SIR HUMPHREY APPLEBY: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years; to create a disunited Europe. In our cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Italians and the Germans. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now when it’s worked so well?
Yes Minister, ‘The Writing on The Wall’
(Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn; BBC TV, 1980)
‘I WILL not speak to cheating bastards.’ Brian Clough’s words hung in the air; their meaning clear to those Italian journalists who possessed only the most basic understanding of English. For those in any doubt, Brian Glanville, the Italian-speaking English writer, was instructed to translate.
Derby County had just lost 3-1 at Juventus in the first leg of the 1973 European Cup semi-final and Clough was fuming. The result was bad enough. The actions of the German referee Gerhard Schulenburg were what really had him at boiling point. ‘We had two key players booked well before half-time,’ he recalled later. ‘Their only crime was to stand somewhere adjacent to an opponent who flung himself to the floor.’281 The fact that the men in question, Roy McFarland and Archie Gemmill, would now be suspended for the second leg was, Clough believed, no coincidence. Peter Taylor had seen Juventus’s German midfielder, Helmut Haller, trailing the referee towards his dressing-room at half-time – and had been manhandled by security officers when he tried to intervene. No wonder Clough felt that ‘the whole episode stank the place out’.282 John McGovern left the field with tears in his eyes, ‘astonished that such favouritism could happen during a televised game at which UEFA officials were present’.283
Clough would claim, ‘Juventus bought the referee. Of that there is no shadow of doubt. I was cheated, Taylor was nearly arrested, and two players were booked for next to nothing. What surprised me is that Juventus were good enough without that. They were the better side, but we could have reached the final if Gemmill and McFarland had played at Derby.’284 The comment column in Goal satisfied its nationalistic self by declaring that ‘no English referee would have handled the game in such a fashion. They have far too much character for that.’285
Derby could only draw the second leg 0-0, Alan Hinton missing a penalty and Roger Davies being sent off for an attempted headbutt on defender Francesco Morini, who ended up sprawled in the back of the goal. ‘I’d given him a good right hook earlier on which I’d got away with,’ admitted Davies, who’d grown weary of the shirt pulling and holding. ‘I actually missed Morini with the headbutt, but he made the most of it.’286 It also emerged later that the Portuguese referee, Francisco Marques Lobo, was offered $5,000 and a car if Juventus won, although a UEFA investigation found that the Italian club had not been the instigators of the alleged bribery.
A few weeks later, Leeds United, who had set out to achieve in the Cup Winners’ Cup what Derby were denied in the premier European competition, were left feeling equally aggrieved. Again it was Italian opposition, AC Milan, that aroused suspicion. Sidelined because of injury, Johnny Giles had attended a pre-match press conference and heard talk among journalists that Leeds ‘can’t win this game’. A goal resulting from a dubious free-kick award by Greek referee Christos Michas and the refusal of two Leeds appeals for penalties left the fans in Salonica jeering the referee at the final whistle and halting the winning team’s lap of honour with a barrage of missiles. Although nothing could be proved in relation to this match – which came days after Leeds had been stunned by Second Division Sunderland in the FA Cup Final – UEFA subsequently banned Michas from officiating in their competitions. Meanwhile, the request of Leeds for the game to be replayed was turned down.*
As bitter as the feeling induced by both those incidents was, neither were particularly new or unexpected when it came to matches between English and Italian opposition in these still relatively early years of European competition. Goal’s European football correspondent Leslie Vernon had written, ‘The distressing European Cup Winners’ Cup Final has confirmed my long-held belief that if there are two countries which shouldn’t meet on a football pitch it surely must be England and Italy. Their written and unwritten rules create a practically unbridgeable gap.’287
Without the widespread televising of international leagues that would become commonplace in the 21st century, foreign opposition was still viewed with suspicion, being largely unknown to all but the best-travelled journalists. Trips to away games were treated as ventures into war zones; tactics and methods that were common in overseas domestic competitions considered underhand.
When Britain had entered the European Economic Community – the Common Market – on the first day of 1973,† it was supposed to have brought its people closer to their continental counterparts. Yet a month later, the prevailing mistrust of foreigners was reflected in the ‘No Hiding Place’ episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, in which James Bolam’s character, Terry, shares his views on various nationalities with his more liberal-thinking friend, Bob, played by Rodney Bewes. Offering the wisdom of his years in the army, Terry reels off a list of perceived national characteristics that were probably a closer reflection of popular opinion than Bob’s mocking response. Russians, says Terry, are ‘sinister’; Italians ‘greasy – not as greasy as the French, mind’; Germans ‘arrogant’; and the Spanish ‘lazy’. He concludes, ‘God didn’t make this country an island by accident.’
Such suspicions had long been voiced, in less direct terms perhaps, in relation to football. Tottenham forward Alan Gilzean had written an illustrated column in the Sunday People, offering his guide to the ‘Dirty Dodges’ of European teams, including shirt pulling, time wasting and hair tugging (not that the latter was much of a concern for the balding Scot). Team-mate Phil Beal complained, ‘If the European players can’t have it their own way out on the park, they give up and resort to childish tactics like feigning injuries. The continental footballers must be the best actors in the world.’288
For years, the story of Anglo-Italian football had been one of mutual antipathy. ‘In those days, the difference between Italian football and English football was remarkable,’ said Arsenal captain Frank McLintock. ‘In our opinion they would be sly. They would fall over looking for free-kicks and spit on you – all that stuff. We would tackle from behind and go in with big crunching tackles that they thought were unfair, so the ideologies of the two camps were poles apart.’289
Tommy Docherty articulated a similar view when saying, ‘When these foreign sides come over here they are greeted with the tackle. And that frightens them to death. When they get back home they howl about the rough handling they have had in England. You would think we had been chopping their legs off with meat axes.’ Bobby Charlton had played enough football around the world, however, to hint that prejudice was the real problem. ‘There seems to be a feeling among English clubs that Italians are not to be trusted,’ he said, ‘and this is something we hold against them whenever we meet.’290
In the early 1970s, there were still plenty of fans who remembered the 1934 ‘Battle of Highbury’. On that occasion, England beat recent World Cup winners Italy 3-2 in a game that began with visiting centre-half Luis Monti having his foot broken in a challenge by Ted Drake after only two minutes. Retaliation was swift and repeated. Eddie Hapgood’s nose was broken, Eric Brook suffered a fractured arm, Drake was punched. All before half-time. Reduced to ten men, Italy almost fought back from three goals down and returned home as heroes. The Football Association, meanwhile, considered withdrawing the England team from future international matches.
