He went on to set club records for first team appearances, turning out 866 times for the north London side, captaining the side over 550 times and winning seven trophies.
But he also holds a more obscure claim to fame: most appearances in post-war league matches between Brighton and Tottenham with nine. The only one of the ten meetings he missed between 1977 and 1983 was the final one, Albion’s 2-1 victory at The Goldstone on 2nd April 1983.
“I always felt there was a link between Brighton and Tottenham,” he says. “Of course, you had Alan Mullery being Tottenham captain and Brighton manager, Philip Beal and Joe Kinnear played for both, as did Gary Stevens, Gary O’Reilly, and of course, Chris Hughton played for Spurs and became Brighton manager much later. There was a warmth when you went there, and it has carried on.
“But that ended as soon as you went on the field. My earliest memories are of the competitiveness of Brian Horton in midfield, a wonderful leader, and Peter Ward, the little frail front man who could turn any game.”
Steve first played against the Albion in the 1977-78 season after Tottenham had been relegated to the old second division and both games were promotion battles played in front of full houses. Albion drew 0-0 at White Hart Lane and won 3-1 at The Goldstone, although Tottenham just edged them out for promotion thanks to their 0-0 draw at Southampton on the final day of the campaign.
“That season in the second division was Spurs’ lowest ebb, but it was also the start of a rebound and led to us having that purple patch in the 1980s,” Steve says. “It wouldn’t have happened without that 1977-78 season.
”Keith Burkinshaw was the manager, a down-to-earth, blunt, dour Yorkshireman who never wanted publicity. You could never imagine these days that Tottenham Hotspur could get relegated and the manager would keep his job! And yet it proved to be a very good decision, because he later signed Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa and we started to win trophies.
“He left when big business started to come in and believe that it should make the big decisions, which grated with Keith. When I played we never knew that chairman’s name. I had to ask some of the other players who the old men, as I saw them, were on the team bus. Of course, they were the directors. Since then I have played for Irving Scholar and Alan Sugar at Spurs and Robert Maxwell at Oxford, which was a different world.”
Albion won promotion a year after Tottenham, but the meetings in the old first division mostly went Spurs’ way. Nobody who saw it will forget the first visit to the Goldstone of Argentinian duo Ricky Villa and Osvaldo Ardiles, who put on a masterclass in a 2-0 away win. Villa had taken a while to live up to the post-World Cup hype, but he dominated that day.
“I think Keith Burkinshaw originally saw Ricky as a defensive midfield player and we hadn’t seen as much of him in the World Cup as we had of Ossie,” Steve says. “Most people’s memories were of him getting a yellow card against Brazil, which of course was a big feather in his cap for an Argentina player.
“But he wasn’t that player. He was a skillful touch player who could be a nine out of ten, as we saw in the 1981 FA Cup Final replay, or a three out of ten, and he admitted that. And he didn’t know when either was coming. And because there were so many other midfield players in the squad it was difficult to fit both of them in. But that was one game when they both played together and played well.
“I’ve looked at the results of games between us in the old first division and for a while we could not get a home result and we couldn’t fail to get one at the Goldstone, although there were exceptions, of course. The most vivid memory I have of games at Brighton was when Ossie Ardiles got clattered once, and he was used to bad tackles, so this must have been a bad one. He got up in anger to take the free kick and I still believe to this day that he meant to smash the ball at the guy who had fouled him. Instead it sailed into the top corner!”
Steve finally left Tottenham in 1986 with FA Cup, League Cup and UEFA Cup winners’ medals and a place in the hearts of all the Spurs fans who watched him. As the original ‘One of our own,’ he very much appreciated their backing, which he stresses is important for players who come up through the ranks.
“I loved getting hammer from the crowds at Liverpool or in Manchester,” he says. “It was a badge of honour. But from your own crowd, that made you take a step back and think about things. I always remind supporters that home-grown players especially need support. Did the Spurs fans really always know Harry Kane would become the player he has? He had to work hard to change minds.
“Never undervalue a home-grown player. Ossie Ardiles was a home-grown player somewhere. The best technical player I have ever seen was Glenn Hoddle. Two of the best-ever club captains, Tony Adams and John Terry, were home-grown. No-one should ever think a home-grown player is second-class, or second-best to a big-money signing.”
