Sometimes, there are football stories that are so well known that virtually everybody has heard them, even if they can’t be sure when they did. No one would be surprised if you went to tell them the tale of how German and English soldiers played football with each other in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day in the First World War, for example.
Other times, stories somehow manage to pass most of us by, in spite of the fact that they are genuinely fascinating. The latter is very much the case with the life and times of Fred Spiksley, who most people will almost certainly never have heard of and yet you will struggle to believe some of it.
Fred Spiksley’s Early Years & Playing Career
Frederick Spiksley was born on the 25th of January 1870 in the Lincolnshire market town of Gainsborough. The son of a boilermaker who worked at the local Britannia Ironworks, he had a young sister named Florence Maud who died just shy of six years after Spiksley was born, barely five weeks old.
He also had an older brother, John Edward, and a younger brother, William. He began playing football at Holy Trinity School as a teenager, also appearing for the likes of Gainsborough Working Men’s Club and Gainsborough Wednesday before signing for Gainsborough Trinity in 1887, scoring 131 goals across 126 games.
That led to him signing for Wednesday, the precursor to the team that we now know as Sheffield Wednesday, in 1891, scoring 100 goals in 293 league appearances. He suffered a serious knee injury in 1903, which led to him missing a large amount of football before he joined Glossop North End the following year, playing just three league matches before joining Leeds City in 1905.
After that, he appeared briefly for Southern United and then in 1906 joined Watford, making 11 league appearances and scoring five goals before retiring. He also managed to make seven appearances for England between 1893 and 1898.
Spiksley the Coach
After retiring as a footballer, Spiksley ended up joining the circus and working with the Fred Karno Company, briefly starring in a theatre role alongside Charlie Chaplin. His attempts to get into coaching roles had been frustrated, seeing him miss out on jobs with the likes of Queens Park Rangers and Tottenham Hotspur.
He was also rejected by Watford because he liked to gamble, seeing most of the money that he earned ending up in the pockets of bookmakers. He did, however, realise that football had grown in popularity across the world, so he spent the years following his retirement as a player working as a coach.
That role took him to the likes of Sweden, where he managed IFK Norrköping, AIK Stockholm and even the Swedish national side, as well as Germany, becoming the coach of both MTV Munich 1879 and 1. FC Nürnberg. From there, he ended up in Mexico as the manager of Reforma AC and Real Club España, before a return to 1. FC Nürnberg.
His coaching career reached its conclusion with time spent at the Swiss side Lausanne Sports and the Spanish club CF Badalona, making him a genuine European traveller long before such a thing had become the norm for football managers to do with their post-playing careers.
The Remarkable Parts of His Life
Whilst Spiksley’s moves around Europe as a manager were ahead of their time, it would be difficult to suggest that they were all that out of the ordinary. Yes, a former footballer joining the circus and working with Charlie Chaplin sounds like the premise of a crazy movie pitch, but Spiksley actually had madder things still to come.
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Spiksley was in his first stint with Nürnberg. When a decree was put out to arrest any foreigners aged between 17 and 45, the 44-year-old and his son, Fred Jr., were both locked up and beaten, whilst being fed a poor diet of water and blackened bread.
Born on this day 156 years ago – Football’s 1st Superstar – Fred Spiksley of Sheffield Wednesday – 114 goals in 321 games 1892-1903 – FA Cup Winner 1896, Division 2 Title 1899/00, Division 1 Title 1902/3. 5 goals in 7 appearances for England. A legend!@SpiksleyBook #swfc pic.twitter.com/lLkD4n4WyD
— DunsbyOwl (@Dunsbyowl) January 25, 2026
His wife, Ellen, secured their release, but the pair still needed to evade the German police as they made their way to Switzerland. Back home, the injury to his right knee, which had ended his time as a footballer, meant that he was declared to be unfit for service. He spent the rest of the war in Sheffield, working as a munitions inspector.
His final coaching role saw him working at Sheffield’s King Edward VII School, where the team scored 181 goals on the way to winning all 20 of the games that they played. That resulted in the Ardath Tobacco Company taking their photo to include with those of the professional sides of the era in their cigarette photograph collection.