Stan Cullis

Stan Cullis
Personnel
Surname	Stanley Cullis
birthday	October 25, 1916
place of birth	Ellesmere Port ,  England
date of death	February 28, 2001
Place of death	Malvern ,  England
position	Defender
Juniors
Years	station
1930-1933	Ellesmere Port Wednesday
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1934-1947	Wolverhampton Wanderers	152 (2)
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1937-1939	England	12 (0)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
1948-1964	Wolverhampton Wanderers
1965-1970	Birmingham City
1 Only league games are given.

Stanley "Stan" Cullis (born October 25, 1916 in Ellesmere Port , † February 28, 2001 in Malvern ) was an English national football player who spent many years as a player, assistant coach and coach with the Wolverhampton Wanderers .

Player career

1934 to 1947: Wolverhampton Wanderers

Cullis came to the Wolverhampton Wanderers as a teenager and initially played in various youth teams of the club. On February 16, 1935 he made his debut in the first team, which was then in the Football League First Division , the first division in a 2: 3 defeat by Huddersfield Town . At first he was only used sporadically, but from the 1936/37 season he was a regular player and shortly thereafter became team captain .

Under Cullis, the Wolves (wolves) played very successfully, which two second places in the league in 1938 and 1939 and reaching the FA Cup final in 1939 prove. However, when the Second World War broke out , his career was interrupted. Although he completed 34 games for Wolverhampton and a few guest appearances for Liverpool , Fulham and Aldershot FC during the war , he spent the best years for a player mainly in military service with the Royal Air Force .

After the war ended, Cullis only played one season (1946/47) for the Wolves before he ended his playing career due to an injury and entered the coaching business. He played a total of 171 games for the Wanderers, 152 of them in the league.

1937 to 1939: English national team

Cullis played for the Three Lions for the first time in a 5-1 win over Ireland on October 23, 1937 . Before the war, he completed 12 more international matches. In the last of these games - against Romania - he replaced the regular captain Eddie Hapgood , who had been battered before the game, and thus had the honor of leading his country at the age of 22. During the war, only so-called Wartime Internationals (internationals in the war) took place, of which he completed 20, which, however, were not counted as full internationals. In ten of these 20 games he was team captain .

Coaching career

1948 to 1964: Wolverhampton Wanderers

After his retirement, Cullis was assistant coach under Ted Vizard at Wolverhampton. After just one season he was promoted to head coach and promptly won the FA Cup (3-1 against Leicester ), making him the youngest coach to ever succeed. It was also the club's first major title since 1908.

Over the next few years the Wolves became one of the most successful English teams, winning the English championship in 1953, 1958 and 1959. 1960 followed another FA Cup win and the runner-up title, before the team could celebrate less and less success in the early 1960s. As a consequence of this, Cullis was fired in 1964 and despite an offer from Juventus Turin announced that he would never want to work as a coach again.

1965 to 1970: Birmingham City

After some representative tasks as a sales representative , he then accepted an offer from Birmingham City , but could not repeat his previous successes and resigned in 1970, which finally ended his football engagement segment.

After football

After his resignation, Cullis worked in a travel agency in his new home, Malvern , where he lived until his death. He died on February 28, 2001 at the age of 84.

After his death, a grandstand at Molineux Stadium was named after him by the Wolverhampton Wanderers (Stan Cullis booth) and in 2003 he was inducted into the English Hall of Fame of Football to honor his longstanding service to football.

Web links

Commons : Stan Cullis  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Stan Cullis in the database of weltfussball.de
• Profile on the official website of Wolverhampton Wanderers
• Profile on the page of the English Hall of Fame of Football (English) ( Memento of 9 May 2008 in the Internet Archive )
• BBC article on Cullis