IF NOSTALGIA FOR 1966 could be plotted on a graph, it probably peaked in February 1993. That month Bobby Moore died of cancer aged 51, and was mourned as the kind of gentleman winner that England no longer produced. The economy, England’s footballing fortunes, and national morale were all then at a low. Only the crime-rate was buoyant. Twelve days before Moore’s death, the murder of two year-old James Bulger by two other small boys had shocked Britain. The event “registered a growing presence of evil,” said the Labour MP Frank Field. He called for children to be taught the “Bobby Moore morality.”
The technicolour moment when a beautiful Queen Elizabeth handed a beautiful Moore the World Cup in the London sunshine serves as a constant reprimand to the English present. National decline is a powerful notion in modern English history, and England’s failure to win a football tournament since 1966 seems to sum up that decline. That’s why the English often turn 1966 into a symbol. The argument then goes that England won because Moore’s “greatest generation” were giants compared with today’s spoiled overpaid lot. However, if we want to know why England really won, symbolism doesn’t get us very far. In an attempt to demystify 1966, I read the history and crunched data.
The first thing to say is that England in 1966 probably were slightly better than most subsequent England teams. A crucial caveat: the quality of England sides over time scarcely varies. This may sound improbable. Fans feel strongly about the qualities of managers and players. Periods of national euphoria alternate with periods of national pessimism (such as 1993 or 2014). The public tends to think the England team is either strong or a disgrace.
But in fact, England in almost any era pretty consistently wins about half its games, drawing or losing the rest. Contrary to all popular opinion, it may be that since the 1960s the strength of the England team has barely changed (which would make the vast apparatus of punditry attached to the team instantly redundant).
The chart across was made by the economist Stefan Szymanski, with whom I wrote the book Why England Lose (we renamed the later editions Soccernomics; the original title for some reason didn’t appeal to English book-buyers). The chart shows England’s cumulative win percentage from 1950 to 2013 (counting a draw as worth half a win). Apart from a few moments in the 1950s the win percentage has not risen above 70%, and it has never fallen below 67.5%.
The overall picture is one of steady but extremely slow decline, punctuated by two eras of exceptional performance. One of those eras was the late 1960s. The other period of clear improvement began in the early 2000s and continues today.
It really does look as if the only period in England’s modern football history that can match the late 1960s is the present. Here is some more evidence — the win percentages of all post-war England managers:
(Note: Figures correct through 6 September 2015)
Match for match, the only England managers whose stats compare with Alf Ramsey’s (in charge from 1963 to 1974) are the two most recent incumbents: Fabio Capello (2008–2012) and now Roy Hodgson. It seems that England this last decade have been stronger than usual, perhaps because today’s English internationals spend their careers competing with the world’s best in the unprecedentedly strong Premier League. (This would rather blow out of the water the idea that all those foreign imports are ruining the England team.)
Admittedly the differences between the top few managers in our table are small. In addition, it’s hard to compare eras. Since the breakup of the USSR and former Yugoslavia, England play more small countries like Estonia and Slovenia. But then Ramsey’s England spent a lot of time beating the little Home Nations. Moreover, most of today’s stronger European teams — Spain, France, Holland and even Germany — weren’t yet world-beaters in his day. In 1966 neither Germany nor West Germany had ever beaten England. At every single World Cup since, the Germans have outperformed England.
Defenders of Ramsey will object that what sets him apart is that he’s the only England manager who (at least in 1966) won the big games that mattered. It’s true that twenty-first century England teams have disappointed at World Cups and European Championships. Possibly they lack the moral fibre of Moore’s men. However, here’s an alternative hypothesis: at big tournaments, today’s England players are simply more tired.
Ramsey’s men were uncommonly fit by the standards of 1966. Before the tournament, the manager gathered his players for a training camp at Lilleshall and told them he wanted two months of sacrifice. “Gentlemen,” he added, “if anybody gets the idea of popping out for a pint, and I find out, he is finished with this squad for ever.” When the team’s habitual drinkers did hatch a plot to escape “Stalag Lilleshall” for a night in the pub, Ramsey forestalled them. After eleven gruelling days in isolation at Lilleshall, England went on a rapid four-match European tour.
Ramsey’s approach was radical in an age when footballers routinely lived it large. The French team in 1966 stocked up for their training camp in the Scottish town of Peebles with “litres of French wine.” While according to the Dutch author Hans Molenaar the Argentines on their warm-up tour of Europe smoked straight after friendlies and training sessions, in defiance of their manager’s edict. Professionalism of Ramsey’s stamp wasn’t the norm back then. The Swiss midfielder Philippe Pottier actually requested a week’s leave from training camp to go on holiday. (This was a bit rich even for little Switzerland, and he was left at home.)
