THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT that football clubs in England filled a huge emotional and social vacuum in the years immediately after World War II, perhaps especially for working class men still recuperating after the brutal conflict. The social geographer Nick Phelps has captured especially well the atmosphere, lived social reality, and the wider role of the game in the years of the post-war “golden age,” with many football clubs revealing a “complex nesting of local, regional and national identities.” The heady experience of post-war league champions was felt first in the North West, then relocated to London, and on to the south coast. After Liverpool had snatched the first post-war championship in 1947, followed by an Arsenal triumph in 1948, it was unassuming and largely unconsidered — but fiercely tough — Portsmouth FC who were to sweep to successive post-war titles, in 1949 and 1950.
Portsmouth FC, in these early post-war years, did its best to ape the football powerhouses “up north,” not only in terms of its intensely physical style of play, but also in its austere stadium, the character of its players and the intimacy and warmth of the relationship established between the club’s staff and its supporters after the war. Barrel-chested butcher’s son and half-back, “Jolly Jack” Froggart, for example, was feted by local fans, reputedly for stocking up on match-days on his father’s best beef. Club hard man Jimmy Scoular was prized for his chastening habit (for the opposition) of having his shorts “pulled right up, you know, showing his thighs.” On the pitch, Scoular was described by Manchester United’s Duncan Edwards, no mean judge, as “the finest tackler of the ball I ever saw.” But Scoular was also the master of the strategic body check or sly trip when it was needed to gain advantage for his men. Even the Liverpool Echo, not averse itself to a bit of northern-style grit, commented in November 1948 that referees who chose to side with the Portsmouth way were liable to believe that football was indeed “a he-man’s game.”
In this celebration of the virtues of hard-nosed working class localism, Portsmouth’s players, under beady-eyed manager Bob Jackson, were the subject of the sort of authoritarian paternalism that was well suited to the austerity of the immediate post-war period. As at many English clubs at the time, Portsmouth’s playing staff were required to live near the home ground, keep out of trouble, and front up in local shops and pubs in the wake of embarrassing defeats or weak match performances. Control could be more easily asserted on “troublesome” types, of course, if the player and his family also lived in a clubhouse. But mostly these players exuded, perhaps above all else, a deep commitment to the collective; they were the antithesis of today’s stars, or even northern footballing heroes of the time — Matthews, Finney, Lawton, Liddell — instead epitomising the conservatism and general lack of class-consciousness in the south of England when compared to some northern cities.
Indeed, like many professional players in England at the time, Portsmouth’s players in these early post-war years echoed key aspects of their domestic habitus, the occupational culture they served; or the local “structure of feeling,” to use a phrase invented by the radical literary theorist Raymond Williams. They reflected back to their followers, in this case, the values of patriotism and the competition that existed between the crafts and trades that dominated the local Admiralty Dockyards in Portsmouth. Most professional players in this sort of context and at this moment were essentially ordinary citizens; privileged workers likely to be spotted in a local pub or working men’s club, or else taking their kids to school, albeit they were ones with an unusual craft and social position against which local male supporters could readily compare themselves.
Watching professional football in England, at a time when the major manufacturing cities of the north and south of Britain were slowly recovering after the privations and extensive damage of years of conflict, was, as one local fan in Portsmouth put it, like seeing “the bright light in the city.” In many places in England the streets were still dingy and poorly lit, with towns and cities widely battle-scarred and riddled with demolition sites well into the late 1950s. Historian James Walvin has argued that going to poorly appointed football grounds in England at this record-breaking time for attendances was a cheap and comforting way of “shrugging off wartime restraint and drabness,” a chance to return to more familiar pleasurable pursuits. It was simply something that many working men almost instinctively did, as a necessary buffer to the deep, infrastructural gloom around them and in the absence of other viable leisure options.
But post-war English football also fed, at least for a while, on the enduring spirit of the Blitz and the new solidarities and confidence established among working people. It did so in its role as an important site for the continuing cultural projection through sport of an illusory imperial power, something that had been left relatively untouched by developments in coaching and the playing of football abroad. Indeed, victorious Portsmouth players, the English champions, later recalled international football tours in the early 1950s, including to Brazil — visits which seem to have had no influence at all on the traditional ideals of British football managers or on the limited style of play of the classic English professional player. “British football was top dog in those far off days,” said one. “Arrogance ruled supreme.” He was right, of course, and later England manager Alf Ramsey seemed to have the same view about how little there was to learn about the game from Brazil. But a rude awakening was coming.
