Jogging in New York’s Central Park on 20 September 1980, the reggae musician Bob Marley collapsed in the arms of Allan “Skill” Cole, his close friend and a Jamaican football star. The following day Marley was diagnosed with incurable cancer; Cole would remain with him for the next eight months until his death.

Up to that point Cole had held the role of Marley’s running partner, joining him on his early morning pipe-openers along the coastline of Jamaica and mustering assorted football teams to play at 56 Hope Road, Marley’s headquarters in the capital, Kingston. “He loved football and I loved music,” said Cole. “It was part of a divine plan. That’s how we came together.”

For a time Cole, who has died aged 74, was also manager of Marley’s trio with Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, the Wailers, and later he spent a period as tour manager for Bob Marley and the Wailers, Marley’s musical vehicle after the departure of Tosh and Wailer. He also had a long-term relationship with Judy Mowatt, a member of Marley’s vocal backing group, the I Threes.

Cole had first met Marley on a football pitch in the Trenchtown district of Kingston, in the mid-1960s. They were linked not only by their love of the game but by the burgeoning Rastafari movement, which Cole had been drawn to in his early teens at Kingston college, one of Jamaica’s top schools.

An only child, Cole grew up in the middle-income neighbourhood of Woodford Park in Kingston. His mother was a dressmaker but it was his civil servant father, Allan Cole Sr, “a sports-minded man, my greatest motivator”, who drummed into him the vital elements of football, including the advantage of being two-footed.

An attacking forward, equally adept as playmaker and striker, he was an exceptional dribbler and passer of the ball, and was called up to represent Jamaica at the remarkably young age of 15 by Major Ken Barnes, the national coach and father of future Liverpool and England player John Barnes.

By 1968 Cole was playing in the North American Soccer League for the Atlanta Chiefs, and in 1972 he moved to Brazil to appear for Clube Náutico Capibaribe in Recife, playing there for just over a year until he was forced to leave after refusing to trim his dreadlocks.

In between playing for those two teams, Cole had become the Wailers’ manager, legally establishing their Tuff Gong record label, which was more or less equally assigned to Marley, Tosh and Wailer. One of the early Tuff Gong releases was Trench Town Rock, which almost immediately became a local No 1: thanks to Cole the Wailers were suddenly earning good cash.

Although he stopped working as the Wailers’ manager when he went to Brazil, Cole remained close to their affairs, and was incensed when in 1974 the single Rebel Music (3 O’Clock Roadblock) got no airtime in Jamaica. Driving up to the RJR and JBC radio stations with a baseball bat, he demanded that it be played immediately – and it was.

After leaving Náutico, Cole returned to Jamaica to play for Kingston-based Santos FC, where he was the star player as they dominated the national league over the next few years. In 1975 the touring New York Cosmos team, featuring Pelé, played at Kingston’s National Stadium against Santos, and it was Cole’s delicious pass that put through Errol Reid to score the winner in a 1-0 victory that enhanced his local myth even further.

The following year Marley’s Rastaman Vibration album became Marley’s first US Top 10 record, and Cole had a co-songwriting credit on the longplayer for the song War – though in reality the words were from a speech by Emperor Haile Selassie that Cole had brought to Marley’s attention. Cole’s influence was clearly felt by his friend in other areas too: Cry to Me, also on Rastaman Vibration, was originally recorded by the Wailers for the Studio One label, but was reworked by Marley at Cole’s instigation.

Not all was sweetness and light around that period, however. Late in 1976 gunmen shot Marley at Hope Road, and though the assassination attempt was put down to politics, there was a misguided belief in some circles that it was as a consequence of Cole’s fondness for dubious dealings at Caymanas Park, Kingston’s horse-racing track, where it was alleged that horses were drugged.

Cole, who often had the twinkle in his eye of a naughty boy, was no stranger to such scams, and earlier in 1976 he had set up a race-fixing scheme with a host of Kingston “badmen”. The plan was botched, the supposedly doped horses had not finished as intended, and the conspirators lost big stakes. Because Marley was close to Cole he became linked with the financial thrashing, and for a time was forced at gunpoint to hand over $2,000 a day. It did not, therefore, take much lateral thinking to mistakenly link the Hope Road shooting with the failed horse-racing fraud.

With his life potentially in danger, Cole fled to Ethiopia, where he coached the national football team. From east Africa he would fly up to join Marley on European tours, playing soccer with him in London and Paris in a series of five-a-side matches. On what would turn out to be Marley’s final live dates from May to September 1980, he also operated as tour manager.

Back in Jamaica following the death of his friend, Cole returned to football, becoming player/coach of Port Morant United during the 80s.

In the 90s, he might well have been found sharing chalices of ganja with jockeys. In 2002 he was charged with possession of 325lb (147kg) of cannabis. Sentenced to 18 months in prison and a substantial fine, he somehow wriggled out of his jail term.

More recently he had been working on a Bob Marley biopic. “Many people [are] jumping on the bandwagon and claiming that they know about Bob, [but] most of it is just fiction,” he declared, seizing the subject for himself.

Cole’s relationship with Mowatt ended in separation; they had three children. He later married Sharon.

• Allan Aloysius Cole, footballer and music manager, born 14 October 1950; died 9 September 2025