Jimmy Carter’s Liverpool career lasted nine months and eight games. It began with Kenny Dalglish handing him the club’s famous No. 7 shirt, and within six weeks the man who had signed him was gone.
But there is far more to the winger from London than a short stay at Anfield. For years almost nobody knew it, but he was one of the very first players of South Asian heritage to play in the Premier League, and his story deserves telling properly.
Released at 19
Carter was born in Hammersmith on 9 November 1965, so he turns 61 on Monday.
He joined Crystal Palace at 14, but they let him go at 19. A spell at Queens Park Rangers followed without a single league game, and it would have been easy to drift out of football altogether.
Instead, in March 1987, Millwall paid QPR £15,000 for him. It turned out to be the making of him.
Promotion at The Den
In 1987-88 Carter was part of the Millwall side that, with Teddy Sheringham and Tony Cascarino up front, won the Second Division title.
It took the Lions into the top flight for the first time in their history, and it put Carter on the radar of the biggest clubs in the country.
The call from Kenny
On 10 January 1991, Dalglish paid Millwall £800,000 for the 25-year-old. Liverpool were the reigning champions and sat top of the First Division.
Two days later Carter went straight into the side at Villa Park, and he did it wearing the No. 7, the shirt made famous by Kevin Keegan and by Dalglish himself. Carter has looked back on that moment with enormous pride ever since.
The game finished goalless in front of more than 40,000 fans. A week later he made his home debut in a 1-1 draw with Wimbledon, John Barnes scoring at Anfield.
Brighton and a derby
He kept his place for the FA Cup fourth-round tie with Second Division Brighton, when Ian Rush scored twice but the visitors hit back late on to draw 2-2.
Four days later he started a breathless replay at the Goldstone Ground, which Liverpool won 3-2 after extra time, with Steve McMahon scoring twice.
Then came a Merseyside derby. On 9 February he came off the bench early in the second half for Ronnie Whelan as Liverpool beat Everton 3-1 at Anfield, David Speedie scoring twice.
Kenny goes
Within a fortnight everything had changed. On 22 February 1991, two days after the famous 4-4 FA Cup replay at Goodison Park, Dalglish resigned.
By then Carter had already lost his place in the starting line-up. Ronnie Moran took temporary charge, and in April Graeme Souness arrived from Rangers.
Carter came off the bench in a 1-1 draw with Coventry at Anfield on 9 April and in a 4-2 defeat at Chelsea on 4 May. But it was clear he was not part of the new manager’s plans.
His last game came in Finland on 2 October 1991, a late run-out as Liverpool lost 1-0 to Kuusysi Lahti but went through 6-2 on aggregate in the UEFA Cup.
Six days later, Arsenal paid £500,000 to take him back to London, and to the club he had supported as a boy.
The story nobody knew
Carter’s surname gave nothing away. He has traced it to an English ancestor who, he says, moved to India in the 17th century and married there.
His father, Maurice, was born in Kanpur and grew up in Lucknow. Orphaned at 14, he joined the merchant navy and eventually settled in England.
When Maurice and Jimmy’s English mother divorced, he brought up Jimmy and his brother as Indian kids, with curry and rice on the table.
He was the one who got his son out of bed on frosty mornings and sent him out running, to give him the edge over the other boys chasing the same dream.
Carter suffered racist abuse as a young player, but he never told his father about it. He knew how much it would have hurt him.
As a professional he never made a point of his background. Football was a harsher place back then, and he worried it might count against him. But he has always said he was proud of his heritage and never hid it from anyone who asked.
A Premier League pioneer
When Carter played for Arsenal at Blackburn on 18 August 1992, it was long believed he had become the first British Asian to play in the Premier League.
In 2024, research for a Sky Sports documentary found that Robert Rosario had beaten him to it by three days, playing for Coventry against Middlesbrough on the opening weekend.
There is a lovely footnote to that. On that April day at Anfield, Carter came on for Liverpool against Coventry, and Rosario came off the visitors’ bench too. Neither man could have known that they would one day be recognised as the first two players of South Asian heritage in the Premier League.
It was another 11 years before Michael Chopra followed them, and only a handful have done so since.
Highbury, Fratton Park and home
At Arsenal Carter started the FA Cup tie at Wrexham in January 1992, and he was on George Graham’s books when the Gunners won the FA Cup and the League Cup in 1993.
He scored twice in the league for them, had two loan spells at Oxford United and joined Portsmouth in July 1995.
In the summer of 1998 he went back to Millwall, but a serious back injury forced him to retire at the end of the 1998-99 season, at the age of 33.
Since hanging up his boots he has worked as a radio co-commentator, and he has worked for Millwall off the pitch too.
Once a Red
Eight games, no goals and a manager who left almost as soon as he had arrived. Jimmy Carter’s timing at Anfield could hardly have been worse.
But he got there the hard way, from being released at 19 to wearing the No. 7 for the champions of England. He did it without ever making a fuss about where he came from, in a game that was far less welcoming than it is today.
That deserves remembering, and it deserves the Kop’s respect. Happy birthday for Monday, Jimmy.