Ramsey’s professionalism was total. “The players were even given lessons in how to cut their toenails for fear that a poor clipping technique would lead to a septic toe,” writes Niall Edworthy in his history of England managers. England’s 0-0 draw in their opening game against Uruguay was disappointing, but afterwards Jimmy Greaves said: “There can’t be a fitter team in the tournament.” Decades later, England’s left-back Ray Wilson told Ramsey’s biographer Dave Bowler: “We were fitter than most teams… In the last half hour we’d generally overcome most sides.” Wilson said fitness mattered especially at Wembley, where players often cramped up on the springy turf. Playing every game in London also meant that England didn’t waste any energy travelling.
The statistics seem to confirm England’s superior fitness. Of the nine goals they scored in normal time at the 1966 World Cup, five came in the last fifteen minutes of matches. Then there were those two goals in extra time in the final. Wilson told Bowler: “We were much fitter than them [West Germany] in extra time. They were gone, they created nothing.” George Cohen, the right-back, recalled: “When Alf came out at full-time, he said, ‘Look at the Germans, they’re finished.’ And they were all lying on the floor. Alf made us stand up to show them how fit we were.” In Dave Bowler’s words: “The World Cup was won on the playing fields of Lilleshall.”
Ramsey himself seems to have identified the physical as England’s USP. “We were the fastest and the strongest side in the World Cup,” he said in victory, “but I do not think we can ever match the individual techniques of the Latin-Americans or the Latin-Europeans.”
Contrast the fitness of 1966 with England’s modern summer fatigue. Now that the Premier League is the most physically demanding league on earth, English players typically arrive at World Cups exhausted. (Wayne Rooney, for instance, flopped in South Africa in 2010 after being squeezed like a lemon by Manchester United that Spring.) Managers and players often point to tiredness as a reason for England’s failures. Here, for example, is Capello telling FIFA.com why England don’t win summer tournaments:
They’re the least fresh of any of the competing national sides, because their league doesn’t have a break. It’s like when you’re driving a car: if you stop halfway to put fuel in then you’ll definitely get where you want to go, but if you don’t there’s always the chance you’ll be running on empty before you reach your goal. In my opinion the soccer played in the first half of the English season is much better than in the second half.
Such excuses are typically dismissed by angry fans, but supporting evidence comes from England’s curious scoring patterns. Most goals at World Cups come after half-time. That is natural: in the second half players tire, teams start chasing goals, and gaps open up on the field. But England, in its eight big tournaments from 1998 through to 2014, scored twenty-eight of its forty-five goals before halftime.
England’s fitness in 1966 was to Ramsey’s credit. So were his brave decisions to dispense with wingers mid-tournament, and to pick Geoff Hurst ahead of the established star Greaves in the final. This manager made a difference.
But however good, fit and well managed his team were, they needed to be lucky. In a league, the best team generally wins. Over thirty-eight games or so, luck tends to even out. One week the referee will mistakenly give your opponents a penalty, but the next week he’ll give it to you.
But luck matters more in much shorter World Cups. The 1966 tournament lasted just under three weeks. As Arsène Wenger has noted, any team in a league can top the table after three weeks. In such a short run, a few inches here and there on a couple of shots can be decisive. England in 1966 beat Argentina in the quarter-finals and Portugal in the semis by one goal each, and won the final only after extra time. Victory hinged on a few moments. Jonathan Wilson puts it well in his Anatomy of England: “One moment can shape a game, and one game can shape a tournament, and one tournament can shape a career. Football is not always fair.”
It’s even less fair than other ballgames. In Test cricket, each batting side has twenty wickets to fall, so an individual dismissal is rarely decisive; tennis Grand Slams are played over five sets, so a favourite can lose two and still triumph. In basketball and rugby, the team with territorial dominance tends to win. Football is more random. Nonetheless, we tend to tell the story of any World Cup with hindsight as if the winners were destined to win.
The last and possibly key reason why England won in 1966 and never since: they were at home. In Why England Lose, Stefan Szymanski and I calculated that in international football since 1980, home advantage has been worth about two-thirds of a goal per game. That in itself could be enough to propel a decent team like England — typically about tenth-best in the world — to the title. However, before 1980 home advantage was probably worth even more. Back then travel was more arduous, local fans often hostile and in-your-face, and conditions very different from home. Think of England in Mexico in 1970 being kept up all night by a crowd outside their hotel before they faced Brazil, and then Gordon Banks missing the decisive encounter with West Germany because of diarrhoea.
England hosted the World Cup at a time when hosting really mattered. Over the period 1930–1978, hosts won five out of eleven World Cups, while three of the other winning countries shared a border with the host. Contrast that with the much weaker performance of hosts since 1982: just one trophy out of nine. Admittedly that’s partly because some modern hosts have been weak football nations. But even taking that into account, they have done poorly. No modern host except winners France in 1998 has even reached the final. Spain, Japan and the US didn’t make the quarter-finals, South Africa fell in the first round, and readers may recall Brazil’s 1-7 defeat in Belo Horizonte, 2014.
