‘Never go back’ is one of football’s old adages, spouted ad nauseam by pundits whenever a player or manager is linked with his former club.

Sometimes it works out. Jose Mourinho, Nemanja Matic and David Luiz all came back for second stints at Stamford Bridge and won a Premier League title – two, in fact, in Matic’s case. On other occasions, however, things don’t go quite how they’re intended. And unfortunately, that is what happened in the case of Peter Osgood, one of Chelsea’s all-time greats, when he returned to his old stomping ground.

During his first spell as a Blue, Ossie was the youth-team graduate who rose all the way to the throne, as he was anointed the King of Stamford Bridge during one of the most talked about eras in our history, as we won the FA Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup in back-to-back seasons at the start of the 1970s.

Osgood might not have been the captain of that side, but he was certainly its leader, both on and off the pitch, as the squad played hard on the pitch and partied even harder as part of the King’s Road set that had developed in the Swinging Sixties.

It seemed everything he touched turned to gold. A sublime diving header in the 1970 FA Cup final replay against Leeds United is one of the competition’s iconic moments, and he remains the last man to score in every round of the competition from the third round onwards in the same season. Real Madrid, too, were on the receiving end of Osgood’s Midas touch, as he netted twice against them in the two games needed to secure our first European honour, the Cup Winners' Cup.

With the straitlaced Dave Sexton at the helm, however, there was always a clash of cultures simmering away in the background. After one row too many, to the surprise of no one, Osgood found himself packing his bags in March 1974, at the age of 27, to join fellow maverick Alan Hudson out the exit door.

The latter part of his career took in spells with Southampton – where he enjoyed another memorable FA Cup triumph, this time over Manchester United and his old Blues boss, Tommy Docherty – Norwich City and the Philadelphia Fury, before he returned for another fling with his first love.

While the list in more recent times has swelled, at that time Ossie was part of a group of only four who had come back to Stamford Bridge, along with Alec Cheyne (1930s), Allan Harris (1960s) and Charlie Cooke (1970s). The last name on that list was well known to Osgood, both as a former team-mate and regular cohort in the King’s Road social scene, and his return had been a huge success, as he claimed a second Player of the Year award at the club, eight years after the first.

Cooke had left for the second time in the summer of 1978, heading for the United States of America, where he remained into retirement. Osgood, making the journey in the opposite direction in December of that year, had clearly had enough of the NASL.

‘They were looking for ‘names’ over there and the challenge excited me, so I crossed the Atlantic for a new adventure,’ Osgood revealed years later. ‘I remember before a game against Fort Lauderdale I was warming up with Alan Ball, who was making a guest appearance, and we began to wonder where the opposition was. We found out a couple of minutes later when a wagon train with full complement of horses and [Native Americans] came galloping into the stadium! This included the opposition who were wearing cowboy hats and firing guns into the air. I looked at Bally and didn’t say a word. After nine months I’d had enough.’

And so in the autumn of 1978, Osgood headed back to the UK and, as he later recalled, entered the ranks of the unemployed for the first time in his life. ‘The reality of the situation hit me like a fist in the face,’ was how he put it in his autobiography Ossie: King of Stamford Bridge, written with Martin King and Martin Knight.

The same could quite easily have been said by the powers that be at Chelsea Football Club. Having narrowly avoided relegation the previous season, the Blues had won only two matches out of 17 by the end of November and a return to Division Two was looking increasingly likely.

The transfer kitty available to manager Ken Shellito was minimal, but what little money he did have to spend was earmarked for Osgood, who had once cleaned our former right-back’s boots during his apprenticeship at the club.

‘I received a call from Ken asking me if I wanted to come back to the Bridge,’ added Ossie. ‘I didn’t think long and hard about it, but perhaps I should have.’

There was one potential stumbling block: Philadelphia still had him under contract. Even so, a fee of £25,000 was quickly agreed between the two clubs and the King of Stamford Bridge was back on the throne.

So much had changed in the four years since his first stint at the club had come to an end. Peter Bonetti and Ron Harris were the last men standing from the FA Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup-winning sides as the club had shown its faith in the talented youth graduates, albeit with little alternative as the spending on the new East Stand had spiralled out of control. Perhaps most tellingly of all, the average attendance for league games at the Bridge had dropped from just shy of 40,000 down to 23,000.

There were still more changes to come before Osgood had even made his second debut for the club. Shellito resigned suddenly, and in came Danny Blanchflower in his place. A legend at Tottenham Hotspur, Blanchflower was an old football romantic who had become a respected journalist and was also managing the Northern Ireland national team. He was not, however, the man for a crisis.

His first game at the helm was up in the North-East, as Middlesbrough hosted the Blues at Ayresome Park. But there was only one name on the lips of every Chelsea supporter among the 15,000 in attendance at Boro’s old ground.

‘The fans gave me a fantastic welcome,’ recalled Osgood. ‘I did feel I’d come home at last. I made up my mind that day that whatever happened I wanted to finish my career with Chelsea, the club I started with.’

It should also be noted that it wasn’t only the supporters who were delighted to see Osgood back at his spiritual home. A side with an average age of 24, including several youth graduates who had been at the club for the tail-end of Ossie’s first spell at the Bridge, were in awe of one of Chelsea’s all-time greats.

