Alexander Derek Dougan (20 January 1938 – 24 June 2007) was a Northern Ireland international footballer, football manager, football chairman, pundit, and writer. He was also known by his nickname, "The Doog". He was capped by Northern Ireland at schoolboy, youth, Amateur, and 'B' team level, before he won 43 caps in a 15-year career for the senior team from 1958 to 1973, scoring eight international goals and featuring in the 1958 FIFA World Cup. He also played in the Shamrock Rovers XI v Brazil exhibition match in July 1973, which he also helped to organise.
A strong and physical forward, he began his career at Distillery in his native Belfast. He helped Distillery to win the Irish Cup in 1956, before he won a £4,000 move to English First Division side Portsmouth in August 1957. He was sold on to Blackburn Rovers in March 1959 for a fee of £15,000 and played for the club in the 1960 FA Cup Final despite handing in a transfer request the day before the final. He moved on to Aston Villa for £15,000 in July 1961 but struggled with injuries during a two-season stay at Villa Park. He dropped into the Third Division to join Peterborough United in 1963, who paid a £21,000 transfer fee. He returned to the top flight in November 1965 after being sold to Leicester City for £26,000. He was sold to Wolverhampton Wanderers for a £50,000 fee in March 1967 and helped the club to win promotion out of the Second Division in 1966–67, to lift the Texaco Cup in 1970 and the League Cup in 1974, and also played on the losing side of the 1972 UEFA Cup final. He also spent two summers in the United States playing for the club's sister teams, the Los Angeles Wolves and the Kansas City Spurs, who he helped to win the United Soccer Association and NASL International Cup respectively. He retired in 1975, scoring 279 goals in 661 league and cup appearances across 18 seasons in the Football League.
He was appointed player-manager at Southern League Premier Division side Kettering Town in 1975, a position he retained for two years. He negotiated the first shirt sponsorship deal in English football at the club. He chaired the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) from 1970 to 1978, and helped to further players' rights and set up the first PFA player awards in 1974. Also, throughout the 1970s, he became a football pundit and writer and became particularly well known for his part in ITV's coverage of the 1970 and 1974 FIFA World Cup. After fronting a consortium that took it out of liquidation, he served as chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers from August 1982 to January 1985. He stood as an independent politician in the Belfast East constituency in 1997 and later became involved in the UK Independence Party.
Alexander Derek Dougan was born in Belfast on 20 January 1938, the son of Jackie and Josie Dougan. His father worked at Belfast docks. His grandfather, Sandy, had played at half-back for Linfield, and two of Sandy's brothers also played for some of the leading clubs in Belfast. As a child, Dougan would usually spend between four and eight hours a day playing football in the street. His family were poor, and later in life Dougan joked that "on the street where I lived, if you paid your rent three weeks on the trot, the police used to come and see where you got the money from". As a teenager he spent 18 months working at a toy factory whilst playing amateur football for Cregagh Boys. He also trained with Linfield, but could not break into any of their junior teams. He instead joined Distillery in 1953. Manager Jimmy McIntosh handed him his first team debut on 5 February 1955, in a 0–0 Irish Cup first round draw with Glentoran. Maurice Tadman, who succeeded McIntosh as the club's manager in the summer of 1955, preferred to use Dougan as a target man centre-forward, as Dougan's height made him adept at winning and flicking on headers in the opposition penalty area.
Whilst playing part-time for Distillery, he also worked at the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding company. Though the maximum wage in England discouraged many of Belfast's top players from leaving their hometown, Dougan was determined to leave for the English Football League at the earliest opportunity, particularly so following the death of his mother in June 1955. He began to attract scouts from England after helping Distillery beat Glentoran 1–0 in the second replay of the 1956 final of the Irish Cup at Windsor Park. He played mostly at half-back in the 1956–57 season as Distillery finished sixth in the Irish League and ended up as runners-up in the Ulster Cup, City Cup, and County Antrim Shield.
Dougan had trials at Preston North End and Bury before he was signed by Portsmouth for a fee of £4,000 in August 1957. "Pompey" struggled to a 20th-place finish in the First Division in the 1957–58 season. Some of his teammates resented Dougan for what he felt was the constructive criticism he offered in the dressing room. He made his first team debut, providing an assist for Jackie Henderson in a 3–0 victory over Manchester United at Old Trafford. He scored his first senior goal for the club in a 1–1 draw with Wolverhampton Wanderers. New manager Freddie Cox, who succeeded Eddie Lever at Fratton Park in 1958, took the club to relegation with a last-place finish in 1958–59 season. However, Dougan would miss much of the season with an ankle injury.
Dougan was sold to Blackburn Rovers for a fee of £15,000 in March 1959. He scored on his Rovers debut in a 1–1 draw away to Arsenal at Highbury. He scored twice on the opening day of the 1959–60 season, a 4–0 victory over Fulham, which began a sequence of five wins and a draw from Rovers's first six matches, at the end of which the club were in second-place and Dougan tallied eleven goals, four of which came in a 6–2 victory over West Ham United. Though their league campaign petered out to an eventual 17th-place finish, Rovers reached the 1960 FA Cup Final at Wembley after Dougan scored the winning goal past Sheffield Wednesday in the semi-finals. However, he did not enjoy his time at Ewood Park, and later wrote that "the dourness of the club matched that of the town. I could not shake off the depression that caused me to wake each day regretting that I had to go to the ground. Life was grey and monotonous". This led to him handing in a transfer request the day before the final, which he later admitted was an occasion where his "vanity triumphed over common sense". He was not at full fitness in the final itself, and had a quiet game as Blackburn lost 3–0 to Wolverhampton Wanderers. He opened the 1960–61 season with a hat-trick in a 3–0 win over Manchester United and went on to withdraw his transfer request.
Dougan was signed by Aston Villa in July 1961 for a fee of £15,000. The 23-year-old was signed by manager Joe Mercer as a replacement for Gerry Hitchens, who had been sold on to Inter Milan earlier in the summer. Teammate Peter McParland later commented that "when Derek came to us at Aston Villa I think it was at a time when he was not taking the game particularly seriously". After returning from watching his "Villans" teammates win the 1961 League Cup Final at Villa Park on 5 September, Dougan was a passenger in a car accident which killed fellow passenger Malcolm Williams and left Dougan with a broken arm and head injuries; driver and teammate Bobby Thomson was charged but found 'Not Guilty' of careless driving. In November 2010 – three years after Dougan's death, Thomson claimed that Dougan had drunkenly pulled a deerstalker hat over his eyes, causing him to crash the car. Dougan recovered after three months on the sidelines and ended the 1961–62 season with 12 goals in 27 matches. He twisted his knee midway through the 1962–63 campaign after slipping in the street, and ended the season with 14 goals from 33 games.
Dougan dropped down to the Third Division to join Peterborough United for a £21,000 fee in the summer of 1963. He later admitted that "I had made a mistake in going to the Third Division when I was a First Division player". The move did though have its benefits, as the club's physiotherapist managed to diagnose and eventually correct an ankle injury that had troubled Dougan for the previous five years. He scored 20 goals in 38 league games in the 1963–64 season, and at the end of the campaign manager Jack Fairbrother was replaced by Gordon Clark, who Dougan said "renewed my sense of vocation". He then scored seven goals in the club's 1964–65 run to the sixth round of the FA Cup, including one in their 2–1 win over top-flight Arsenal at London Road. Peterborough's league promotion campaign failed despite their cup exploits, causing Dougan to remark that "after playing at Stamford Bridge it was not easy to go to places like Gillingham on a cold Tuesday evening, where they are waiting for you with their sleeves rolled up".