Scotland, Celtic, Everton and Leeds footballer described by Don Revie as 'the best signing I ever made'
Bobby Collins, who has died aged 82, had a long and remarkable football career. Changing from a classical, quick and elusive Scottish right winger, he became in due course a notable playmaker, principally for Everton, then Leeds. An international career with Scotland brought him 31 caps, and appearances in all three Scottish matches in the finals of the 1958 World Cup.
At Leeds, he established a formidable partnership with the manager Don Revie, who signed him for £25,000 in March 1962. Revie later described him as "the best signing I ever made. Leeds can never thank him enough for the transformation he brought to the club." Collins recalled: "Don knew that good pros had good habits and I think that's what he was hoping to instil when he signed me. One of the great things about the boss was the way he built up a comradeship. We all loved him because he treated us properly and commanded our utmost respect. He also knew how to build a team."
Within a year or two of Collins's arrival, he said, "some of the kids were coming through who went on to become the nucleus of the great Leeds team. Billy Bremner had already made the first team when I arrived and looked a brilliant prospect." Johnny Giles came from Manchester United as an outside-right and eventually succeeded Collins himself as a general of the midfield.
In the 1963-64 season, Collins captained Leeds to the championship of Division Two, missing just one League game, and scoring half a dozen goals. The following season saw Leeds make a spectacular return to the top division. They finished runners-up, as they also did in the FA Cup, and Collins was voted footballer of the year.
At little over 5ft 3in, but unrelentingly hard, Collins was as abrasive as he was creative. In the 1965 Cup final at Wembley, against Liverpool, he broke the collarbone of the Liverpool full-back Gerry Byrne, who somehow played on (substitutions were not then permitted). Leeds too were diminished by injury to the midfielder Jim Storrie. There was a thrilling climax in the first extra-time period played in a final since 1947. Byrne, despite his injury, pulled the ball back from the goal-line for Roger Hunt to head Liverpool into the lead. Leeds unexpectedly rallied, for Bremner to equalise, but another header, this time by Ian St John, deservedly gave Liverpool the Cup.
Later that year, in Turin, during a European Fairs Cup match against Torino, Collins was the victim of a vicious assault by the opposing defender Fabrizio Poletti, which broke a bone in his thigh. However, Collins managed to return after a complex operation for the last three matches of the season. The following season, he received another injury, and transferred to Bury in February 1967.
Collins was born in Glasgow and worked as a miner and cobbler from the age of 14. He recalled: "Football was a wonderful life, but I found working outside the game interesting and challenging too." Going down the mine, he once remarked, had the further advantage of keeping him out of the army, in those days of conscription. Playing for Glasgow Boys, he was signed by Celtic, making his debut for them on the right wing in the 1949-50 season. His second season with Celtic saw him win his first three international caps. Altogether, he would play 220 League games for Celtic, scoring 80 goals. Crossing the border to join Everton in 1958, he had already modulated into an inside-forward.
In the Swedish World Cup of 1958, he was a member of a Scotland side which, as he later remarked, was bizarrely without managerial leadership, though it did not disgrace itself. Indeed, to draw their first game at Västerås with a Yugoslavia team which had recently thrashed England 5-0 in Belgrade was no small feat. Collins played at inside-left in that game, and inside-right in the second match in Norrköping, scoring Scotland's second goal in a 3-2 defeat by Paraguay.
The third and last game came in Örebro against the powerful French side that would eventually take third place, inspired by the attacking combination of Raymond Kopa and Just Fontaine, both of whom scored in a narrow French victory. Collins that day played in his original role of outside-right.
He stayed productively at Everton until 1961-62, making 133 League appearances and scoring 42 goals. Midway through that season, however, he dropped down a division to join Leeds. He might well instead have moved across the city to Liverpool, whose manager, a fellow Scot, Bill Shankly, wanted him. But the first time Shankly phoned him, Collins was out and his brother-in-law couldn't make out who it was. By the time Shankly phoned again, Collins had agreed to join Leeds.
After leaving Leeds, he helped Bury to reach the Second Division. Later there was a spell in Scotland with Morton, another in Dublin with Shamrock Rovers, and a stint at Oldham Athletic, as player-coach. His subsequent managerial career was varied, and somewhat ill-starred. In August 1974 he became manager of Huddersfield Town, then in the Third Division, but that ended in December 1975, by which time his job had been made impossible by the board's intransigence. It was, he said, "a nightmare".
After Huddersfield, he became chief coach, caretaker and manager, and finally, in October 1977, the manager of Hull City, but the job lasted only until the following February, when he was dismissed. In the interim he had returned to Leeds United as youth coach.
For the next couple of years he was forced on to the dole, then worked variously as principal of a coaching school, "in the rag trade, chauffeuring and being a bit of a messenger boy. I enjoyed that." Finally, his former Leeds team-mate Norman Hunter made him youth and reserve team coach at Barnsley. When Hunter left, Collins became the new manager, after a spell as caretaker, in February 1984.
But, just back from taking the players for a holiday in Majorca in what seemed a fruitful spell for the club, he was dismissed once again, with a year of his contract left, in June 1985. "I thought I had done a good job," he said. "At the time, the miners' strike was having a bad effect on the local economy, gates were down, and if you spent £50,000 on a player, it was big money."
Later, he worked with a friend in wholesale fashion, then for some years as a driver for Leeds University. In 2002, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
He had two children, Michael and Julie, with his wife, Betty.
• Robert Young Collins, footballer and manager, born 16 February 1931; died 13 January 2014