The year 1953 has been neatly described by Ronald Kowalski and Dil Porter as the year in which the British people finally shook off the grey “overcoat of post-war austerity.” Rationing was easing — within eighteen months margarine, cheese, butter, meat and bacon would all be off the ration; a new young Queen had captured people’s hearts; Crick and Watson dominated international science talk; Everest was conquered by a British-led expedition; and, in cricket, the Ashes were regained. The year is mainly remembered in English football circles, however, for two contrasting reasons: firstly, for the popular celebrations that followed the gentlemanly veteran Stanley Matthews’ first and only FA Cup final win. The great northern master, a symbol of working class decency and respectability, finally received his long-awaited victor’s medal from the newly crowned young Queen Elizabeth II, in front of — for the first time — a national TV audience. And, secondly, 1953 is remembered for the humiliation suffered by the national team (including Matthews and Ramsey of course) later in the year at the hands of a rampant Hungary, led by the imperious Ferenc Puskás.
As Martin Jones and Gavin Mellor have pointed out, the Matthews final symbolised a moment when the traditional, local roots of the sport in England — as epitomised by Matthews himself, as well as by the place and role of football in reviving exhausted post-war English cities such as Portsmouth — were beginning to be reshaped by the forces of a new, optimistic modernity, one that was to have a much stronger national providence. The game, in short, “intersected with the cultural spirit of the period, a time of celebrating both modernity and tradition.”
The 1953 final, between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers, was still celebrated in those northern football towns, of course, as a ripe old Lancashire clash transported down south. It had all the trappings of local pride and regional bragging rights that such a match implies. But its obvious TV popularity, franked by the presence of the new monarch — an estimated audience of 10 million watched the final at home — conferred on the contest a much more powerful national relevance at a moment of major social transformation. This was despite, of course, the English football authorities’ continuing suspicions about television coverage, anxieties that would last pretty much undisturbed for the next forty years.
Matthews symbolised, in the eyes of the establishment, the kind of honest, modest and deferential figure that best characterised the decent and respectable working class men who had been so central to the history of the professional game and to the survival of the nation during the years of conflict. Media analyst Gary Whannel has argued that the lives of football stars during this period were often narrated in the press and elsewhere as “moral fables” in which good, embedded traditional values were routinely emphasised. Although Matthews had actually managed, even in the wake of organised protests about his proposed departure from the Potteries, to engineer a move from Stoke City to Blackpool, the persistence of the grimly defended retain-and-transfer system in England meant that smaller clubs could largely hold onto their prize assets in the 1950s.
Famously, Tom Finney, alongside Matthews unarguably the greatest English player of his generation, signed for Preston North End at fourteen years of age in 1936 and retired some twenty-four years later in 1960 after making 473 competitive appearances and scoring 210 goals for Preston. It was an astonishing record, but one that produced precisely no medals, nor titles won. Finney supplemented his meagre football wage with returns from his Preston plumbing business. The season after Finney retired, Preston were relegated from the top flight and have not been back since.
Although there are examples of a few more ambitious, less class-bound, English archetypes who went abroad to play from the 1950s onwards — Finney himself was wanted by Sicilian club Palermo in 1952 but his club refused to even discuss the matter — most domestic footballers of the time (like the FA and the Football League) still regarded “abroad” as an impenetrable and largely inhospitable foreign no-man’s land. Not much changes. Elite English players of the day, in any case, were well-schooled in the practised art of being thankful for their £14 basic wage in England, earned for “doing what they loved” and something that they would happily do for free. And they were further grateful, of course, for being spared the options: the slow torture of the factory or the pit — or even worse.
The catastrophic first England international football home loss, 3-6 against Hungary in November 1953, was initially treated by sections of the press and the English football authorities as an aberration, something surely to be straightened out when the countries met in a return fixture in Budapest six months later in May 1954. The traditional virtues of the English game of “relentless chasing” and “tearing into the tackle” were argued by journalists to be the best means of revealing the lack of backbone among these collectivist foreigners and thus were the likely solution to the Hungarian puzzle. Some letter-writers to the national newspapers at the time even volunteered that their own club side would have been enough to see off the fancy Magyars. Instead, in the 1954 return leg England capitulated to Puskás and his men in an even heavier 7-1 defeat. It was “Disaster on the Danube” according to the alliteration-favouring Daily Mirror.