The decline in home advantage has probably been starkest in international football, but the statistical website Fivethirtyeight. com has shown that it has also occurred in English domestic football:
At the 1966 World Cup, visiting teams faced all sorts of obstacles. Argentina, a serious contender for the title, tried to fit in their own Lilleshall session, but, writes Jonathan Wilson, “the plan turned into farce as the Argentina bus got lost, taking two hours to cover the thirty miles from their base near Birmingham.” Then, the evening before their quarter-final against England, Argentina weren’t allowed their mandatory twenty-minute practice session at Wembley “on the grounds that it would have interfered with the evening’s greyhound-racing,” writes Wilson. (He adds that they could easily have been fitted in ahead of the dogs.) Setbacks like that just didn’t happen to the hosts. There was homesickness, too. Argentina’s captain Antonio Rattín listened to a cassette of his wife and children ten times a day, he told Razón newspaper. “If I could draw up my own contract for football at this level, I assure you I would put in a clause that said I could only play in Buenos Aires and would never leave my country again.”
So many things went England’s way. Eusébio always believed that the organisers had illegally moved the England–Portugal semi-final from Goodison (where Portugal had come to feel at home) to Wembley (where England had played all their games). In fact, he was wrong. In 1966 FIFA was free to decide which semi-final would be played at which venue. However, this was exactly the sort of decision that went in favour of the hosts.
Most refereeing decisions probably did too. In England’s 2-0 victory over a weak France, the first goal was “blatantly offside,” writes Edworthy, while the second came after Nobby Stiles “crunched Jacques Simon right under the nose of the referee with a challenge so late that it beggared belief.” The ref ignored the foul, allowing England to go upfield and score, whereupon Simon was stretchered off. A subsequent cartoon in the French newspaper L’Equipe showed Bobby Charlton driving a Rolls-Royce while referees dressed as British bobbies cleared opponents from his route. Uruguayan and Argentine critiques along these lines were angrier.
In the final, the Soviet linesman Tofiq Bahramov was wrong to award England’s third goal. The point isn’t that later scientific studies showed that Hurst’s shot probably bounced on the line. The point is that the linesman couldn’t possibly have seen whether the ball bounced in or not. Given the uncertainty, as Dave Bowler writes, Bahramov “had to give the benefit of the doubt to the defending team. His decision was incorrect.” But it’s the kind of decision a linesman makes with a Wembley packed with Union Jacks behind his back.
There’s a more general sense in which hosting favoured England. At the time, two different ethical codes were effectively fighting for dominance in international football: the Latin American code and the northern European code. In Latin America, playacting, shirt-pulling and bullying the ref were considered OK, but violent fouls weren’t. “In northern Europe,” writes Bowler, “the reverse was true, histrionics were frowned upon while heavy tackling was part and parcel of a man’s game.” FIFA had said before the World Cup that referees would crack down on violent fouls, but that didn’t happen. This may have had something to do with the instincts of the crowds and referees. As Jonathan Wilson notes: “Of 23 listed referees, 18 were European, ten of them from Britain.” And so Stiles was free to foul against Uruguay and France, while other Europeans kicked Pelé out of the tournament.
The triumph of the northern European code favoured England. With more Latin referees, Pelé might have had more protection and could have won Brazil their third straight World Cup, as the bookmakers had expected. Moreover, a Latin referee at England– Argentina mightn’t have sent off Rattín for “the look on his face,” as the German Rudolf Kreitlein did.
Afterwards FIFA fined Argentina £85 (the maximum permitted) and threatened to bar the country from the next World Cup. As Hans Molenaar has reported, outraged Latin Americans met while still in London to discuss breaking away and founding their own tournament. The Latins must have been particularly irked that England’s cheating (as they saw it) was accompanied by lots of pompous rhetoric about “fair play.” In truth, most English people of the day, certain of their moral superiority, probably couldn’t have imagined that they themselves might be cheating.
Lastly, any analysis that compares England in 1966 with later England teams has to address the issue of penalty shootouts. Penalties — rather than any lack of moral fibre — may be the single biggest reason why modern England lose. From 1990 to 2014 England played in eleven World Cups and European Championships. They exited six on penalties. But in 1966, shootouts didn’t yet exist. If they had, the exhausted West Germans in the final would surely have parked the bus in extra time and played for penalties. We can all guess how that would have turned out.
Still, at the end it was the England team waving a replica of the Jules Rimet Trophy from the balcony at Kensington’s Royal Garden Hotel. (The real trophy had been taken into custody by policemen to stop anyone stealing it.) In the popular imagination, the men of 1966 now tower over all future generations of English footballers. Perhaps they were better, perhaps just fitter, perhaps they were the most sober team of their day, and perhaps they even possessed a never-say-die English spirit that has since been lost. However, it would be wrong to infer anything much from a narrow victory in a three-week tournament at home.