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Tue 3 February 2026 8:00, UK
Rock and roll has always had an affinity with the beautiful game, whether it’s Rod Stewart’s undying love for Celtic or The Wedding Present and their affinity with George Best. Despite coming from one of the most football-crazed cities on the face of the Earth, though, The Beatles never espoused much of an interest in the sport, making John Lennon’s connection to the 1952 FA Cup Final all the stranger.
For those of you whose memories don’t stretch that far back, or aren’t lifelong Magpies fans, the 1952 FA Cup Final saw Newcastle United win their second consecutive FA Cup, thanks to an 84th-minute header from George Robledo, beating Arsenal’s George Swindin. While the winner was hardly one of Robledo’s most graceful goals, it was certainly among his most important. Not only did it keep the cup in the North East for another year, but it also inspired a future songwriting icon.
Although in his adult years, the allure of music, drugs, and, eventually, activism tended to overshadow every other interest in John Lennon’s life, he had not been immune from the pull of football during his childhood back in Woolton, Liverpool. When he wasn’t being shot at for stealing apples, the young Lennon was quite artistically inclined and, as an 11-year-old, chose to immortalise Robledo’s FA Cup-winning goal as a drawing.
While it is not lovely strange for a young boy to draw scenes from football matches, it does seem rather odd that Lennon would hang on to that drawing for multiple decades, despite having no affinity to either Newcastle, Arsenal, or the sport of football in general, but nevertheless, the drawing ended up appearing on the album cover of his 1974 record Walls and Bridges.
One of the songwriter’s most troubled, off-the-wall recording experiences, containing some of his most experimental and autobiographical offerings, Wall and Bridges is rarely cited among Lennon’s greatest efforts, but its strange album cover left many listeners scratching their heads for years.
John Lennon’s Walls and Bridges, 1974. (Credits: Album Cover)
After all, very few long-haired Lennon devotees would glance at the album cover and immediately identify its upper third as being a depiction of the winning goal in the 1952 FA Cup final – particularly because, back in 1974, there were few ways of rewatching that fateful final.
It was only in 2013, in fact, that researcher Nestor Flores connected those dots while looking into the life and times of the Chilean footballer who had forfeited any need to buy a pint in Newcastle during his spell at the club.
Whether Lennon was consciously harking back to that 1950s cup final, or simply collating various childhood drawings that – for reasons unknown – he had kept in his possession, is ultimately unknown. It is worth noting, however, that Lennon lived at number nine, Newcastle Road, Liverpool for much of his childhood, and Newcastle’s number nine, Jackie Milburn, appears alongside Robledo on that childhood drawing.
It is no secret that Lennon had a lifelong obsession with the number nine, and Walls and Bridges contained one of the multiple songs in which he used that digit, ‘#9 Dream’. It could either be argued, then, that Lennon’s obsession with the number was already present during his childhood, or that its appearance on the drawing was coincidental at the time, but deliberately used on the album cover by the songwriter for that very reason.
Regardless, the album cover of Walls and Bridges and its connection to the 1952 FA Cup final remains perhaps one of the strangest, most unexpected sporting connections in the history of rock.
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