Jimmy Hogan, a revered Scottish tactician (at least abroad) who had spent much of his career coaching on the continent, told the newly football-obsessed Daily Worker in the aftermath of this latest fiasco that “our players have forgotten that the game is one of intelligent movement. Professional football in England has degenerated into a lazy and indolent life, for all but the few really conscientious players.” This seemed harsh — no one could argue that English footballers were not working hard enough. But what exactly were they learning? Hogan’s words certainly seemed to ring true for the 1954 World Cup finals in Switzerland one month later. Seeded England were knocked out by Uruguay at the quarter-final stage, registering one win, one draw and a defeat, to the South Americans, in the process. There were few signs of progress in the tournaments which followed: in 1958, in Sweden, England failed at the group stage; and 1962, in Chile, there was another quarter-final exit, this time to a strolling Brazil. “The Brazilians were so cocky and composed behind their 3-1 lead,” England player Johnny Haynes said later, “that they were able to indulge in their victory dance in the last ten minutes, flaunting their superiority and their success.”
When English league champions Wolves had beaten the Hungarian “people’s army” club of Honved on a mud-heap at Molineux back in December 1954 — in a floodlit match covered live on radio and TV and billed as the club championship of the world — in some quarters the old order was thought to have been re-asserted. But not all were fooled. England international-in-waiting, Haynes, wrote later that the international defeats by the Hungarians had made a “tremendous” impact on football in England — but that it was short-lived. Midfield players began to play a little “shorter” for example, looking for return passes, he reported. English clubs also “tightened up” on training routines and everyone worked a little harder — for a time. Actually, Haynes reasoned that the English football elites had read the wrong lessons from the Hungarians. The mistake was thinking that it was their fitness, not skill, which was the key to the success of the men from Central Europe, so few English clubs radically changed their methods. The basic drag-back practiced so devastatingly by the Hungarians at Wembley in 1954, for example, was not widely seen in English football until the 1960s.
It was hardly surprising, perhaps, that the general technical quality of the English game improved relatively little in the years that followed. While the continentals were already talking about “science,” tactics and variety in player preparation, the English approach to training, even into the early 1960s, was still incredibly basic, drawing largely on the brutal fitness regimes learned by club trainers and managers in the armed forces during the war. It was aimed at producing stamina and strength for the long slog ahead more than it was developing match awareness or ball skills. Directors at English football clubs — in tune with their training staff and still central at most clubs to player recruitment at this time — routinely reported to their board meetings on the hundreds of players they had scouted by referring mainly to their size, physique and weight of kick.
Training at a club such as Liverpool FC was a case in point. Monday was the day off, Tuesday was spent at the rudimentary Melwood training ground, on exercises, perhaps with a brief practice match. Wednesday and Thursday were usually days spent at Anfield, endlessly lapping the pitch under the eagle eye of disciplinarian trainer Albert Shelley, while Friday was back at Melwood, in spikes, for speed work. If it rained, the Liverpool players slogged up the covered terraces, or else did some basic gym work. This was the pattern at most clubs. There were still very few practical or creative activities undertaken with a football in training in the English game, and little on match tactics. When Bill Shankly arrived in December 1959 he introduced small-sided games and more ball work though, as elsewhere, fitness remained at the core of the Liverpool training regime.
Despite calls in sections of the quality press for a new direction, one prioritising skills and technique over fitness and brawn, most professionals in the game in England were still much more comfortable with the ideas of, say, a Stan Cullis over the young Matt Busby, and the “committed” game of a Jack Charlton over that of younger brother Bobby or — God forbid — the soon-to-emerge outrageous skill and wilful individualism of a George Best. When, in 1959, Denis Violett the technically gifted Manchester United captain argued that their “direct” style of play would make League champions Wolves poor ambassadors for the English game in the European Cup, he was strongly rebuked by the Football League for his insolence. The message was clear enough: the real strength of English football was to be found as much in character as in skill or technique. Moreover, the enduring sense of entitlement in the English game rang loud and clear in the late 1950s, even among the most ardent modernisers: that England and its domestic club football could — and should — regain its rightful place, at the very pinnacle of the world game.
