Clough was born in Middlesbrough, the sixth of nine children. His resilient mother, Sally, was extremely close to him, and was reportedly "fanatical" about football. In later years, Clough would always be a professed socialist, once parking his Mercedes outside a church hall in Nottingham before giving an emotional speech supporting the Labour candidate in the 1979 election, Phillip Whitehead.

Clough married Barbara Glasgow, a close neighbour, while still playing for Middlesbrough. Of their three children it was Nigel who followed Brian into football. He was a gifted centre-forward, long the fulcrum of the Forest attack. He later played with Liverpool and Manchester City.

Brian Clough scored 204 second division goals in 222 games for Middlesbrough, yet won only a couple of England caps, against Wales and Sweden in 1959. Clough's league debut came against Barnsley in 1955. When that career came to a bitter end on Boxing Day 1962, playing for Sunderland, for whom he had signed in 1961, he had already scored 33 goals that season. He was only 27 when the collision with Bury's goalkeeper tore a cruciate ligament beyond repair. He nevertheless played one game for Sunderland in Division One - against Leeds. He scored, of course.

When George Hardwick (q.v.), made him Middlesbrough youth coach, Clough's misery was partly assuaged. But the directors would not have him. He was dismissed, drank heavily, despaired - only to find himself, in 1965, manager of nearby Hartlepool. Peter Taylor agreed to leave his job as Burton Albion manager to assist him. Between them, the two men breathed life into a club forever on the verge of extinction, and, in 1967, were appointed to run Derby County, then in the Second Division. Showing enormous flair in the transfer market - acquiring for small fees such future stars as Roy McFarland and Archie Gemmill - the two transformed Derby as well. In 1972, they won the championship. But the relationship steadily deteriorated across the years until it degenerated into implacable hostility, still unresolved at the time of Taylor's death in 1990.

Taylor was enraged when he found Clough had been given a £5,000 salary increase without telling him; and things would never be the same. In October 1973, after Clough had taken Derby to the semi-finals of the European Cup, he and a competitive chairman, Sam Longson, fell out irreparably, Clough and Taylor resigned, and, despite impassioned protest meetings in the town, would not find a way back.

The two of them revolutionised Forest as they had Derby. But not before they had utterly failed, from November 1973, to do the same for the Third Division club Brighton and Hove Albion, where Clough's attempt to bully limited players to perform like stars brought disastrous results. Surprisingly, in July 1974 he was engaged to manage Leeds United, whose players he had publicly condemned as cheats in the past, and who fully reciprocated his antagonism. Clough lasted only 44 days, and emerged from the ordeal a demoralised man.

However, in January 1975 he became manager of Derby's eternal rivals, Nottingham Forest, and in the summer of 1976, when Taylor resigned as manager of Brighton, he joined Clough. Showing their old flair for signing players, they took Forest out of the Second Division in 1977, won the championship in 1978, and the European Cup in 1979 and 1980. This was an astonishing achievement with a club that had won nothing of consequence since the FA Cup in 1959. That particular domestic trophy eluded Clough - Tottenham beat Forest in the 1991 final - but league cup victories came in 1978, 1979, 1989 and 1990.

Clough's public image was as an outspoken controversialist. His methods were unique. He was essentially a dictator, and not always a benevolent one. After Forest supporters invaded the pitch at the end of a tumultuous league cup quarter-final victory over Queen's Park Rangers in February 1989, Clough took the field himself and struck several fans ('The shit hits the fan' as the newspapers said). He was fined £5,000 for bringing the game into disrepute, and banned from the touchline of all football league grounds for the rest of the season. When Everton's players, disappointed by losing a league cup match to a very controversial goal, despoiled their dressing room, Clough, knowing they were due back in three days for a league match, told the cleaners to leave it as it was. Clough, not often to be found at the training pitch - but always influential when he was there - was given to late, inspirational appearances in pre-match dressing-rooms. On April 26 1993, 58 years old, in charge of Forest for the past 18 years, he finally retired. The team faced relegation, and he himself no longer had the same resilient hubris. But he had worked wonders at the City Ground.

In January 2003, his years of heavy drinking caught up with him and he was obliged to undergo a liver trans-plant in a 10-hour operation carried out at the Freeman in Newcastle.