Brian Clough and Peter Taylor signed plenty of players nobody else wanted, but only one of them arrived at the City Ground with a reputation so bad that other clubs had stopped asking. Kenny Burns Nottingham Forest is the story of a Scottish forward with a taste for the bookmakers who was moved to centre-half, told to grow up, and finished his first season as the best footballer in England.
Who is Kenny Burns?
Kenneth Burns was born in Glasgow on 23 September 1953 and came south as a teenager to join Birmingham City, making his first-team debut in 1971. At St Andrew’s he was used all over the pitch — centre-half, midfield, centre-forward — and it was as a forward that he made his name, finishing as Birmingham’s leading scorer and earning a Scotland call-up.
He also earned a reputation. Burns was combustible on the pitch and fond of the greyhound and horse tracks off it, and by the summer of 1977 the word around English football was that he was more trouble than he was worth. Forest, newly promoted and shopping in the bargain bins, did not agree.
The scouting job that made the signing possible
The due diligence fell to Peter Taylor, whose job in the partnership was to work out which flawed footballers were fixable and which were not. Taylor went and watched Burns — not in matches, but at the dog tracks he was supposed to be ruining his career in — and came back with a verdict that separated the gambling from the drinking. Burns liked a bet. He was not, Taylor concluded, drinking himself out of the game, and a player who wanted to win badly enough to lose his temper every week was a player Clough could work with.
Forest paid Birmingham a fee reported at around £150,000 in July 1977. In a squad assembled almost entirely from other clubs’ cast-offs and mistakes, as set out in our account of Clough’s time at Nottingham Forest, it would prove one of the best pieces of business the club has ever done.
From centre-forward to Footballer of the Year
The masterstroke was positional. Rather than play Burns up front, where his record said he belonged, Clough and Taylor put him at centre-half alongside Larry Lloyd. The logic was simple enough: a converted forward knows exactly what a forward is trying to do, and Burns could read a striker’s intentions a fraction earlier than a career defender ever would.
What emerged was one of the most complete central defenders of the era — genuinely comfortable in possession, quick to step in front of a runner, and utterly ruthless when the situation called for it. Lloyd handled the physical duels, Burns did the thinking, Peter Shilton stood behind them, and Forest simply stopped conceding goals.
The result was the 1977/78 First Division title, won at the first attempt by a promoted side, a season told in full in our piece on how Clough’s promoted team won the league. Forest also lifted the League Cup that year. And at the end of it, the Football Writers’ Association named Kenny Burns its Footballer of the Year — a player who had arrived nine months earlier as a problem striker, voted the outstanding footballer in the country as a defender.
Two European Cups
The defence Burns anchored then did something even less plausible. Forest went 42 league games without defeat, the run covered in our account of the 42-game unbeaten sequence, and turned that resilience into back-to-back European Cups.
Burns started the 1979 final in Munich, when Trevor Francis headed the goal that beat Malmo, and the 1980 final in Madrid, when John Robertson scored the only goal against Hamburg. Both were 1–0 wins, and both were built on a back line that gave European football’s best attacks nothing at all. The full story of those two nights is in our guide to the 1979 and 1980 European Cups.
Around him were John McGovern lifting the trophies and Viv Anderson flying down the right, but it was the Lloyd–Burns partnership that made Clough’s high defensive line survivable.
Burns also won 20 caps for Scotland and travelled to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, the tournament that went so badly wrong for Ally MacLeod’s squad.
The exit, and the legacy
Like most of the European Cup winners, Burns did not get a long goodbye. As the great side aged and the money to rebuild it failed to appear, he was sold to Leeds United in October 1981 after around 200 appearances in a Forest shirt. Spells at Derby County, Notts County and Barnsley followed before he wound down into the lower leagues and non-league management.
He remains one of only a handful of Forest players ever to be named Footballer of the Year, and he sits comfortably in most supporters’ all-time Forest XI. The medals he won are listed in full in our guide to Nottingham Forest’s honours.
The lesson has not dated, either. Oliver Glasner builds his Forest side around a back three that is asked to defend a long way from its own goal and play out from the back under pressure — the exact job description Clough and Taylor invented for a 23-year-old centre-forward from Glasgow in 1977. Forest fans watching Murillo stride out of defence with the ball are watching an idea that Kenny Burns got there first with.
Footballer of the Year winners are recorded by the Football Writers’ Association, European Cup final records by UEFA, and club history on the official Nottingham Forest website.