Anglo-Italian competition continued along a course of rancour, mistrust and outright violence, not helped by the unhappy tales of British players such as Denis Law and Jimmy Greaves, who returned home with horror stories after brief and unhappy transfers to Italian teams in the early 1960s. In a scenario that Clough and Don Revie would come to recognise, Liverpool took a 3-1 European Cup lead to the San Siro Stadium in 1965, only to lose 3-0 to Inter Milan when Spanish referee José María Ortiz de Mendíbil allowed two disputed goals, while ruling out a valid-looking effort by Ian St John. Glanville recalled Tommy Smith being so incensed that he kicked the referee ‘all the way to the dressing-room’. Working at Inter at that time was Italo Allodi, who would be general manager of Juventus by the time they played Derby in 1973.
The following season, Chelsea beat AS Roma 4-1 at Stamford Bridge in the Fairs Cup, despite having full-back Eddie McCreadie sent off for retaliating after being grabbed by the throat. Even before kick-off in Rome, Chelsea chairman Joe Mears was struck by a tomato thrown from the crowd. The missiles became more dangerous during the game – coins, stones, cans, bottles of urine. The Roma players elbowed, stamped and pinched; John Boyle was felled by a bottle; and George Graham narrowly missed being impaled by an iron railing. Chelsea advanced with a goalless draw, while Roma were left facing a three-year ban from European competition.
Another year, another battle. This time it was Burnley who came through a bruising first leg to take a 3-0 lead to Napoli in the Fairs Cup. Again, the English team achieved a 0-0 draw, but then the real contest began. ‘Run for your lives,’ ordered Burnley manager Harry Potts as home fans set fire to seat cushions and skimmed them towards the field. Reserve goalkeeper Adam Blacklaw was thrown down the steps leading to the dressing-room and the Burnley players had to hold suitcases against coach windows to protect themselves from objects thrown by Italian fans.
You might think that this manner of mayhem would discourage football contact between the two nations. Far from it. As the conflicts raged into the 1970s, they were instead given their own formal battle theatre in the shape of the Anglo-Italian Cup. Conceived in the spirit of goodwill and friendly competition, it quickly became home to festering bitterness that merely reflected what was going on in the bigger competitions. The tournament had its genesis in Swindon Town’s 3-1 upset of Arsenal in the final of the 1969 League Cup. Denied entry into the Fairs Cup because they were a third-tier team, a compensatory challenge was set up against Coppa Italia winners Roma, which was duly won over two legs by the English underdogs.
The renowned Italian football agent Gigi Peronace, who had helped broker the transfer of John Charles from Leeds to Juventus and Greaves from Chelsea to AC Milan, was convinced that an expanded Anglo-Italian Cup deserved a place in the calendar. So, while the challenge between cup winners would be played over the next two seasons – and make a brief comeback in the middle of the decade – the summer of 1970 saw six teams from each country engaged in Peronace’s new brainchild. Split into three groups, with two teams from each country in each, home and away contests were staged between the opposing nation’s sides. With every team having played four matches, the best English and Italian teams were awarded a place in the final, points having been awarded for each goal scored in addition to the usual two for a victory.
Middlesbrough, Sheffield Wednesday, Sunderland, Swindon, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers were the first English entries. A taste of what the competition would offer came when West Brom travelled to face Lanerossi Vicenza. With the scores level at 1-1 and 15 minutes remaining, Asa Hartford’s foul on home captain Roberto Di Petri set off a brawl between the players. When many of the 12,000 crowd decided it would be good fun to join in, English referee Kevin Howley abandoned the match and the competition organisers awarded a 2-0 defeat to both teams. Wolves, meanwhile, found themselves engaged in a game against Lazio in Rome that was described as a ‘fight to the death’ by Derek Dougan, who admitted thinking, ‘If they want it that badly they can have it.’
What was needed was a showcase final. Swindon, clearly at their ease against Italian opposition, qualified to face Napoli in front of 55,000 in the Stadio San Paolo. Goals by Peter Noble gave them a 2-0 lead and when Arthur Horsfield added a third after 62 minutes the home fans had seen enough. Concrete benches were smashed and thrown, along with bottles. Fires were ignited in the stands. With 11 minutes left, and with his linesman almost struck by a missile from the crowd, Austrian referee Paul Schiller called the whole thing off and the game was awarded to Swindon. Bizarrely, the trophy presentation went ahead amid the mayhem. Swindon manager Fred Ford thought misguidedly that it might help to calm the most frenzied section of the crowd if he walked over and showed them the trophy they had failed to win. He was soon running for cover under another barrage of rubble.
Undeterred, the organisers planned for 1971, although Lanerossi, Lazio and Napoli would all be absent. By that time, Lazio – coached by Uruguayan Juan Carlos Lorenzo, who led the Argentina team referred to as ‘animals’ by England manager Alf Ramsey during the 1966 World Cup – had left their mark again in one of the most incredible episodes in the history of Anglo-Italian football. Arsenal had begun their defence of the Fairs Cup by drawing a bad-tempered game in Rome 2-2. ‘They were treading on us and elbowing, and they would spit in your face at a corner,’ recalled goalkeeper Bob Wilson. ‘And they went up to the younger ones and pulled their hair. It really was horrible stuff.’291
It was nothing compared to what transpired at the post-match banquet, where Arsenal’s less worldly squad members provoked matters by sniggering when they were presented with the kind of leather man-bags fashionable in Italy. The gifts were tossed around during the formal speeches. When striker Ray Kennedy, accompanied by full-back Sammy Nelson, ventured outside to escape the stuffy restaurant, one of the Lazio players walked past, made a derogatory comment and attempted to knee Kennedy. ‘Ray just went “Smack!” and splattered him,’ said Nelson. ‘The other lads were coming out and there was shouting and screaming. It was like a comedy film, with people being thrown over Fiat 500s.’292
Bob McNab almost ended up through a plate-glass window, George Armstrong was slammed against the team bus and Peter Marinello was thrown over a car. When manager Bertie Mee attempted to restore order, he was lifted by his lapels by his opposite number. It needed the arrival of armed police to bring things to a halt. One Lazio official accepted his club’s culpability, but only because ‘with the dinner we provided some excellent wine’.
Mee adopted a rather more serious tone. ‘It was asking too much of any group of men to resist defending themselves when they were provoked again and more seriously after the match,’ he said. Arsenal’s players would cite the incident as being one of those shared experiences that engendered greater team spirit as their season advanced towards the League and FA Cup double.
