wales has ever produced, capped 92 times for his country.

Management, coaching, and a life after the gloves

After leaving Everton in 1998, Southall carried on playing into his forties, turning out for Torquay United, Bradford City, Huddersfield Town, Tranmere Rovers and others, before moving into coaching and management. He had brief, difficult spells in charge of Dover Athletic, Hastings United and Margate, none of which lasted long, and he coached at various clubs and with Wales's youth national teams before falling out with the Football Association of Wales in 2004.

Alongside that, Southall built a second working life entirely removed from the professional game. He set up an educational consultancy specialising in helping NEETs, young people not in education, employment or training, and worked in special education. He has described teaching young people how to coach through a scheme called Soccer Skills, and worked in similar settings in London before moving into his current role.

What he does now

Since 2014, Southall has worked as a teaching assistant at Canolfan Yr Afon, the Pupil Referral Unit for Blaenau Gwent, based in Ebbw Vale. There, he helps pupils who have fallen outside mainstream schooling with job-seeking and soft skills, and liaises with local businesses to arrange work placements for them, a world away from Wembley finals and European nights, but one he has clearly found purpose in.

It sits comfortably alongside the rest of Southall's post-playing life, much of which has been spent quietly campaigning for others: as an international officer for his UNISON branch, as a vocal supporter of LGBT rights who has handed his social media platform to marginalised groups and charities, and as an advocate for Welsh independence. None of it makes headlines the way his shot-stopping once did, but it is, by his own account, work he finds meaningful, helping teenagers get a foothold in the world of work, much as he once had to find his own way in, one binman's round at a time.