Leon Britton: Loving the big time

Swansea's 5ft 5in midfielder has been at club since their Third Division days which is why, the League's best passer tells Ian Herbert, he's so happy to have finally reached the top

Leon Britton has experienced the highs and lows with Swansea City (Getty Images)

Leon Britton is about half the size of his Conservative namesake and of the wrong generation to appreciate that he possesses gifts which Margaret Thatcher's former Home Secretary always lacked – like a remarkable pass completion rate and a devoted following in the South Wales valleys. "When I played the junior Sunday Leagues, the older refs who booked me would always say 'any relation?' when they took my name," the little Britton grins, when the subject of the larger one comes up. "They all loved that one!"

The Swansea midfielder has had a long wait for high office, though, and while a first crack at Manchester United will finally be his at the Liberty Stadium tomorrow evening, the scene before us at the club's training base is probably not what he had mapped out for himself when he became Britain's most expensive teenager, 13 years ago. Several people are running about the place with Britton's name on their backs, here at the Glamorgan Health Club, and since the club share the showers and the restaurant with the public there's a reasonable chance that the owners of these replica shirts will be meeting him in the shower later. "Yes, it's a bit different from your normal training grounds," Britton says, casting his eyes around. "Certainly, you'll get people wanting to talk to you. A lot of it is positive. Not a lot of people give you a hard time."

The lack of abuse is one of several dubious consolations about the set-up. The other is that when Britton first arrived in Swansea, desperate for the league football which his £400,000 move as a 16-year-old from Arsenal to Harry Redknapp's West Ham in 1998 had never delivered, it was anyone's guess where training would be. "It used to be a case of 'get changed at the Vetch Field' and we would then be told 'you're training at this place' or 'that place' and it would be a convoy," Britton remembers. "We'd all go up there in our cars."

Even the current regime would be another world to United's Michael Carrick, with whom Britton roomed at West Ham. The 29-year-old still buzzes with the Geordie's "great technique, right and left feet, and a great range of passing, long distance, short distance." He was the sort of player whom Britton, a Lilleshall graduate on Arsenal's books since the age of nine, had left his Highbury alma mater to be around. The Arsenal he had departed, against the advice of the PFA and his Arsenal coach George Armstrong, were changing.

"Arsène Wenger was starting to bring in a lot of foreign lads, for right or wrong," Britton recalls. "West Ham had a great reputation across many years of bringing players through." Jermain Defoe and Glen Johnson were in that number and, of course, Joe Cole. "People were talking about him being one of the best players ever."

But while those individuals all reached for the accumulated riches of stardom, the 5ft 5in Britton was left behind, lost in the mist of "Tuesday nights with West Ham reserves in front of 50 people," as he solemnly remembers it, and even those dizzy heights became a stretch. There weren't too many options. Southend took him on loan for a few weeks. "They said 'hmm, we're not sure, because our midfield's strong. You might have to bide your time,'" Briton relates grimly.

It was why the call from a club 200 miles down the M4, and propping up the Football League at the time, did not seem so bad. To begin with, there was a Gavin and Stacey moment. The Port Talbot steelworks is not a divine sight from any angle and Britton has never forgotten how he clapped eyes on it as he first ventured up to Swansea. "You're not too sure what it is at first," he says. "All of a sudden you see all this steam and smoke and the signs are saying Swansea's five miles away!"

The man who persuaded him that this piece of earth was holy happened to be one of Port Talbot's finest sons. It was the then Swansea manager Brian Flynn, a one-time midfield technician even smaller than Britton, whose extraordinary eye for talent had also seen him fish Roberto Martinez out of Walsall reserves. The self-belief Flynn re-instilled in Britton almost defies articulation. "He is a brilliant man manager," Britton says. "He made you feel great, lets you go and express yourself. There weren't many boundaries." Flynn, now manager of the Wales Under-21s, needed repayment soon enough. Swansea remained anchored, obstinately, to the foot of the table and despite Britton's contribution – Flynn remembers the way he played without the mask recommended for him after sustaining a broken cheek – it was win or bust when Hull City arrived on the last day of the 2002-03 season. The hat-trick heroics of James Thomas, now a Port Talbot ambulance driver, are legend, though Britton – the only survivor of that side to face United today – tells the lesser remembered story of naked fear.

