James Belshaw: the goalkeeper with two degrees and a second world war thesis

Harrogate Town’s James Belshaw loves diving around in Yorkshire mud at training as he lives out a dream that was slipping away in his mid-20s. But in addition to being the club’s No 1, he is the person players and staff turn to for advice on mortgages, investments and everything in between. He certainly knows how to save.

Belshaw’s CV could walk him into most industries; 10 A*s and 2 As at GCSE, three As at A-level and two degrees, in history and business markets and management. He also has an impressive ability to rattle off the names of Football League clubs. After graduating from Duke University in North Carolina, Nottingham-born Belshaw rejected the chance to join Chicago Fire, eventually going part-time in the sixth tier in England, while managing a software engineering company, and will face Cheltenham in League Two on Saturday.

“One of my biggest interests growing up was biomedical sciences,” says Belshaw, who is also a keen linguist. “If football had never been an option, I think I would have gone to medical school and gone through that route but I didn’t really want to focus on a degree that pigeonholed me, so I thought I’d actually enjoy history and learn about what’s going on.

“I didn’t really know much about the American collegiate system and how that all worked, but someone outlined it to me as: ‘It could be a perfect opportunity for you.’ You can play football to a high standard or soccer to a high standard whilst maintaining your education and getting a degree. For me, it was the best of both worlds.”

Four years mixing education and football resulted in a thesis on SS guards in concentration camps. “It’s a period of history that fascinates me,” Belshaw says. “I looked at the mindset of guards and whether they were mindless robots following Hitler’s orders and where there were acts of kindness that went against the Nazi orders given to them by Hitler and the Third Reich. My thesis highlighted their humane side and how that saved certain prisoners’ lives.”

Holidays now are spent with his wife and young daughter, reading books poolside on African footballers, where previously Belshaw spent his spare time visiting places such as Sachsenhausen outside Berlin.

Belshaw eventually made his Football League debut in the week he turned 30. As a youngster he had been part of the Notts County centre of excellence until it was disbanded and moved to Walsall’s academy, after a spell in Sunday league, playing games on a Saturday while keeping up his education. They wanted him to turn professional but Belshaw decided he could manage his joint ambitions better in America. Belshaw was regarded as the best college goalkeeper in the USA and drafted by Chicago Fire.

“They put this contract in front of me and said: ‘Look, you’ve got 24 hours to decide.’ That’s a lot for an English kid living abroad. Do you want to build a life in England or do you want to build a life here in America? I remember speaking to my parents. I knew they wanted me to come home, but they told me to decide what feels right for me.

“I was frantically Googling apartments in Chicago, trying to look at rental prices to see what my $33,000 a year could get me. I think it had got me a shed at the bottom of some garden somewhere in Chicago, so financially it wasn’t really viable. So I decided to turn the contract down and come home.”

There was a call-up to represent British Universities, with whom he reached the finals of the World University Games in Russia. Non-league Tamworth and Nuneaton kept Belshaw occupied, and he trained twice a week in addition to games alongside a full-time office job and starting a goalkeeper coaching business. After hearing Harrogate, then of National League North, were going professional, he offered his services to the manager, Simon Weaver.

“The office job was killing me alongside the football schedule. I walked away, took a massive 50% pay cut, to go full-time. I thought, it was now or never to give football a go. I always felt I had the potential; after my first year at Tamworth I got messages from a few Football League clubs but nothing ever came of it. I always felt I was good and talented enough to play in the Football League.”

Two promotions quickly followed, Belshaw and Harrogate making it into League Two after they beat Notts County, his boyhood club, at an empty Wembley during the season cut short by Covid. Spectators or not, Belshaw was finally a Football League player aged 29. After helping Harrogate to consolidate for a season, he moved to Bristol Rovers, where he secured promotion to League One, winning the club’s player of the season award, before playing 38 games in the third tier. On his commute from Nottingham to Bristol he would listen to Guardian Football Weekly.

Belshaw, who has his one-year-old daughter Isla’s name on his gloves, returned to Harrogate for a third spell in January after a brief period on loan. Aged 33, he is making up for lost time and hopes to play for plenty more years but is planning for the future in the background: his goalkeeper coaching company, East Midlands Elite Soccer, has partnered with Nottingham Forest, he has earned a Uefa B coaching licence and is hopeful of being voted on to the Professional Footballers’ Association players’ board.

“I might want to go upstairs and be director of football, go into the back room, so there’s lots of avenues, and I am dipping my toe into many different avenues with the PFA. I want to test the media world and see if a career in that would suit me. Obviously, getting invited on to Guardian Football Weekly would be a career highlight.” An invitation will surely be on the way to Belshaw soon then.