‘I’ve been a Chelsea supporter all of my life and when I was growing up my heroes were all footballers who played for the Blues,’ said striker Tommy Langley, who would finish the season as the club’s Player of the Year. ‘Top of the list was Peter Osgood, as was the case with many my age.

‘I absolutely adored him – the swagger, that touch of arrogance. He was the person I looked up to. And we became friends! Can you believe it? At that time I was living in Basingstoke and he was based in the Windsor area, so we’d travel in together. I became friends with my idol. He was a keen race goer, as was I, so we'd go racing together. It was surreal!’

Langley was selected up front alongside Osgood up at Middlesbrough and it felt like all his Christmases had come at once.

‘I remember being sat next to him in the dressing room – that alone would have been enough for me,’ he added. ‘But we actually combined for the opening goal. Little Razor [Ian Britton] got away down the right-hand side and sent a great ball into the box; I drifted from the near post to the far, Os went the other way and ended up flicking the ball into the back of the net. We’re 1-0 up and here I am celebrating with my idol. And then we got beaten 7-2. But it was still a great day for me.’

It was a sign of things to come. Osgood would play only nine more games all season, scoring a second goal in a win over Manchester City – his 150th for the club, a record bettered only by Bobby Tambling at the time – but it was a wretched season. We finished bottom of Division One and relegation had looked a near certainty from the early weeks of the campaign.

In a bid to arrest the slide, and to offer Blanchflower some much-needed help, Geoff Hurst was brought in to work alongside the manager as his assistant. Seven games into the season, Blanchflower resigned, to be replaced by England’s 1966 World Cup final hat-trick hero; it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what had happened.

In an interesting quirk of fate, just as he had made his ‘second debut’ in Blanchflower’s first game as manager, Osgood pulled on the famous blue shirt for the last time in his final match in the dugout. Only 17,182 supporters turned up at the Bridge to see us lose to Birmingham City. Osgood was replaced by defender Gary Chivers in the second half – not the final hurrah he would have dreamed of.

‘I knew Geoff well – I roomed with him in Mexico [at the 1970 World Cup] and I liked him,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘But with Danny gone, there was little point in trying to build a manager/player relationship with him. We were nearly the same age. Geoff didn’t approve of my lifestyle. He knew I spoke my mind and probably believed that I would be a threat to his authority.’

Hurst’s first big decision was to drop his old pal, who responded a few days later by refusing to play in Peter Bonetti’s testimonial. The subsequent £100 fine imposed by the club proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. ‘He phoned and asked for his cards to be sent to his home,’ declared England’s 1966 World Cup hero, while Osgood claimed he would play one final match for the reserves before calling it a day.

Ossie later wrote of his regret – both that he had gone back to the Bridge when clearly past his best, but also that he hadn’t been able to keep his cool when Hurst had tested him.

‘Professionally, I shouldn’t have gone back. Chelsea had seen my finest days and I was now a shadow of the player I once was, only able to offer the Chelsea faithful the most fleeting glimpses of that golden age. Emotionally, though, I was unable to say no.

‘With hindsight, I should have bitten my lip and carried on playing in the reserves instead of forcing the situation with Geoff. Perhaps I could have kept my head down and taken the reserves over. Maybe I would have ridden out Geoff’s spell at the club (he didn’t last too much longer, either), gained valuable experience in coaching and stayed in the game.

‘I would have liked nothing better than to have become part of Chelsea’s backroom operation and see what developed from there. But it was not be. I did play in that final reserve game, against Oxford United and in front of a couple of hundred people. Chopper was in the side and at the end of the game I cuddled him and said, ‘See you Ron.’ By the start of the following season, Geoff had let him go too. Last man standing.’

At the age of 32, Osgood hung up his boots and bought a pub in Windsor, The Union Inn, which he ran with his best mate and former strike partner, Ian Hutchinson.

Perhaps it was inevitable he wouldn’t be long for the game he once loved so dearly. Back in 1969, when he’d written his first autobiography at the preposterously young age of 22, Osgood offered his insight into where he saw football going.

‘There is a shortage of skill in English football today,’ he wrote in 1969, ‘simply because we have been weaned on basics, hard work, fitness courage. Our tactics are stereotyped. There is more emphasis on preventing goals than scoring them.

‘My idea of midfield play is to beat a man and then work the ball. There is a growing tendency in our football now to bypass the middle of the field. The call now is ‘early balls’. Skill is being suffocated. Teams now are a unit, there seems to be no place for the individual who may be essentially a touch player.’

There was no greater individual than Osgood. And even if his second coming hadn’t quite gone to plan, it had provided a timely reminded of what he loved so much about the beautiful game and, indeed, Chelsea Football Club.

‘People rave about the Manchester United and Liverpool fans, but these two clubs won trophies regularly. Chelsea fans really had little reward for their loyalty, other than the 1955 league championship, now a fading memory, and the burst of glory at the turn of the decade.

‘It sometimes seemed that the harder the going got, the more the Chelsea crowd dug their heels in. I cannot overstress the wonder we all felt when we’d turn up at Sheffield for an evening game on a cold winter’s night, and the ground was packed three out of four sides with Chelsea. There was a great sense of sharing the battle together.”’

By Richard Godden, first published in 2020

We will continue to tell stories of the legendary Peter Osgood in the lead up to the 20th anniversary of his passing on Sunday. You can read and watch more on 'The King of Stamford Bridge' Peter Osgood here.