By the time the dust had settled on the 1970-71 season – and Leeds had beaten Italian opposition Juventus on away goals in an untypically good-natured Fairs Cup Final – six English teams were embarking on a new Anglo-Italian Cup adventure. This time the referees managed to keep the teams on the field for the duration of all the games, with Blackpool, just relegated from the First Division, finishing as the leading English representative. ‘You could always feel an undercurrent,’ said midfielder Alan Ainscow, who played his first games for Blackpool during the tournament. ‘There was something in the air that did not feel right, something sinister. I remember one night, after a match, we got involved in an altercation. It ended with one of our players punching an Italian.’293
The status of the competition had grown enough for BBC to show the final, played in Bologna, live on Grandstand. It was a rare bonus in the days when live games were strictly rationed. The host team were held to one first-half goal by the brilliance of 19-year-old goalkeeper John Burridge and Blackpool levelled the game after 62 minutes through John Craven. Nine minutes into extra-time, the small group of travelling fans in the 40,000 crowd were sent into raptures by winger Micky Burns, who cut across the face of the penalty area from the left and lashed in the game’s winning goal. With Chelsea having lifted that season’s Cup Winners’ Cup and Leeds the Fairs Cup, the Blackpool Gazette heralded its team’s victory as England’s third European trophy of the season. Burns explained, ‘When we got back to Blackpool there was a civic reception, an open-top bus tour. It was definitely seen as an achievement.’294
Burns scored four goals in a 10-0 win against Lanerossi Vicenza as Blackpool made their way to the final the following year, the only English team to win all four group games. This time they went down 3-1 to Roma in front of 75,000 at the Stadio Olimpico. The tournament had featured a Stoke–Roma match in which three players were sent off.
By 1973, the fourth year of the tournament, the organisers felt obliged to address the elephant of bad blood that was not so much in the room as forcing all other occupants out into the corridor. Admitting to ‘teething troubles’ when writing in the souvenir brochure, Italian League president Aldo Stacchi said, ‘It was inevitable that these would occur. It was no small thing to introduce a competition between peoples who needed time to understand each other.’ Football League president Len Shipman sounded relieved when writing of the previous year’s event, ‘With one or two exceptions, the competition was played in the sporting manner we all hoped for.’ It had, however, been deemed necessary to introduce a ‘Good Behaviour Award’, whereby the club whose players and supporters were judged to have best exemplified the notion of sportsmanship would have the team’s travelling expenses to its two away games covered by a sponsor, the Fiat car company.
Having expanded to eight teams per country, the tournament was spread over the closing months of the season, rather than jammed into the summer break, and no longer featured points for goals. There was also a semi-final for the two most successful teams from each country. In England’s case, it meant Newcastle United scoring five in the second leg against Crystal Palace to ease through. Manchester United had been one of the English also-rans, with their game at Verona in May seeing Bobby Charlton score two goals in his last competitive appearance in a United shirt.
Newcastle travelled to Italy to beat Fiorentina 2-1 in the final, something midfielder Terry McDermott referred to as ‘no mean feat with all the tricks the Italian teams got up to’.295 Skipper Bobby Moncur was presented with the trophy and then saw it dented when winger Terry Hibbitt fell down some steps. There was no rush to get it fixed. Diminishing interest meant the tournament was scrapped – although it would be resurrected as a competition for non-League teams later in the decade and tried again as a professional event for a further four years in the early 1990s.
There was a reminder of why the tournament had always appeared ill-conceived a few months later when Ipswich Town beat the notorious Lazio over two legs in the UEFA Cup after Trevor Whymark’s four goals had given them a 4-0 lead to take to Rome. They ended up with a 6-4 aggregate victory, but midfielder Bryan Hamilton called it ‘an unsavoury night, where we just wanted to get the match over with and go home’. Angered by refereeing decisions, the home crowd ‘went crazy’ – according to Lazio forward Giorgio Chinaglia – and the Ipswich players were forced to shelter in their dressing-room for two hours for safety. ‘No team should ever be asked to come here again,’ said Ipswich manager Bobby Robson. ‘Night of shame,’ read the local newspaper headline, although Lazio’s record suggested they might have had that one on permanent standby. On their way to winning the Serie A title, Lazio would be banned from contesting the European Cup the following season.
MR SMOKETOOMUCH: Then once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman ruins where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin’ Watney’s Red Barrel.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC TV, 1972)
In the beginning was the FA Cup, followed in relatively short order by the Football League. Not until another 70-odd years had passed did the Football League Cup arrive on the scene in the early 1960s. Now the 1970s was spawning new competitions as rapidly as Marc Bolan was churning out hits as lead singer and songwriter for the decade’s first new pop sensation, T. Rex.
While the Anglo-Italian Cup had apparently been born of a desire to capitalise upon national rivalry, the new tournament that became a feature of the pre-season of 1970-71 was driven by one thing – money. ‘I believe sponsorship in football has now arrived,’ said Football League secretary Alan Hardaker when announcing details of the Watney Mann Invitation Cup, a competition in which the two highest-scoring teams from each division not to have qualified for Europe or been promoted would play in a knockout tournament over the course of a week. As well as a share of ticket revenue, clubs would receive £4,000 for participating in what quickly became abbreviated to the Watney Cup. There was also the award of £500 for wins in the first round and semi-finals and a further £1,000 for winning the tournament. For Manchester United, who entered the first two competitions, it was hardly a life-changing amount, but for the likes of Halifax Town it could make a significant difference. Meanwhile, the Football Association and Football League shared £50,000 from the brewery company.
It all seemed innocuous enough, but it had taken three years of negotiation and persuasion to bring the event to life. ‘A company entering the field of sponsorship in football cannot hope to achieve its object simply by using the game to advertise its product,’ Hardaker assured those who felt that the sport was selling its soul. This was a time when many major clubs still refused to allow advertising around their pitches. ‘There has to be a genuine interest in the welfare of the game,’ Hardaker continued.
His view of sponsorship was that ‘its financial influence could well revolutionise football during the next decade, but it must … never be sold cheaply to a sponsor just for the sake of financial gain.’ He dismissed the idea of ‘the kind of advertising prevalent on the Continent where one team’s shirts endorse a certain brand of alcohol, while another team carries plugs urging male supporters to use a particular brand of eau de Cologne’.
Football League Review spelled out that for a commercial deal to be considered it had to benefit the game, the spectators and the sponsors. ‘There have been other approaches from industry which have been engendered by a desire by industry to use football for its own ends,’ it explained. ‘The League have refused to entertain any of these suggestions.’296 And the authoritarian voice of Bobby Charlton warned, ‘I don’t think anyone would like to see his favourite team trotting out for a big game with a foaming pint of bitter painted on his shirt and a slogan underneath.’297
Coming off the back of the vibrant World Cup in Mexico, the timing for the sponsors could not have been better. Average attendance throughout the inaugural Watney Cup was more than 21,000, proving that fans were eager to see some sun-kissed football of their own – even if Peterborough United v Hull City at London Road contained only the merest whiff of Guadalajara’s Jalisco Stadium. Manchester United fans took it seriously enough to queue overnight outside Elm Park before their 3-2 first-round victory at Reading, while ITV gave their highlights shows the full World Cup panel treatment and introduced them with their Mexico 70 theme tune, ‘The World at Their Feet’, performed by the John Shakespeare Orchestra. United’s Pat Crerand, a man who had fought considerably more important battles during his career, could not quite share the gravity that Brian Moore and Jimmy Hill attempted to bring to the studio, resting his chin on his hand as he insisted that no one could read anything into games this early in the season.