Steve later went into management with Brentford as player-manager and then Watford, before returning to Tottenham as assistant to Ardiles. He then followed the Argentinian to Japan, where he coached for seven years. But the second-longest period of his career with one club was at Exeter City, where he was Director of Football. A relatively obscure destination and role?
“I was mentoring very good young managers on the training ground or in meetings about future training plans. And having been in Japan and done very well there, I didn’t want to work for a rich owner again who thinks that they can tell you about football. I will listen to them talk about business all day long because they are businessmen and that is their area of expertise, but about football judgement? No. I wasn’t ever having that again.
“So, I dropped out of the big race in football and decided to have a supposedly quieter life in Devon. But of course, when your club has no money, life isn’t quieter after all. I was part of arranging to sell good young players that we had produced. Signing players coming in was more straightforward. You’d tell their agent ‘It’s 300 quid a week. You either want it or you don’t. If you can get 350 somewhere else, go and get it.” That was probably for the first five years. When you start selling players for over £1m, agents tend not to believe sob stories about not being able to afford much any more.”
That blunt ‘take it or leave it’ approach sounds like the way Steve’s first manager at Tottenham, the great Bill Nicholson, carried out contract negotiations. “Bill didn’t want anyone to get carried away with themselves,” Steve recalls. “Not that I ever did. I had 19 years at Tottenham, seven years in Japan on one-year contracts, which is almost unheard-of, and 18 years at Exeter.”
He remembers a visit to Withdean Stadium with The Grecians. “They had a ball boy sat behind each goal with a ball under his chair. When the ball went out of play for a goal kick into that big empty area where the running track was, they’d immediately throw the ball they had under the chair to the goalkeeper and the game could continue quickly while they would run off and get the first ball. But if Brighton went a goal up, that ball under the chair disappeared. Referees never noticed, but people playing against them did!”
Like most fans, Steve is delighted with the new Tottenham Hotspur stadium, where Graham Potter’s men will hope to improve on last season’s 1-0 defeat. Thousands of Albion fans have already experienced this state-of-the-art arena, but they will not have seen the club’s new training ground at Hotspur Way in Enfield, one of the very few facilities that put Albion’s Lancing headquarters slightly in the shade.
“The new stadium is one of two main building blocks towards reaching the top echelons of the European game, and the other is the training ground. The building of the new stadium and the money that had to be spent on it may actually have hindered that progress, but it is there now and it was well worth waiting for.
“The training ground is a masterpiece, amazing. I am not jealous of much about modern football but I would have loved to turn up and work there every day. I criticised the club in the past for selling their Cheshunt training ground, which was nowhere near the level of today’s, but it was our own and you didn’t have to phone up the council and ask if they would unlock it if you wanted to train on a Sunday. You spend more time at a training ground than a stadium and the present one is spectacular. Good times are ahead, I’m sure.”
Steve has an illustrated autobiography out at the moment, A Spur Forever, which has attracted some excellent reviews. It not only tells the story of Steve’s life in football, but also contains images of memorabilia from his personal collection.
“I had helped the publisher out with various things on other books and I trusted them,” Steve says. “The point about the scrapbook element is that I had material that very few people would normally see, such as a letter from Bill Nicholson, writing to the father of the 15-year-old me. It is actually a historic letter from the double-winning manager to the father of the boy who ended up playing the most games for the club.
“It could have stayed in a frame in my hallway or go in a book so that Spurs supporters could see it. And they deserve to because it gives an insight into Bill Nick. It was signed ‘W E Nicholson’ and was so polite, so much to the point and typified the man. Most of the other stuff too, because it is my history. A lot of people have said that they like the way it has been done.”
Tottenham fans famously devour material about the club’s great heroes and games of the past – some, unkindly, have said that it is because of the trophy drought in the present – and Steve hopes that they will enjoy his book.
“Of course, I am biased, but I think fans in north London – and I can’t limit this just to the one set of fans – are very serious football people. They have grown up on great history and great characters. You couldn’t kid Spurs fans. They knew if you were at it or not, and they let you know.
“People say it was a tough crowd and it could be, but it could work the other way. When Danny Thomas missed a penalty in the shootout in the UEFA Cup final against Anderlecht, which could have meant defeat, they chanted his name all the way back to the half-way line. How did that make him feel? How did it make the next penalty-taker feel? And how did it make the goalkeeper feel? That is how important supporters are to a team. In one moment, they can change everything.”
Steve Perryman: A Spur Forever (Vision Sports Publishing) is out now.