As the decade rolled towards its close, the style of player autobiographies in England finally began to signal a shift in mentality from the player-as-good-servant model of the Matthews and Finney era into a quite new tone and language that signposted changing attitudes among some younger British professional players and in the wider society. These “dissident voices,” as Joyce Wooldridge has called them, began to become much louder, less reverential. They were reflecting the early signs of what would be a generally brasher, more confident post-war working class masculinity, one buoyed by the sensation-seeking ambitions of the Sunday papers, the emergence of distinctive working class youth cultures, new patterns of mass consumption, and a new popular realist literature — by Sillitoe, Braine and Osborne among others — which sympathetically depicted the aggressive aspirations of their frustrated working class anti-heroes. The inanity of National Service, the ignorance of most football club directors, and, according to Welsh international Trevor Ford in his 1957 book, the cunningly titled I Lead the Attack, the shame-free “fiddling” that was now a routine feature inside the English game orchestrated by players no longer willing to stomach the pitiful maximum wage, all increasingly featured in these no-holds-barred accounts of players’ life stories.
Perhaps tellingly, in the same week in April 1957 that the English titleholders, Manchester United under Matt Busby, were playing in Spain in the new European Cup club competition against Spanish champions and cup holders, Real Madrid, the great Welsh player John Charles was also leaving Britain — to sign for Italian giants Juventus. He left for a fee reported to be in the region of £10,000. For those who had connected the trials of the English game in the 1950s to insular attitudes, a dearth of modern coaching, and a lack of proper financial rewards for professional players, this seemed like another watershed moment. Leslie Edwards in the Liverpool Daily Post, for example, railed against a potential English player drain, and the “pittance” that even top English players were still paid — £17 was now the maximum wage — compared to their continental equivalents. This meant, he argued, that in England “technicians of the highest class [were] set to work with labourers with the proviso that they should receive labourer’s pay.” In August 1957, the Liverpool players protested against low pay by refusing to pose for pre-season photographs unless they were paid, though they were soon brought to heel again as humble employees. But the strains were beginning to show in the battle, as the Football League liked to depict it, against the “greed” and “lack of respect” shown by a new generation of younger professional players who barely valued the “good of the game.”
Matt Busby’s early escapades in Europe with a young Manchester United side — explicitly, of course, against the wishes of the Football League — only added to the pressure for change in this and many other areas of the English game as the 1960s loomed. The British public’s reaction to the Munich air disaster in February 1958, especially, began a sequence of developments that served, among other things, effectively to begin the long and incomplete process of the “de-localising” of football support in England. As Bobby Charlton, a survivor of the tragedy, put it, “Before Munich it was just Manchester’s club, afterwards everyone owned a little bit of it.”
The spread of television coverage of matches from the late 1950s and United’s audacious attempts to take on the top clubs in Europe certainly brought the “Babes” thudding into the nation’s living rooms. But the young United players under Busby seemed to have little in common with the flamboyant characteristics of the newly emerging national youth cultures of the day. They were far from self-confident, sneering teddy boys, either in action or appearance. Instead they seemed to epitomise the much more traditional values of the Matthews and Finney era — hard work, clean living, teamwork and bravery. The glamorous and much more individualistic United sides that eventually replaced the Babes — the teams of the early 1960s, of Denis Law, George Best and later Willie Morgan, for example — had rather more in common with the troubling generational changes and new youth lifestyles that would increasingly characterise the late 1950s and 1960s.
But what the public sympathy around Munich did do was to flag up United as a national club, perhaps the first in England that could legitimately claim support — and, for the same reason, also deep antipathy — from places well outside its host city. This development chimed with, and also reflected, new lifestyles characterised by increasing mobility and car ownership, growing working class affluence, and traces of new attitudes among younger fans, values that had been imported through the growing influence of American popular culture. Why support a loser local club when a successful national one was available and regularly on TV? From August 1964 BBC’s Match of the Day beamed football highlights into British homes every Saturday during the league season. When the incendiary and glamorously subversive figures such as Best and Law emerged regularly on British screens soon after, this seductive circle of attraction was conveniently closed.