The second round saw history made with the first penalty shoot-out in English football after Hull held United 1-1 at Boothferry Park. George Best achieved the distinction of being the first scorer and Denis Law the first to fail – although Hull keeper Ian McKechnie, who had saved from Law, shaved the crossbar with his own spot-kick to send United into the final against Derby County. The Daily Mail’s Brian Taylor was sufficiently impressed to report that ‘the penalty-taking session which settled this pulsating game was one of the most exciting and dramatic features I have ever seen on a soccer field’.
On the same day that Alan Ball was running around in white boots in the FA Charity Shield, 32,049 turned up at the Baseball Ground for the first Watney Cup Final. It may only have been a pre-season competition, but it offered the clearest possible picture of two clubs heading in different directions. Derby took advantage of the statuesque United defence to sweep to a 4-1 victory. Both teams played their strongest side for the third time in a week – no thought of preserving legs for the beginning of the League season or giving fringe players an opportunity – but the most fight displayed by United was in a feisty spell in the first half, ending with Crerand hurling the ball into the face of Alan Hinton, who dropped like a murder victim on an amateur dramatics night. ‘In one week the Watney Cup has made an astonishing impact,’ said Moore, ‘no doubt about that.’
Having waited so long for this sponsored competition, more were on their way. Once the pre-season Watney shindig was out of the way, it was time for the Texaco Cup to make an entrance. A European-style tournament featuring 16 English, Scottish, Irish League and League of Ireland teams who had not qualified for mainstream continental competition, the tournament regularly produced crowds in excess of 20,000. When Wolverhampton Wanderers beat Hearts to win the inaugural trophy, the two matches attracted 51,000 fans.
The sponsors, keen to create brand recognition after taking over the Regent chain of filling stations, put up £100,000. The Football League banked £22,500; the Scottish League £17,500; the Irish League £5,000; and the League of Ireland £3,000. Other payments included £1,000 per competing team, plus £1,500 for first-round winners; £2,000 for second-round winners; and £2,500 for the winning semi-finalists. Renewing the event for a second year, assistant Football League secretary Eric Howarth assured everyone, ‘Texaco have not interfered at all. Some people feared a sponsor would insist on gimmicks. They have left us alone to run the competition.’298
The Watney Cup continued for three further summers. The 1971 event offered proof of Manchester United’s problems – beaten at Third Division Halifax Town – and Colchester United’s ability on the big occasion. A few months after upsetting Leeds United in the FA Cup, the Fourth Division side beat Luton Town and Carlisle United, both two tiers above them, to reach the final. Luton boss Alec Stock had not been thrilled about having to start pre-season training early, but admitted, ‘There’s a few bob involved, which is what soccer’s all about.’
Against West Bromwich Albion in front of a crowd of 19,000 at The Hawthorns, a remarkable match saw Colchester fall behind 3-2 at half-time, before hitting back to lead 4-3 and then conceding a last-minute equaliser to Jeff Astle. As the scorer disappeared among the fans behind the goal and the ground swayed and surged with the kind of excitement that might seem unthinkable to those reading about a long-discarded manufactured tournament, BBC commentator Barry Davies exclaimed, ‘He and everybody else in this town will believe in fairies.’ It was Colchester who enjoyed the magic ending when Len Cantello’s ballooned effort proved fatal in the penalty shoot-out. It was exactly the kind of match that was envisioned with the introduction of an experimental law whereby players could only be offside if inside or level with the penalty area. ‘How about that then?’ beamed Hardaker.
Manchester United declined their invitation to enter a 1972 tournament won by Second Division Bristol Rovers, who beat Sheffield United on penalties following a 0-0 draw, and Watney Mann’s decision not to renew the sponsorship meant only one more year remained. A pair of Jimmy Greenhoff goals saw Stoke City beat Hull in front of their own fans to become the last winners.
The Texaco Cup lasted one year longer. Derby won the competition in its second year, beating Scotland’s Airdrieonians over two legs separated by exactly three months because of bad weather. On 26 January 1972, they drew 0-0 in Scotland, but not until the final days of April did they beat Airdrie 2-1 in front of 25,201 at the Baseball Ground – where Texaco, as it happened, had become the dominant stadium advertiser. ‘[It] may not have had the appeal and clout of the FA Cup, but we took the competition seriously,’ said Rams forward Roger Davies, ‘and the atmosphere that night was unbelievable.’299 As in the case of the Watney Cup, Clough was happy to commit his first team to the task in hand, even with the League title on the line.‡
The political climate meant that Irish clubs were excluded from the competition’s third season, which, intriguingly, brought East Anglian rivals Ipswich and Norwich City together in the final. Ipswich showed evidence of their development under Bobby Robson by winning both legs 2-1. They would be frequent qualifiers for European competition in subsequent seasons, building towards trophy success in the 1978 FA Cup and 1981 UEFA Cup.
Having won the final Anglo-Italian Cup of the era in 1973, Newcastle went on to win the last two Texaco Cup tournaments, beating Burnley 2-1 at St James’ Park in the one-off final of 1973-74 and Southampton 3-1 over two legs the following season. The first of those campaigns featured a bizarre quarter-final tie against Birmingham City. With the second leg kicking off at 2pm because of the ban on using floodlights during the miners’ dispute, the match ran into trouble when the scores finished level on aggregate. Only ten minutes of extra-time could be played before the November daylight disappeared and the game was abandoned. When the match was replayed, in front of the BBC cameras, only 53 seconds had elapsed when Newcastle’s Jimmy Smith, a skilful midfielder with a ruthless streak as dark as his hair, went into a challenge with Tony Want and left the Birmingham defender with a broken leg. Smith was sent off.
It appeared to be a case of familiarity breeding contempt, this being the fifth of six meetings between the teams in little more than six weeks – two League Cup matches, three in the Texaco Cup and then a League game three days later at St Andrew’s. In the final contest, Newcastle had four men booked and Birmingham one, while two visiting players, Frank Clark and Irving Nattrass, were carried off. Geoffrey Green in The Times called it a display of ‘the truly dark side of football’, while Newcastle chairman and future Football League president Lord Westwood said, ‘The players, by this type of behaviour, are putting the livelihood of their colleagues in jeopardy.’