"We had a great start – 1-0 – I was able to win a penalty and James scores," he recalls. "But before you know it we're 2-1 down going towards half-time and you could just feel the silence on the ground. I remember looking at one of our players, the full-back [Michael Howard], who had made the mistake [for the second goal.] You could just tell he was devastated. He gave the ball away and they went away and scored. None of us wanted to be the one who sent the club down.

"I had my West Ham contract but you have to remember only one other player had a year left [on his contract] after that season. Everyone else was out. You're talking about mortgages, bills to be paid, so much at stake. You appreciate things in football a bit more after that kind of experience and when you finally get to the Premier League you know you've worked hard to get there. When you get that opportunity, you want to take it even more."

Swansea's determination to keep Britton has become also as big a part of the legend. The fans rattled buckets in the old Vetch Field North Stand to help pay his wages, in what became known as the "Battle for Britton". It helped that West Ham did not arrive to view the loanee once. In the subsequent eight-year toil through all the leagues, there were times when the Londoner has thought that he would never reach the place Carrick and Cole occupied. "You do go to some places," he says. "Boston is one of them. No disrespect, but especially from here, on a Tuesday night, it seems like the end of the earth..."

Martinez's ascent to the manager's chair, introducing 4-3-3 and a technical, passing game, certainly suited the man he had shared rooms and midfields with for four years. "Rob made me a lot more of a defensive midfielder, the link between defence and midfield," Britton says. Chairman Huw Jenkins has insisted on preserving the passing game amid the changing guard of managers, which is why the Brendan Rodgers session about to begin in the afternoon sunshine will place extreme emphasis on ball retention. "It's what he always bangs on to you about: be embarrassed if you lose the ball," says Britton, with a mock grimace. "If you keep training like that it comes out in the game. You are disappointed if you miss a pass."

So here lies the explanation for Britton's extraordinary statistical impact on the Premier League. His pass completion rate – 93.8 per cent – is currently higher than that of any other Premier League player who has made more than 200 passes this season, with 67 out of 67 completed in the 3-1 home win over Bolton.

"My passing's pretty safe and I'm someone who more keeps the ball moving and ticking over, but I can't say I came off the pitch thinking anything different," he says. "Before we reached the Premier League no one took much notice of us. But now we get stuff like [midfielder] Mark Gower being the most creative player in Europe's five major leagues. That's the attention, I guess."

Briefly, Britton thought that there was a more direct route to the top than this. His far less fertile relationship with Paolo Sousa, successor to Martinez, contributed, too, to his departure for Sheffield United, in June 2010. He was back "home" within six months, reaching an agreement with Rodgers that sees him leave for London every Saturday night or Sunday morning for 48 hours with his four-year-old daughter, Lily. Thus has one of football's most remarkable journeys been completed by a man who has hardly strayed from one coastline.

Britton cannot say he has tackled the Welsh language quite like Martinez did and he's never unearthed a Welsh granny to enable him to play for the nation. But down in the Swansea Valley, even the few Conservatives will tell you that there's only one Leon Britton.

My other life

I've lived up towards the Gower coast for about eight years now and I think I'm getting countrified, which you wouldn't expect in a London boy like me! You have to be careful driving at night because there are animals roaming around over the Fairwood Common. It's not lit and the next thing you know there are sheep around your car.

The Gower has got lovely beaches. I used to have a Weimaraner, a "ghost dog" as they call them, and I'd love walking him on the coast. The Mumbles is also lovely place to go and get a bit of food and ice cream.