Michael Dennis Mills MBE (born 4 January 1949) is an English former footballer who played for Ipswich Town, Southampton and Stoke City.

[4] A full back who could play on either side but was more frequently used on the left, Mills spent his late teens in and out of the Ipswich first team but became an established regular in 1969, the year after the club achieved promotion to the First Division.

[4] Robson appointed Mills as team captain in 1971 and so began a close working relationship between coach and skipper which was at the forefront of Ipswich's rise to the top of the game for a decade.

[4] Ipswich began to finish in the top sector of the First Division with some regularity and played in numerous European competitions, but actual success seemed to elude them.

He had just turned 22 when he became captain 30.01.71 and remained Ipswichcaptain for the rest of his career - a total of 588 matches [4] He joined Southampton in November 1982 and spent three seasons at The Dell making 123 appearances before leaving in the summer of 1985 to become player-manager at Stoke City.

[7] During the 1972–73 season, England manager Alf Ramsey gave Mills his first international cap in a 1–1 draw with Yugoslavia at Wembley.

Mills played four England matches in 1981 – notably, they were all World Cup qualifiers for the 1982 tournament, with Greenwood happy to use less-experienced players like Anderson and Sansom in the friendly games which preceded them.

When England beat Hungary at Wembley in their final qualifier to reach their first World Cup in a dozen years, Mills won his 35th cap.

Still switching flanks for his country when required (but rarely for club – he was almost always the left back), Mills played in just two of the preparation matches for the competition, but was named in the team as right back and captain (squad captain Kevin Keegan was injured) when England played their first game of the tournament against France in Bilbao.

Greenwood reverted to a Mills-Sansom full back pairing for the second phase, but two goalless draws against West Germany and Spain (the latter of which finally saw Keegan's return to the team) sent England out of the competition.

Mills joined Stoke with the club a very poor position having just been relegated from the First Division with a record low points tally and with little money available.

[1] However, with Cranson only making 19 appearances in 1989–90 missing most of the campaign due to a knee injury, results were poor and with Stoke rock bottom and heading into the third tier for the first time since 1927 he was sacked in November 1989.