It was precisely what the third of the sponsored competitions introduced in 1970-71 had been designed to eradicate. The Ford Motor Company Sporting League sought to promote fair and attacking play by offering prize money to be spent on facilities. Over the course of the season – or the first 42 games in the case of Divisions Three and Four – teams were awarded one point for a home goal and two for an away goal, with the loss of five points per booking and ten for a dismissal. Oldham Athletic were the first winners, picking up £50,000 after receiving only four bookings all season. They also won all eight monthly prizes of £2,500 each, a nice windfall for a team that was in the process of winning promotion from the Fourth Division, enabling them to build a new stand at Boundary Park. Crewe Alexandra earned £30,000 for their second place. Both teams suffered the deduction of only 15 points all season. Belying the notion that only bad guys could be successful in the top flight, the two top-rated First Division teams were League Champions Arsenal and runners-up Leeds United, who finished fifteenth and eighth respectively. Southampton’s reputation as one of the most physical teams in the League was confirmed by them finishing as the lowest-placed top-tier club, with a final total of minus one point.
The good intentions of the tournament prompted Sports Minister Denis Howell to describe it as ‘an interesting example of how sponsorship can be intelligently used to further developments in sport that need to be encouraged’.300 Yet there was opposition to the competition from those clubs who felt they were being embarrassed by the exposure of their crimes. And Ford, mired in industrial conflict, decided it had more important matters requiring its attention than fulfilling its original pledge to Hardaker of a £750,000 investment over five years. The new league never saw a second season.
Money, it’s a gas. Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash New car, caviar, four-star daydream. Think I’ ll buy me a football team
‘Money’, Pink Floyd (Roger Waters; Sony/ATV Music
Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, BMG Rights
Management, 1973)
After a flurry of currency and good intentions, English football reached the middle of the 1970s without major visible commercial support. This after journalistic giant Ian Wooldridge had said of the Texaco Cup, ‘Soccer struck oil in its own goalmouth.’
Reports published after the 1969-70 season had shown that only 12 League clubs made a profit, with Football League Review blaming the fact that almost £5 million was being spent by the game on players’ wages, out of gate receipts of only £7 million. ‘The margin is too small,’ it said. ‘Not enough to pay managers, staff, running expenses and ground improvements. What is upsetting the balance? The struggle for success.’301
In 1977, Hardaker described the game’s reluctance to fully embrace sponsorship as a solution as ‘one of my chief regrets’ and ‘something which angers and baffles me at the same time’.302 Chelsea chairman Brian Mears saw increased sponsorship as ‘only a question of time’, but warned, ‘Frankly, I can’t see many firms wanting to put a lot of cash into clubs with small gates and no publicity value.’303 Meanwhile, Blackburn Rovers winger Gordon Taylor, becoming a more influential voice within the PFA, suggested, ‘There must be a way to get the money going to the clubs who need it the most,’ even though he spoke for the majority of his profession when he objected to the idea of corporate names adorning the players themselves.304
Hardaker had foreseen ‘sponsors coming in with all manner of offers and ideas’ but had reckoned without the economic pit into which the country slipped. So deep, in fact, that 1976 would see the UK go to the International Monetary Fund for the biggest loan it had ever granted, $3.9 billion, in return for cutting its own spending.
Historian Alwyn W. Turner pointed out, ‘The deal was the kind more normally associated with Third-World countries, allowing domestic policy to be determined by international bankers.’305 Or, as stated by Professor Maurice Peston, chief economic adviser to Labour minister Roy Hattersley, ‘If the IMF had said the entire Cabinet had to jump off Westminster Bridge, you would have had to jump off Westminster Bridge.’306
Such was the nation’s growing number of creditors that US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had observed to President Gerald Ford, ‘Britain is a tragedy. It has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing ... that Britain has become such a scrounger is a disgrace.’307 Offering a little less in the way of political credibility, Opportunity Knocks presenter Hughie Green closed his final show of the year by asking viewers, ‘In your farewell to 1976, did you see Britain as old and worn, on the brink of ruin, bankrupt in all but heritage and hope, and even those were in pawn?’ He ranted for several minutes, for which he was reprimanded by his bosses at Thames Television, although that did not stop him putting out his outburst as a single.
Even Shoot! had begun the decade with an uncharacteristically serious article in which it pointed out the low number of clubs turning a profit. Those such as Manchester United, reckoned to have made a net £130,000 in a year in which they won nothing, were few and far between. Sponsorship, the magazine suggested, was one of the keys to a healthier financial future for the sport. Other proposed measures included staggered kick-offs so that lower-division clubs were not competing with high-flying neighbours.
Hardaker’s dismay was not just because of the delayed realisation of his logo-branded vision of the future. It represented the overall concern about the finances of the clubs in the grip of such a challenging environment. ‘[They] have been in a mess for years,’ he said. Dependency on what they could drive through the gate meant that Hardaker reckoned League clubs were collectively £15 million in debt (the equivalent of almost £100 million in 2020). ‘To me this represents nothing less than insanity,’ he said, describing many directors as ‘wrongly motivated, greedy, impatient, unqualified, short-righted and rather confused’.308
Clubs’ major outlay was the cost of getting a competitive team on the field. The most visible manifestation of that was the transfer fee, an element of the game that League president Shipman had argued was becoming ‘too ridiculous for words’ when Tottenham paid Southampton £125,000 for centre-forward Martin Chivers early in 1968. ‘I was talking recently to a club director who visualises fees reaching £250,000 within the next six years,’ Shipman added. That unnamed director underestimated the market’s acceleration.
Tottenham opened the 1970s by making Martin Peters the first £200,000 player in British football in a deal that sent Jimmy Greaves to West Ham as a chunk of the fee. The 1971-72 season saw another 1966 hero breaking that record when Arsenal pulled off the £220,000 signing of Alan Ball from Everton, a move that no one had seen coming and which Goodison Park fans would still be mourning half a century later. Striker Joe Royle struggled to understand why the man he described as ‘the best player ever to wear a blue shirt’ was sold by Harry Catterick only a season and a half after Everton’s title triumph. ‘We always thought Harry would build a new team around Bally,’ he explained. ‘There were all kinds of rumours that Alan had wanted to move, that there were financial problems and this, that and the other. But we were all surprised when he went.’309
The same season saw significant transactions in the same bracket: Ralph Coates, sold by Burnley to Tottenham in the summer for £190,000; Malcolm Macdonald, who scored a hat-trick for Newcastle on his home debut against Liverpool after a £180,000 pre-season move from Luton Town; the previously discussed £200,000 arrivals in Manchester of City’s Rodney Marsh and United’s Ian Storey-Moore. In that same month, United manager Frank O’Farrell also paid £150,000 for Martin Buchan from Aberdeen.
