‘After bringing the [FA] Cup home for the third time in 1955, [Jackie] Milburn recalled, the reward [for the Newcastle team] was handbags for the players’ wives: the board bought a job lot for £17 and, stuffed with tissue paper, they were doled out at the official celebration event. “Everybody was howking away inside the bags,” Milburn later remembered. “There wasn’t a bloody thing in any of them.” ’
Gordon Burn, ‘No More Local Heroes’, Observer, 8 January 2006
‘ “We were driving back from, I think, Birmingham, when Kieron [Dyer] suddenly shouts out, ‘Stop the bus! I’ve left my diamond earring in the dressing room’ . . . Can you believe it! Can you imagine in my day a player shouting to Bill Shankly, ‘Bill, stop the bus. I’ve left me earring in the dressing room’?” He is wiping the tears of mirth from his eyes. “It’s true. Absolutely true.”
‘Did they go back for it?
‘ “Did we, ffff,” he said.’
Bobby Robson, interviewed when Newcastle manager, Telegraph, 15 February 2003
It has become a common complaint among a certain generation of fans that English football itself has lost its integrity, even its innocence – sold its soul, if you like. Kevin Keegan, a consummate self-packager, has had no qualms about characterising himself as ‘the bridge between that innocent era of Bobby Charlton, Bobby Moore . . . and whatever [football] is now’. Guardian football writer Barney Ronay put himself in Keegan’s party by writing of a ‘peculiar sense of innocence that was still in place throughout the 1970s; the impression, however brief, of something transformed but still unspoilt’. Ronay’s feelings are in line with previous sentiments expressed by Stephen Wagg who wrote, a little primly, in his The Football World of a game ‘less constrained than in the early part of this century by notions of fairness and probity’.
For many of us, the golden age of human affairs is a blanket that settled over the world while we happened to be in our childhoods or teens or early twenties. It is bound up with a person’s sense of cherished memories, a buttress against the customary hardening of the self in adulthood. This is not to say that football hasn’t got worse in some important respects.
The Premier League is a conspicuous product of an age, its invention overlapping with the popular Toryism of the 1980s, its fame and wealth rising steadily through the three Blair-led Labour governments of 1997-2007. The changes it wrought upon the game – in terms of money, management, presentation – are all glaring and have been itemised many times over. Suffice it to note that in 2015 Rupert Murdoch’s Sky paid £4.18 billion for the right to broadcast fewer than half the Premiership’s fixtures over a three-year period.
Has the standard of football on offer to the spectator improved or declined in that time? In a sense, the question is negligible. This factor of the quality of what’s being served has rarely stopped fans coming to games in the past: football is an addictive mania that way. But many formerly passionate supporters do now declare themselves in retreat from the game, if they have not already deserted it. There are a number of recurrent laments.
One is for the loss of a bond or identification between the player and the average Joe, based on a gulf made by wages and lifestyle, and an attendant sense of players as mercenary celebrities only ever passing temporarily through the club colours they wear. But as we have seen in these pages, such a process had begun earlier than we sometimes suppose – before Keegan and Dalglish, before even George Best and Bobby Moore. Possibly, footballing heroes are not quite what they used to be; but the days of Jackie Milburn, the pitman-player, are not coming back. The players themselves simply wouldn’t settle for such a constrained status.
The working-class basis of football endures above all in that the working class is where football talent comes from. Middle-class families still just don’t seem to want to put their sons onto pitches in such numbers. And yet, the game’s rewards are greater than ever. For all the disapproval of the extreme wealth of modern players, football remains a remarkable vehicle for working-class boys to make it big – their salaries dizzying multiples of those commanded by the increasingly middle-class spectators.
At the end of the day, to be fair – as the pundits say – you’re talking about gifted individuals pursuing success, and no one coasts their way there. A young person who seeks to be a professional footballer learns competition the hard way, entering a hothouse, blooded quickly, judged from the first kick. Of those who make it to the top, it’s hard to expect these rich young men to be apologetic about the lives they have won for themselves. Elite sportsmen are not natural socialists, and it should be counted remarkable if they manage to be well-adjusted human beings. Kevin Keegan has certainly managed as much, but Keegan is the exemplar of a player who always knew what he was worth, and not only where he was from but where he wished to get to.