The glamour for this new United “brand” (as we would learn later to describe it) certainly appealed to younger fans. With attendances falling as the older, skilled working classes retreated to home leisure and Saturday afternoon’s Grandstand and away from poorly appointed English stadia, so top football clubs in England in the early 1960s became much more aware of the need for self-promotion. A new generation of football managers would be key figures in this new era of the game as a putative TV show. “Personalities,” such as Jimmy Hill, the irrepressible Bill Shankly and later the mischievous Brian Clough, became eminently quotable templates for others to try to follow. England’s Alf Ramsey, of course, resolutely refused to play ball. As the new consumer culture and the lifting of the maximum wage for players in England in 1961 had begun to help transform managers from barely visible functionaries, and some younger players from model skilled workers, to commodified media and sporting stars, so on the terraces the English game also began to exhibit some of the traits — and some of the obvious problems — of the new age.
Football-fan culture and pop culture had first collided in England sometime in the early 1960s; claims about the exact time and place remain largely unsubstantiated. What we can say is that the blending of music and youth fandom — the Liverpool Kop’s adaptation of Gerry Marsden’s version of You’ll Never Walk Alone in 1964 and their scrutiny of Beatles and Cilla Black songbooks to find other Kop Anthems, for example — began to delineate discrete spaces for older and younger fans inside English football grounds. Hooliganism at football in England had first surfaced as a public concern in the mid-1950s as younger fans began to travel in larger numbers and increasingly separately from older supporters. As seats and fittings were being ritually smashed at rock-and-roll venues, so Football Special trains began to suffer the same fate. Merseyside supporters again seemed to figure strongly here. Indeed, Liverpool’s relegation to Division Two of the Football League in 1954 signalled a spate of serious incidents involving racism and fights with rival supporters and the police at the club’s fixtures. By the 1960s it was joked that Merseyside fans were recognisable because they wore railway carriage doors as trophies on their lapels.
By the early 1960s the first versions of modern hooligan gangs were already forming in England, with young men regularly hauled before the courts claiming that they had read in local newspapers that rival supporters had planned to attack their spiritual home — the local stadium. In 1964 a spectacular moment occurred when a Millwall fan (historically, usual suspects these) threw a (dud) hand grenade onto the running track at a local derby match. “Soccer Marches to War,” brayed the Daily Express. Indeed the English press worried loudly for eighteen months before the 1966 finals about the impression the world might take from these shores if the “hooligan outrages” now occurring in the domestic game transferred to the World Cup itself. They had no need to be afraid — filling World Cup venues in some of the English host cities (and even for some England matches) was to prove to be a much more pressing problem.
In the seventeen post-war league seasons up to 1962, Portsmouth (twice), Wolves (three times), Burnley (with a tiny population of around 85,000) and Ipswich Town all won league titles in England. Tottenham’s title in the double season of 1961 was also to be the last to date for that decidedly “provincial” north-London club. In the fifty-four seasons that followed, only Derby County (twice), Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa and a briefly moneyed Blackburn Rovers in the mid-1990s (thus reviving this East Lancashire success story after a break of some eighty-one years) managed to resist the larger northern football strongholds of Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool and the London-based football aristocrats (Arsenal) and arrivistes (Chelsea). Effectively, the lifting of the maximum wage — as the men at the Football League had predicted — was the beginning of the end of the possibility of league success for provincial clubs from towns and smaller cities.
English football had been in a condition of some crisis, of course, in the years before the World Cup of 1966. Stadium facilities had long been underfunded by negligent and complacent directors and spectators were routinely treated appallingly. Incidents of hooliganism (and its coverage in the national press) were increasing and football crowds were falling annually. Almost five million league attendees were lost from the English game between 1960 and 1965 — though the creation of the League Cup from 1960 offset some of the travails of the League clubs.
Simmering crowd violence and falling attendances were very likely to be at least indirectly connected, but rising wages, and television and home-based leisure had also dealt serious blows to the established notion after the war that watching your local football club was what working class men did with their Saturday afternoons. Certainly, some members of the skilled working class in England were already beginning to strain at what had once been widely regarded as the standard ties of football, masculinity, family and place, connections that were further loosened as communities from war-damaged and simply worn-out British neighbourhoods were now decamped into new towns and garden cities, sometimes far away from their parents’ traditional football bases.