Ironically, it was O’Farrell who a few weeks later voiced fears over the money being spent on players. He even suggested restricting all transfers to the summer months. ‘It’s sheer urgency which creates huge fees – and urgency is the mood of the playing season,’ he argued. ‘Clubs panic if things go wrong and consequently are obliged to pay out more than they would like – and probably can afford.’ O’Farrell might have foreseen the eventual introduction of formal transfer windows, but he failed to predict that the greater pressure applied by such windows would force prices up even more. An alternative regulation suggested by Stoke City chairman Albert Henshall in 1973 was a £250,000 spending limit per club. Looking at the lower end of the First Division, he argued, ‘I don’t think the wealth of clubs should enable them to keep out of trouble at the expense of two clubs who eventually go down. It is grossly unfair that the cheque book rules the game.’310
In the meantime, by the time our anonymous director’s six-year timeline had concluded, his £250,000 vision had been surpassed by centre-forward Bob Latchford’s £350,000 transfer from Birmingham City to Everton. Yet the economic challenges the country faced were evident in the fact that it would be three years before an English club paid more than that, when Liverpool spent £440,000 on Kenny Dalglish in 1977.
At that time, on top of the income they generated themselves, Football League clubs were sharing the £750,000 that BBC and ITV jointly paid for television rights. The League also redistributed the 4 per cent levy on all gate money (20 per cent for League Cup ties, worth around £300,000 per season); one third of FA Cup gate money from the third round onwards; and a quarter of the untaxed profits from international matches, worth approximately £750,000 a year. Important additional income had been earned by the League’s successful legal fight to copyright its fixtures, allowing it to receive 0.5 per cent of the stakes bet on the football pools. What began as a £250,000 per year windfall rose in value to almost £2 million by the later years of the 1970s, a quarter of the money going to the Scottish League. The Pools Promoters’ Association kicked in another £1 million each year through its ‘Spot the Ball’ competition, money earmarked specifically for ground improvements.
Even the bigger clubs sought imaginative fiscal solutions. Volunteers selling raffle tickets on behalf of the Manchester United Development Association had, it was reported in 1972, allowed the club to bank £500,000 for stadium upgrades in the previous ten years. Everton’s equivalent group was selling 40,000 bingo tickets per week, reaching as far as Jersey, and producing profits of £100,000 per year. Meanwhile, the club’s annual income from programmes – around £14,000 as the decade began – was greater than some gate revenue in the Fourth Division, where players’ wages could often total twice the money generated through the turnstiles.
Colchester had been among the first to follow Hardaker’s preaching on commercialism and introduce match sponsors. The princely sum of £250 per game could, the club hoped, add up to a valuable £5,750 per season. But others had to count pennies rather than bring in the pounds. Scunthorpe United manager Ron Ashman explained that undertaking trips to places such as Swansea, Bristol and Bournemouth by coach rather than the relative luxury of a train was a valuable economy. ‘It’s four o’clock in the morning by the time we arrive back in Scunthorpe,’ he said, ‘We save about £100. For a club like Scunthorpe that’s a lot of money.’311
Outside the Football League, Kettering Town manager Ron Atkinson was proud of a 1973 arrangement with Golden Wonder crisps to provide team tracksuits and help publicise the club’s long road trips to destinations such as Yeovil and Weymouth in the hope of attracting additional funding. The same club would be the first in major English football to put a brand name on its shirts when chief executive Derek Dougan fell foul of FA regulations by plastering Kettering Tyres on their maroon and white kit in January 1976, a deal reportedly worth £2,500. Despite being told not to do it again, Kettering’s players found the offending shirts laid out for them at a Southern League Cup tie at Weymouth. ‘Doog had negotiated a deal and I don’t know how much the chairman knew about it,’ said goalkeeper Gordon Livsey. ‘We thought we’d been told we couldn’t wear it, but Doog said, “Nobody tells us what we wear. I am the one who tells you.”’312 Dougan’s attempt to compromise by changing the logo to ‘Kettering T’ fared no better and Vernon Stokes, head of the FA’s disciplinary committee, warned him, ‘Do you know we could close down your ground?’ Kettering were let off with a warning, but in June 1977 the FA would announce its decision to allow clubs to carry a small logo on their shirts; no more than 2.5 inches high and wide and not to be ‘detrimental to the image of the game’. Ironically, Kettering were unable to find a sponsor.
By the end of the decade, many leading clubs were maximising the value of their kit by wearing shirts featuring garish trim made up of multiple repeats of the manufacturers’ logo. Umbro’s distinctive diamond might only appear on the right breast of Liverpool and Arsenal’s players, but on the kits of Manchester City, Everton, Chelsea and others it created a pattern that ran down the sleeves and the outside of the shorts. Admiral, who made their mark with distinctive redesigns of England, Manchester United, Leicester City, Southampton and Coventry City kits, among others, introduced a similar sleeve-long device for clubs including Leeds United, Tottenham Hotspur and Crystal Palace.
Meanwhile, television, for all the financial importance it already had within the game, was still a relatively untapped revenue stream. In fact, the history of televised League football had been characterised by constant soul searching about the real extent of its benefits. By the mid-1970s, as Match of the Day celebrated its tenth anniversary of bringing highlights to the nation, there were still many who felt the money was not worth the aggravation. Even Jimmy Armfield, who became a major media figure after his playing and management career, told the Blackpool Gazette in 1972, ‘Television is killing the game, and solely because of this medium I can see wholesale bankruptcy in the game unless something is done.’
The earliest football to appear on television screens had been a game between Arsenal and Arsenal Reserves that aired as an experiment on BBC in 1937, paving the way for the first televised FA Cup Final a year later. A sign of BBC’s uncertainty about such an opportunity was the fact that only one outside broadcast unit was assigned to the match, while two had been booked for the Derby at Epsom a few weeks later.
One year after the launch of the ITV network in 1955, attempts to get the Football League to permit the televising of its games reached a point of serious negotiation when Associated Television (ATV) offered £50,000 – plus compensation for any lost gate revenue – to screen the second half of one game live each Saturday at 6.15pm. The League Management committee recommended acceptance of the deal, but the clubs voted against it. ‘They began to worry, as always, about shadows around the corner,’ Hardaker recalled.313 Eventually, one game, Blackpool versus Bolton Wanderers, was shown live as a one-off experiment in 1960. By the early 1960s, more than 90 per cent of UK households contained a TV set and commercial television companies were the first to bring weekly highlights to the screen in 1962, with Tyne-Tees producing Shoot! on Saturday evenings and Anglia putting out Match of the Week on Sunday evenings.
But it was when Match of the Day aired for the first time in 1964, with Liverpool playing Arsenal at Anfield, that the TV landscape was changed. All it had cost the BBC was £20,000 and an agreement not to reveal its choice of game until 4pm on Saturday, a rule that stayed in place throughout the 1970s. Yet it was not until the post-World Cup boom of 1966 that the show was moved to BBC1, having begun its life on selected regional broadcasts on BBC2. The ITV network was given the green light for Sunday afternoon highlights in 1965, although only after the redistribution of the franchises in 1968 did the familiar regional line-up become established, including London Weekend Television’s The Big Match.§ The show endured a slow and painful labour, with industrial action among technicians meaning LWT was forced to air re-runs of that year’s European Cup Final and the execrable 1968 League Cup Final on the first two weeks of the League season. It was not until the third weekend that Brian Moore and Jimmy Hill, now the head of sport at LWT, had the chance to introduce a show billed by the TV Times as ‘football’s busiest and best informed programme, bringing you action and controversy that sets you up for those Monday morning arguments’.
