Paul Fletcher MBE
Striker · Burnley · England
About Paul Fletcher MBE
Paul Fletcher MBE was a direct, hard-working centre-forward who became one of Burnley (ENG)'s finest strikers of the 1970s, scoring 71 goals in 293 appearances across nine seasons. Selected for Don Revie's England senior squad, a serious knee injury denied him a full cap. He later forged a distinguished second career as one of Britain's foremost stadium development experts and served as Chief Executive of Burnley FC, overseeing their promotion to the Premier League in 2009.
Paul Fletcher MBE's story
Burnley's Striker of the Seventies
Fletcher joined Burnley from Bolton Wanderers in 1971 for a then club-record fee and spent nine seasons as the focal point of their attack. He scored 71 league and cup goals in 293 appearances — including Burnley's Goal of the Decade, a stunning strike at Elland Road in a famous 4-1 victory over Leeds United in 1974. He gained four England Under-23 caps and was named in Don Revie's senior England squad, only for a serious knee injury to end that dream.
From Teamsheet to Balance Sheet
After retiring from football at 32 following a second serious leg injury, Fletcher built a remarkable second career in stadium development — masterminding the award-winning Alfred McAlpine Stadium at Huddersfield (ENG), the Reebok Stadium at Bolton (ENG) and working on the new Wembley. He returned to Burnley as CEO and guided the club to Premier League promotion in 2009, receiving an MBE in 2007 for services to sport and charity.
Stadiologist, Inventor and Educator
Fletcher went on to become chief executive of Arena Coventry Ltd, delivering the Ricoh Arena, and briefly managing director of Coventry City itself in 2006 — he resigned in October 2007 in protest when the stadium's owners rejected an American consortium's bid for both the club and the arena. In 2004 he founded StadiArena Ltd, patenting his own invention: a hoist-fabric door system that seals an open stadium stand into a fully enclosed indoor arena in under eight minutes, letting a football ground host concerts, conferences and banqueting on non-matchdays. In 2012, alongside former Burnley director Brendan Flood, he co-founded UCFB (University & College of Football Business), building it from a single base at Turf Moor into campuses at Wembley Stadium and Manchester's Etihad Stadium — he remains a director there today, at www.paulfletcher.co.uk billing himself a 'Stadiologist': someone who has developed more than one football stadium.
A Second Career in Print
Fletcher has written or co-written six books. BFC & Me (1994) and The Sportsman's Dinner Business (1998) came first, followed by his own memoir, Magical – A Life in Football (2013), and a stadium-industry manual, The Seven Golden Secrets of a Successful Stadium. In February 2018 he turned to fiction, co-writing Saturday Bloody Saturday with Tony Blair's former director of communications, Alastair Campbell — a novel weaving a struggling 1970s football club into a real IRA assassination plot in London, which reached The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestsellers within a week of publication. His most personal book, Heading for Dementia? ...but it was a Wonderful Life (2025), confronts his own fears about memory loss and the toll of heading footballs on his generation, drawing on the stories of former Burnley team-mates.
Did you know?
- 🎯 As a boy on a Bolton council estate, Fletcher taught himself to head a ball with total precision by hanging one on the washing line and practising every night until it flew straight down the line rather than spinning — the skill that became his 'passport' through a 16-year career.
- 👃 Fletcher broke his nose four times during his career. On one occasion, with no doctor willing to reset it before he sailed to the Caribbean on the QE2 with his Burnley team-mates, he simply had a team-mate straighten it for him in the dressing-room toilets.
- 👨👩👦 He lives with his wife and family in the Rossendale Valley in Lancashire, close to Turf Moor, and is an active member of the George Formby Society.
- 🏟️ His stadium-conversion invention, StadiArena, seals an open stand into a fully enclosed arena using a giant hoist-fabric door — the patent is his personally, and its first real-world use came at a Kabaddi World Championship in Ahmedabad, India, in 2016.
- 📖 Early reviews of Saturday Bloody Saturday questioned whether a terrorism subplot belonged in a football novel — but most changed their mind by the end, one describing its 'totally unexpected ending which cleverly draws all the strands together.'
- 🧠 His 2025 book, Heading for Dementia? ...but it was a Wonderful Life, examines the links between heading footballs and CTE and includes a contribution from Bryony Hill, widow of footballer and TV personality Jimmy Hill.
- 🎓 By 2018 the university Fletcher runs had grown to around 2,000 students studying football-industry degrees across its two campuses — remarkable scale for a venture that began life inside a football stadium's function suite.
- 🏷️ As Bolton Wanderers' chief executive in 1996, Fletcher personally struck the naming-rights deal that turned the club's new ground from Middlebrook Stadium into the Reebok Stadium.
- ⚕️ He spent eight years as a consultant to the Professional Footballers' Association on industrial injury claims — drawing on his own playing career, which ended at 32 because of a serious leg injury.
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