Young people, dis-located in this way in the 1960s, would now do just a little more choosing of their favourite football clubs, and some of this preference work in the ’60s would be more closely associated with the glamour and pop-culture “coolness” of specific football players — George Best’s career at Manchester United began just months after Tom Finney’s career ended — and the relative success of clubs now featuring more regularly on television and in the glittering new competitions of European football. The deference and intense localism of the 1950s, it seemed, had given way to a very new kind of sport.
Perhaps sensing growing inequality and the decline of smaller local clubs — there was certainly plenty of evidence around, not least in attendance figures — in June 1966, just before the World Cup finals began, Norman Chester, a warden of Nuffield College Oxford, a former member of the War Cabinet secretariat, and an expert in government and administration, was instructed by Labour Sports Minister Denis Howell to form a committee to “enquire into the state of the [English] game at all levels.” This was something quite different from previous public inquiries in England, which had been variously into fan disorder and the range of “causes” of stadium disasters. Here the problem identified was a deep-seated, structural process of decline, focusing on the economics, culture and management of the English game itself. Nothing was off-limits, at least theoretically. This was decidedly one of those potential “take-off” points for English football, at a juncture when key members of the political class might be engaged by the game and at a moment when the sport itself was argued to lack real direction and focus — and the stomach for change.
Howell was both foul-mouthed and forceful, not a bad combination for getting some attention in football circles. He was already tired of the press obsession with hooliganism and policing (and his own ministerial responsibility for reacting to crowd violence) and was determined that the government could help harness what was expected to be the very positive impact (read “legacy” today) of finally hosting the World Cup finals in England: a means of turning around the fortunes of some English clubs that were, by now, in long-term and in some cases terminal decline. Howell knew that he also had some big back-up. Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Chester had noted later in his spidery handwriting, “is known to favour the round not the long ball and… he actively supports Huddersfield Town.”
I think we might reasonably question the use of the word “actively” here, but at least football, not rugby or cricket, was on the political agenda for once. The new Labour government under Wilson from 1964 had of course worked very hard to tap into popular enthusiasm for an especially fruitful bout of creative young northern working class culture in the early 1960s. In football, both Liverpool FC and high-spending Everton, neighbouring Wilson’s Huyton constituency on Merseyside, were near the top of the English game at this time and regional rivals Manchester United had been reviving fast under Matt Busby after the traumas of Munich. Wilson and his Cabinet colleagues were gambling on an electoral and national boost from a “feel-good” performance produced by England in the World Cup finals, and even a re-invigoration of the domestic game to follow. Wilson, perhaps fancifully, saw running the British Government as akin to managing a top football club — a matter he later discussed, with some animation, with ex-Huddersfield Town man Bill Shankly on the former’s own, briefly favoured but excruciating, TV chat show.
Norman Chester was enthusiastic and highly competent for his new role, but he also had few illusions about the size of the task in hand. At least he was already well versed in the practised resistance in the English game to “outsiders”; to wiseacres and academics, “theory men” who were trying to tell their footballing betters how to suck eggs. So when he first met the press, Chester’s hand-written notes for his opening statement revealed a clever determination to get his retaliation in first: to establish his solid football credentials as a supporter. “First watched M/c United in 1922,” they read, “(long before Matt Busby).” United had actually finished rock bottom and were relegated from the First Division in 1922, so the young Master Chester could reasonably claim he was no glory hunter.
To confirm the point he also had notes on his current local club, Third Division Oxford United, who “wd have got into second [division] if they had one consistent goalscorer.” This was simply publicity gloss. Finishing a distant fourteenth in 1966, Oxford were way off the promotion pace. But the point being made here was that his Football Enquiry Committee planned to examine the connections and synergies between the glamour boys at Manchester United and those men at the other more lowly Uniteds, and the various Citys, Towns and Athletics that were now wallowing and insecure down in the lower levels of the English Football League.
This eleven-man squad (not much changes in football in gender terms) of advisers pulled together by Chester was charged with examining something that the current generation of supporters and administrators might find rather more difficult to articulate and comprehend in the more divisive, knives-perpetually-sharpened era of the FA and the Premier League. The committee was required by the Minister to examine the means by which the game in England “may be developed for the public good.” As well as looking at the funding of local football, Chester demolished the theory that transfer fees benefitted smaller clubs — they didn’t — he recommended more clubs be promoted and relegated, that clubs should be able to appoint salaried directors, and proposed a compulsory retirement age of seventy years for the eighty-four FA Council members, most of whom were already some way past this sell-by date.