The BBC had made an unsuccessful attempt in 1967 to get live games aired on Thursday evenings. Instead, the corporation had to be content with a system of sharing highlights with ITV that began with a coin toss each season to determine first choice of games in August. When BBC had the honour, it would select its top game, after which the three big ITV regions (London, the North-West and the Midlands) would each nominate its preferred game. Then the BBC would identify a second match. When ITV was picking first, the three regions would all select before BBC had a choice. The system was further complicated by Match of the Day being prohibited to visit one ground more than three times per season for League games, while being compelled to air five Second Division matches and two from the Third and Fourth. All matches were picked a month in advance. ‘The comforting thought about football audiences on television,’ said BBC football editor Sam Leitch, ‘is that they are not glamour snobs. Second and Third Division games manage to hold on to 90 per cent of that regular audience.’314 Such was the relative scarcity of football on the television in an era when the FA Cup Final and a smattering of European finals and internationals were the only games shown live. Outside of World Cup summers, the month of May was the only time fans could bank on seeing regular live football.
For a typical game, Match of the Day employed five cameras, including one on the touchline for ‘personality’ close-ups and one high up on a crane for the panoramic stadium shots. It seems like nothing compared to the 20-plus used by Sky Sports in the modern age, especially as they could not always be relied on. ‘You lose cameras; cameras break down,’ said producer Alec Weeks in a behind-the-scenes film, ‘but the viewers wouldn’t miss anything.’315
In the mid-1970s, Match of the Day was attracting around 14 million viewers per week, while ITV’s various regional offerings on Sunday afternoons accumulated 10 million. ‘While the new scourge of hooliganism in the 1970s put many people off attending matches, the parallel universe of televised football achieved a new realism,’ Joe Moran wrote in his history of British television. ‘Electronic cameras meant matches could be snappily edited, and on a colour set you could see everything beautifully, from churned up goalmouths to the grass changing colour from late summer to spring.’316
Such appeal was apparently considered a threat by the Football League. In Football League Review it spoke early in the decade of ‘danger signals’ and suggested that ‘while filmed matches on television play a major image-building role for the game, football must beware that is does not become just another television progamme’. That was fair enough, but there was blind paranoia in its conclusion: ‘Weekend television audiences of nearly 25 million on both channels compared with live attendances of three-quarters of a million a week suggest that a new type of football supporter is being bred, the armchair fan.’ Nonsense, of course. The ‘armchair fan’ population might well have been booming, but every ground could have been full every Saturday and live crowds would still only have totalled a fraction of the on-screen audience.
It was symptomatic of the fears that had been around since the first strains of the original Match of the Day theme, ‘Drum Majorette’ – replaced by Barry Stoller’s familiar refrain in 1970 – reached the airwaves. Everton manager Harry Catterick had taken three years to allow the cameras into Goodison Park for fear of giving away tactical secrets, although the club’s attempt to get their neighbours to join them in a Merseyside boycott was scuppered by Liverpool’s greater belief in the promotional benefits of regular exposure. Some feared that discovering the reality of periods of tedium in a live game would deter those accustomed to seeing only edited highlights. Leicester City secretary John Smith complained that games were ‘edited to show the best parts’, which meant, he said, ‘A lot of people are happy to sit back at home and watch the box.’317
Such a view received unlikely support from Jimmy Hill, who became perhaps the best-known face in TV coverage in the 1970s. In a questionable analogy with politics, he argued, ‘Football has suffered at the lenses of its discerning medium in the same way. Like our raped and de-bagged politicians (for how many of them have been caught by the cameras with their trousers down, metaphorically speaking of course?), soccer has not been strong enough to withstand the pressures of this intense observation.’ His point was that edited highlights had ‘introduced all soccer fans to the highest standards of the game available’, which he believed meant that fans of lower-division teams were sat at home trying to take in this revelation.
Author Dave Russell agreed in his social history of the sport that TV coverage ‘shaped perceptions, loyalties and attitudes in a number of crucial ways’, including giving the top teams ‘an increasingly glamorous image and a growing band of adherents’.318 Yet he might not have been so quick to agree with Hill’s claim that, for a fan of a smaller club, ‘the game at his local club will be further impoverished by the lack of enlightening comment made available on the screen’. Such was Hill’s ego that you assume that comment was made without irony.319
Leading journalist Brian Glanville wrote that ‘TV is the Moloch of the age, into whose vast, undifferentiated maw anything and everything can disappear’. He said that editing was turning football into something ‘vulgar’ and voiced support for an idea floated by Danny Blanchflower that games should follow an editorial lead. Therefore, ‘a poor game should be edited to look like a poor game’.320 Yet that somewhat missed the point of televised football as an entertainment medium. As John Fiske and John Hartley noted in their 1978 study, ‘Match of the Day is not football, in the way that Come Dancing is not dancing.’321
Despite frequently voiced concerns about television’s threat to attendance, crowd numbers were established on a downward curve long before Match of the Day came along. Only the excitement of the World Cup victory was able to offer a temporary reversal of that trend. Hill stated the overriding benefit of small-screen football when pointing out, ‘At peak time, it would be £144,000 for 45 minutes’ advertising. Don’t anybody tell me that exposure on television is bad for future live gates.’322
The debate was reinvigorated when Tottenham announced a disappointing attendance of 24,000 for a 1972 UEFA Cup tie against Red Star Belgrade, televised later that night on BBC. ‘How can we be blamed for falling gates when the British internationals – the only games we are allowed to name before we show them – have not been affected?’ said Leitch.¶ ‘The game itself must take some measure of action, for it is lacking in entertainment.’ Support came from John Bromley at ITV, who argued, ‘People are taking the easy way out by blaming TV. You can never over-publicise this game.’323
West Ham United chairman Reg Pratt likened televised football to ‘building a cinema with glass walls – people stop paying to go in’,324 and as late as 1978 it was still being called ‘a controversial subject’ by England goalkeeper Ray Clemence. He at least cited the benefit to those who could not attend matches because of ‘working unsocial hours, illness or living too far from the ground’.325 The Soccer Monthly Annual saw in the 1980s with a feature entitled ‘Television – a tool or a tyrant?’ BBC commentator John Motson had the good sense to point out that without coverage of games, television stations would air far less of the news and soap opera elements that helped create the theatre and narrative surrounding the game. ‘Every day football makes news and every time a preview or an interview goes on the screen somebody somewhere is being persuaded to go to a match,’ he argued.326
As the 1970s began, Catterick had requested £5,000 per game compensation for accommodating the TV companies, instead of the standard £1,000 at that time. Such claims were typical of those who regularly quoted the low cost of producing an hour of sport compared to the sums involved in a major drama series, especially costumed epics such as BBC’s The Onedin Line and ITV’s Upstairs, Downstairs, both of which launched in 1971 and became staples of the weekend schedules for several years. A grumpy Hardaker complained of some clubs that they had a ‘psychological fear’ of television and ‘if they had their way they just wouldn’t entertain it at all’.327 Burnley chairman Bob Lord was close to falling into that category, refusing coverage of his team’s FA Cup quarter-final against Wrexham in 1974 when the BBC refused to pay £10,000 per team.