The Premiership has its unalloyed admirers, of course. How many really wish for football to be back as it was in the 1970s? Mucky pitches, tackles from behind, ramshackle grounds, bristling hooligans? It should not be controversial to say that it’s a fine thing for the game to have shiny all-seater stadiums where you can safely take young kids, because these days at a football match nobody, God forbid, dies. Of course, the steep rises in ticket prices have changed the class profile of football crowds, and many will protest that the game has been taken away from its core supporters. A lot of longtime fans have swallowed the new expense where they can, for the love of football. But evidently for many more the price of match day feels like the dodgy privatisation of a former utility: being forced to pay high for something you really need – and such a price to take one’s flip-down plastic seat amid the weirdly muted and domesticated atmosphere of the modern flat-pack ground.
There have been notable revolts, such as at Liverpool after Fenway Sports Group proposed a 30 per cent hike on the top ticket to £77, and an increased season ticket price of £1,029. Towards the end of a home game with Sunderland on 6 February 2016 an organised protest saw fans begin to chant, ‘Enough is enough, you greedy bastards, enough is enough’, before, on 77 minutes, as many as 10,000 rose and exited the ground. The demonstration drove FSG to a U-turn: a public apology and a pledge to freeze prices for two seasons, together with more reduced tickets for young fans.
There may be more such dissent to come. But in the meantime the Premier League can say that the market is working, the product is successful, the stadia full 90 per cent of the time. People want in, and on that basis it’s not surprising clubs try to charge more. The problem arises if one still wishes to think of football clubs as embedded in their communities and conforming to the old story of the game of ordinary working people. Going to the match, though, is clearly no longer a defining form of working-class leisure. The working class is not what it used to be.
Historian Robert Colls has written of how ‘fundamental shifts in the pattern of work and residence’ led to a state from the 1980s where ‘government agencies talked a lot about “community” and employed professionals to foster it, but only as a sign that it was slipping’. ‘In the post-war years,’ Economist writer Jeremy Cliffe observed in 2015, ‘people felt united, common and responsible for each other’s well-being. Now that is much less the case. One can mourn the passing of that common feeling – as I do – but still acknowledge it as a fact.’
Britain has changed greatly since 1945 – even since the 1980s – and we have to conclude that a great many Britons wished it so. Those changes include the breadth and level of formal education, what people do for a living, average incomes, the ways we consume, the lifestyles we aspire to and respect. In the post-industrial cities – Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle – vestiges of old industries barely poke through the façades. There is little to be gained from expending great sorrows on this deep, wide, willed transformation. The writer Simon Kuper was commendably tough-minded in the Financial Times when characterising ‘the many laments for the lost cloth-capped proletarian crowds’ of English football as a case of those lamenters ‘simply mourning their lost roots’.
Still, the language of expropriation and exploitation dies hard and is readily revived, as in 2000 when sociologist Eric Dunning felt bold enough to write of ‘the great social invention of soccer’ as a cause to be upheld against ‘hooligan fans, complacent politicians, and money-driven owners, managers and players’. Who’s left on the good side of that fight, then, except for those who style themselves as true fans? True fans will say football is really about the club, and the club is really about the fans. That’s also a view that Keegan and Dalglish have been known to espouse; and it remains true that a football club can be nothing without support.
But what the often eloquent and avowedly leftish fans of football who write blogs and fanzines want the game to be is not where Keegan and Dalglish have helped to take it – to the place where the talented worker is remunerated to the level his ability can command at market. If you want football to be cheap and cheerful, there will always be an amateur game to see in Bootle or Blyth. But that’s not why most of us watch football, nor is it the style in which any real ball-player wants to play the game. Fans may speak and write articulately and passionately about wanting to defend a culture of football; but the culture of football, really, is what footballers do on the pitch – and rather a high culture at that, when they play at the heights of their abilities. That, too, is the story of Keegan and Dalglish.