In fact, Chester seemed to have plenty of footballing answers to the old Eric Hobsbawm question: “Where does the future come from?” He was something of a visionary, envisaging a future with paid TV, supporters on club boards, and more female spectators — “a major and largely untapped source of support.” Writing to fellow committee member Clifford Barclay, Chester observed: “I imagine you may want to say something about amalgamation of grounds, the role of TV, and such stratospheric ideas as large stadia catering for multi-sports activities.” It was a strangely prescient moment, but it took the English game almost thirty years to catch up. Although some areas highlighted by the Nuffield man continued to get predictably short shrift, he would certainly have recognised the supporter movements that eventually started to sprout up from the mid-1980s and spread in the new century. As usual, however, the report carried no legislative weight and when Chester thought he had been invited to a League Management Committee meeting to present his findings he found, instead, that he was offered no more than lunch and a friendly chat. The game stumbled on.
The report was finally published in 1968, with England as World Cup holders and Chester’s own Manchester United about to become the first English club to win the European Cup. Happy days. But, did winning the World Cup in ’66 really benefit the development of the game in England? Ramsey’s team had limited ambitions, but a great spine — Banks, Moore and Bobby Charlton were accomplished players, especially at home. But on reflection the 1966 victory was also rather bloodless. Brazil and Italy were ineffably poor, and England stumbled and kicked their way out of their group, before sneaking past a ten-man Argentina, and then disposing of a one-man Portugal — Eusébio was plainly the only truly world-class performer at the whole shebang. West Germany were talented, sure, but also a team in transition. England winning in 1966 may have answered the critics of previous World Cup failures, but it did little to take the English game forward.
Nevertheless, English clubs soon had some unprecedented success, winning seven out of eight European Cup finals between 1977 and 1984. However, much of this glory depended on forceful British players, and especially on fast-disappearing great Scottish talent — Hansen, Dalglish and Souness at four-time winners Liverpool and Kenny Burns and John Robertson at double European Champions Nottingham Forest, under a Brian Clough once rejected by the FA. (Perhaps under Clough things might have been different, but I doubt it.) By contrast the England team slumped in the 1970s, even failing to qualify for the 1974 and 1978 finals. Alf Ramsey’s salary when he was sacked by the FA for the first offence, and after eleven years of remarkable service with the national team, was a pitiful £7200 pa.
Eternal schisms between the FA amateurs and the club game in England are often contrasted here with the more successful collectivist and centralised administrations abroad; did English clubs ever really care about national-team success? And, as international football became more cerebral and precise, and its top players became fitter and more athletic into the 1990s, so those typical English cultural traits that promoted tackling as a fine art, teamwork and high-tempo physicality, all became quite banal and much less effective. Given time and space in international football most English players proved to be poor decision makers. When Sweden beat England under the flapping Graham Taylor in the European Championships of 1992, the manager bemoaned the fact the Scandinavians were not only technically superior, they were now “even” more physical and better prepared than his own men.
Media pressure and the demand from fans for up-and-at-’em performances were also taxing problems for England on the international stage. Only once, in the latter stages of the World Cup finals in 1990 under Bobby Robson in Italy — and a full twenty-four years after winning the World Cup — have England looked once more like they really could belong at the highest levels of the international game. A team playing with both structure and freedom and containing Gascoigne, Waddle, Beardsley, Platt and Lineker outplayed the perennial foe West Germany in the semi-final in Turin — but inevitably lost on penalties. Even English hooligans stopped their antics to watch. A country and a culture that had seemed All Played Out, the title of Pete Davies’s book about England at Italia ’90, briefly appeared to be reborn. But it proved to be a fog, a mirage, merely the prelude to something quite different: the global reconfiguring of club football in England and the arrival of the bloated FA Premier League. We would soon be able to watch in our own backyards some of the greatest and best-paid players in the world — we just seemed to have forgotten, perhaps forever, exactly how, if at all, we had ever managed to produce them ourselves.