The nature of the coverage itself had its detractors, including those who appeared to resent the opportunity for others to critique their performance. In 1973, Gordon Banks was among those who seemed to think that the job of anyone covering the game was to be a cheerleader. ‘I have been on TV panels to talk about international games and it seemed to me that it was a case of knock, knock, knock. We now have so many critics of football that they are harming the game,’ he argued. ‘All this knocking doesn’t do anything to lift players’ confidence.’
The next demand by Catterick, clearly not an early adopter when it came to TV, was a ban on action replays ‘because they are doing the game a lot of harm’. He had support from on high, with the edition of Football League Review that accompanied the 1970 League Cup Final going on one of its tirades. ‘The playback continues to be exploited by TV football personnel,’ began its opinion piece. Addressing the BBC’s claim that 90 per cent of replays of controversial incidents proved referees right, it continued, ‘We suggest it is no justification at all. It is surely wrong that the men who have to make split-second decisions out there on the pitch, in situations super-charged with tension, should be faced with the inquisition of a Magic Eye.’ ITV, the article went on, re-ran incidents at normal speed, but said, ‘It is no better.’ Even the one in ten mistake ratio ‘serves to disenchant a public which forgets the other nine’.328
For a while, there was a clause in the TV contracts prohibiting the vilification of match officials, while Hardaker once had to veto a Match of the Day opening sequence showing a montage of overly physical challenges. ‘I think we are getting to the stage where the commentators are the star of the show while the footballers are just the chorus,’ Hardaker said in 1972. ‘I think harm can be done by their playbacks and criticism.’ The response of Brian Moore was that, ‘Everyone in football is far too sensitive. It is an unhealthy state of affairs if anyone is above criticism.’329
Hardaker, who led television negotiations for the Football League, continued to discount the possibility of live televised games, stating in 1977 that ‘opinion now is very firm that regular live football would undermine the game’s health’.330 That view was softening enough, however, that live League action would only be six more years away.
In the meantime, light entertainment shows would have to meet viewers’ demands for additional football content. In the second half of the 1960s, there had been Quiz Ball, a game where teams representing football clubs scored goals by answering general knowledge questions. The choice of taking four easy questions to score or one tough one brought the phrase ‘route one’ into the lexicon of the sport. Teams consisted of four members; three players (or sometimes the manager) and a celebrity fan. As an Arsenal fan, I was aware that the show had provided the big Scottish centre-half Ian Ure with his finest moment as a representative of the club, scoring bucketloads of goals as Bertie Mee, Terry Neill and radio disc jockey Jimmy Young carried off the first trophy.
By the late 1970s, though, TV producers decided that instead of asking footballers to answer questions or ride bicycles in the name of entertainment, they should ask them to do what they were trained to do: play football. All in The Game, a skills contest between League clubs, was dreamt up in the bath by Bristol City commercial director Graham Griffiths as a way of generating extra revenue for his club. Club manager Alan Dicks took the idea to some ITV contacts and the game ended up being aired across the network.
The competition, staged at Ashton Gate and aired in the summers of 1976 and 1977, was contested by clubs in a knockout format, featuring games designed to test players’ ability to shoot, dribble, chip, head and bend the ball. Big names such as Frank Worthington, Gerry Francis, Brian Kidd, Eddie Gray and Stan Bowles took part and Wolves goalkeeper Gary Pierce even suffered a broken wrist stopping a shot by Ipswich’s Kevin Beattie. When Derby veteran Alan Hinton led a young team to the £2,000 prize with victory over Norwich in the first final it made the top ten in that week’s TV ratings. It was a sad indictment of the state of English football, though, when Don Howe observed, ‘There were some excellent tests of skill and some of the players were furious they couldn’t do them better.’
The reach of television had come to the rescue of QPR in February 1972 when a hastily arranged Friday-night friendly against West Brom had sold only 12 tickets three days before the game. Claiming ‘a bit of soccer history’, Rangers paid for an advert to be aired at 6.55pm on the eve of the match. Thus, viewers of Crossroads had their latest dose of drama in the life of Meg Richardson interrupted by an invitation to see ‘the one and only Rodney Marsh in action’ – for what proved to be one of the final occasions in a QPR shirt. A crowd of 7,087 turned up, justifying the £192.50 cost of the advert that the two clubs shared.
One of the biggest rows around on-screen football broke shortly afterwards, caused by a desire to show England’s European Championship quarter-final first leg against West Germany live from Wembley on a Saturday evening in late April. This time, it was less a case of football versus television than a fight between administrative bodies. ‘There now seems to be a state of war between the League and the Football Association,’ Hardaker announced to the press after they could not agree the size of the fee to be charged to show the game. Hardaker felt the League and FA’s joint television committee should be asking for £100,000 and was shocked when the FA unilaterally cut a deal with the BBC for £60,000. FA secretary Denis Follows said they had been ‘motivated by the desire to ensure that the enormous public interest in the match should be satisfied’, although the League did not see why that precluded holding out for more money and including Hardaker in the negotiations. The League even threatened a boycott of the FA Cup or a demand that the FA should pay them £100,000 for their clubs’ participation. Toys were eventually returned to the pram and no such threats were ever followed through.
Then there was a near-blackout of League football in the autumn of 1974, after BBC and ITV’s combined offer of £750,000 was rejected by the clubs in a 28-16 vote. The players disagreed with that position and PFA chairman Derek Dougan said they might refuse to play if the cameras were not present – the kind of stance Kim Kardashian would have appreciated decades later. While the TV companies threatened to show Bundesliga games instead, Goal’s comment column warned, ‘Whatever the pros and cons of soccer on television, and there does seem to be a case for limiting the number of matches screened, we must not lose coverage completely. That would be a tragedy.’331 When the clubs consulted industry expert Harold Davidson and were advised that the deal on the table was the best possible, they duly voted 36-13 to accept.
There was still some griping ahead. New FA secretary Ted Croker was angered by the BBC’s decision to re-air the Muhammad Ali– George Foreman ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ on a Saturday afternoon. ‘The BBC pay lip service to having the best interests of football at heart,’ he complained. ‘But when they make decisions like this, one can only wonder about their sincerity.’ That, however, was a minor skirmish compared to the heavyweight battle for the future of televised football that lay ahead later in the decade.