Big Interview: 19st Jon Parkin isn’t your average footballer

‘The Beast’ Jon Parkin is a glorious throwback to when footballers weren’t as chiselled as they are these days.

Cult striker Parkin is still playing – and scoring – with National League North side York City a couple of months shy of his 37th birthday. Whatever has helped his professional career span 20 years, it has not been an scrutinised fitness programme.

Weighing in at 19 stone, Parkin poses with a pie and a pint on the back of his recently-released autobiography ‘Feed The Beast’.

He has always been one of the bigger lads – despite protesting ‘I don’t even eat that much!’ – but the striker insists he has remained ‘just your average fella from the pub’.

There is one major difference though... he has scored 220 in 644 games as a professional footballer. Not many blokes from the pub have achieved that.

‘Feed The Beast and he will score’ was the chant. He most certainly did.

A proud Yorkshireman, Parkin comes across as refreshingly sincere, given his reputation as one of the bygone characters of the football world.

“I don’t really think about it,” he said. “I’ll probably be sat in a pub on a Sunday afternoon watching the football after I’ve finished playing and think ‘f****** hell, I’ve scored over 200 goals.’

“I don’t really think about myself, or what I’ve done in the past because it’s gone – you can’t do anything about that.

“The thing that’s surprised me most has been the longevity of it. Now I’ve got the problem with my knee, that’s knackered. I can’t train every day.

“But one of the biggest things is, for whatever I’ve done away from football – and I have lived a life – I can honestly say that every time I turned up for training or a game I bust my balls.

“Whether I were c**p, scored or whatever, I can look in the mirror and say ‘I tried my best every time’.

“That probably means more to me than the goals. Although they are obviously what people judge you on, but it’s quite outrageous I’ve managed to score over 200 goals.”

The forward’s two decade-long strike record of one goal in three games means he has been loved in the stands with most of his 14 professional clubs.

If you watch your team play in the Football League then you’ve almost certainly booed him from the terraces – whether Parkin was wearing the colours of Barnsley, Hartlepool, York, Macclesfield, Hull, Stoke, Preston, Cardiff, Doncaster, Huddersfield, Scunthorpe, Fleetwood, Forest Green or Newport.

Parkin made his first-team debut for boyhood club Barnsley in April 1999. Some of his current York City team-mates were not even born.

He lived the typical – now extinct – YTS (Youth Team Scholarship) with The Tykes. He cleaned the boots of the older pros, swept the floor, all the ‘c***py’ jobs, as he would put it.

But it was just the way football was then. It helped character-building, according to Parkin. There were no 17 and 18-year-olds that felt they had cracked it before even sampling professional football.

These days, as Parkin sees first-hand, things are different. He added: “It’s the characters in it. All people are bothered about is putting their earphones on now, (being on) their phones and stuff like that.

“A lot has come from young lads not doing YTS, not doing the c****y jobs like sweeping the stands and cleaning toilets.

“A lot of them have got attitudes on them. You try and tell kids and they all think they know what they’re doing already, that’s the frustrating thing.

“You try and help someone – I say ‘whatever you do in your career, don’t do what I’ve done’ – I give advice as if I’ve been a model pro, which I haven’t. But a lot have chips on their shoulders.

“With the money that’s in football now, you can have somebody who’s not played a game on 100 grand-a-year, they don’t realise what they could have. Because they have that much money, the flash car and can pay for a bottle of Grey Goose or whatever it is on a night out, they think they’re ‘it’.

“They think they’ve made it and they’re nowhere near.”

The bulky forward admitted he was always brash, even as a youngster. He was outgoing and confident. Nothing fazed him, even walking into a dressing room full of seasoned pros at Oakwell when he was a teenager.

“I felt like one of the louder lads from a young age,” Parkin admitted.

“Walking into my first dressing rooms as a YTS and a kid, I never felt intimidated by anyone, as some do when they first go in.

“I just felt like ‘they might be playing in the first-team or whatever but they’re still normal fellas’ – you know what I mean?

“That’s how I always went about it. From an early age I was in with having banter and that stuff.

“Footballers being these special people, it’s all a load of c**p I think.

“We’re just normal blokes who end up being all right at football.

“You’re a footballer, so what? You’re still just a normal bloke.”

When asked if being a footballer was everything it’s cracked up be, he replied instantly: “No, it’s totally different, totally different to what anybody who’s not been in football sees it.”

Parkin knows better than most that football is tough. Forty-six-game league campaigns are a slog and there is only really any joy if you manage promotion.

There are some dark, grey winters where things aren’t going your way and fans call for the heads of managers and players.

So there has to be craic, says Parkin. He’d normally be the ring leader and his autobiography details all kinds of behaviour that goes against the professional footballer instruction manual.

But despite his ageing years and struggles to keep up with his team-mates’ grasp of advancing technology, Parkin admits he remains a child at heart.

“I’ve had to evolve a little with all this Instagram and that sort of stuff, when they’re all on about Tinder and that,” he said. “I’ve never grown up in the dressing room. You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing, it’s a long season, a long slog, you’re with each other for five or six days most weeks so you’ve got to enjoy yourselves and make it as entertaining as possible.

“In football there are three teams that get promoted. If you’re not one of them you’ve had a bad season. Three or four have an even worse season and get relegated. Throughout your career most seasons you don’t achieve what you want to – you’ve got to have a bit of craic while you’re trying to do it.”

If he had the power, Parkin would change football for the better and bring back more respect.

He continued: “One hundred per cent I would change it so it was like that.

“Not only on a football level, growing as a man. Footballers get their a**e wiped for them, most are not going to make it. They haven’t got the life skills out of football for a normal job when you’ve got a gaffer telling them what to do.

“They’re not used to it and it’s killed it in general for their lives going forward when some don’t make it.”

Some tried to change Parkin’s histrionics. That soon realised they wouldn’t. Besides – he always knew where the net was.

“I’ve had quite a few (trying to change me), but they’ve all realised pretty quickly this is how I am. If they don’t like it then fair enough, I’ll move on somewhere else.

“Fortunately a lot of my career I’ve managed to score goals. If a manager says ‘you need to be doing x, y and z’ I’ll say ‘I scored on Saturday, what is my job?’ That’s been my mentality. This is how I am and I’m scoring goals for you.”