BY NIALL McCRAE

London mayor Sadiq Khan urges the Premier League to start staging matches around the world. So Chelsea versus Manchester City might be moved to Jakarta or Abu Dhabi. Like the exhibition matches of American football, there would be much money to make, but Khan is pushing the globalist agenda, in which the idea of English or British football clubs becomes outmoded.  

Modern football may be supremely skilful, but it is alienating many people who have experienced the old and the new.

Was there ever a golden age of British football? 

Though few readers will be old enough to remember, the 1950s would be a reasonable choice: massive crowds watched the likes of Tom Finney, Raich Carter and Stanley Matthews, and the lowest league clubs filled their terraces with flat-capped working-class fathers and their sons. The 1960s was the decade of England’s World Cup triumph, and the maestro George Best. But in my view the best decade was the 1970s, as I shall explain.  

Of course, no decade was perfect and there were dire problems in football in the 1970s. Hooliganism was rife, alongside rampant inflation a major factor in the steady decline in attendances. This was the last decade when players almost entirely came from the British Isles (almost half of First Division teams were Scots), and the pool of talent appeared to be shrinking. England failed to qualify for the World Cup in 1974 and 1978. There was, however, a promising new crop of black players. They encountered racist abuse, but pioneers such as Laurie Cunningham, Brendan Batson, Vince Hilaire and Ces Podd fought through (despite Shoot magazine suggesting that such players would struggle in cold winters).

Grounds were dangerous not only due to thuggery but also the crumbling terraces and obsolete wooden stands (the grandest built by Archibald Leitch in the interwar years) that were waiting to go up in flames (as in the Nottingham Forest fire in 1968 and the Valley Parade disaster in Bradford in 1985). In the 1970s some of the few profit-making clubs built new grandstands, cantilever technology removing the poles that blighted the view from original structures. Celtic and Chelsea built particularly impressive stands in stark contrast to the surrounding Spion Kop.

On the field it was still possible for a provincial club to prosper. In the early 1970s Leeds was consistently the top club, before Liverpool took over, but however invincible they seemed at the time, they could be beaten.

Second Division club Sunderland beat Leeds in the 1973 FA Cup final. Signing capable players overlooked by other clubs’ scouts and moulding them into a disciplined unit, Brian Clough took Derby County from the Second Division to league champions in 1972. Three seasons later Derby repeated the feat under Doug Mackay. Clough went on to make Nottingham Forest the finest team in the land, winning the league in 1978 and then two European Cup finals.  

The first meddling with the established order in English football was when three points for a win was introduced in 1982, to encourage teams to play for a win rather than sitting back for a draw. Symmetry was disrupted as the number of points awarded from a match is variable.. A team winning half its matches and losing the other half would have finished midway in the old system, but would now be in a promotion place, while a team that draws every match (thus unbeaten) could be relegated.

Heralding the corruptive influence of money, advertising appeared on shirts from 1980 onwards. Legendary clubs such as Liverpool and Manchester United became marketing tools for multinational companies (initially the electronics companies of Hitachi and Sharp respectively). Lesser clubs sported the names of local firms, particularly breweries (Vaux at Sunderland and Shipstones at Nottingham Forest), before these were taken over by bigger companies.

‘Astroturf’ was laid at QPR and Oldham, spurred by the severe winter of 1978 when hundreds of matches were postponed. The experiment failed as the ball bounced crazily on the fabricated surface, and defenders got nasty burns from their sliding tackles. Grass was soon reinstated, but in recent years plastic pitches have become ubiquitous in regional leagues, and over half of Scottish league matches are now played on plastic.  

Gates continued to fall in the 1980s. Hideous steel fencing was installed at the front of terracing and between sections for home and away supporters at every ground, topped by barbed wire at clubs with a bad record. Prime minister Margaret Thatcher sought to curb the violence, and after a riot by Millwall supporters at Luton in 1985, an identity card scheme was piloted by the Bedfordshire club.

Police forces were given licence to treat football supporters like a herd of animals, to the relish of West Midlands and South Yorkshire constabularies. The latter force was responsible for the mass manslaughter at Hillsborough, the ground of Sheffield Wednesday, at a FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. The disaster almost happened with exactly the same clubs on the same ground in 1988, when Liverpool supporters were directed into a severely overcrowded pen behind the goal. In 1989 the inevitable happened, when supporters were pushed forward on to the perimeter fencing that was supposedly for safety.

In 1992 the emergence of Sky Sports and lucrative television deals led to the creation of the premier league, run not by the Football League but the FA. The old Second Division became the Championship, and the Fourth Division is now League Two, complicating the level a club occupies in the national structure.

The rich just got richer.

It was exceptional for Leicester City to win the league in 2013, as the Big Six of Manchester United and City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham dominate. These clubs are global brands, with fans in every continent wearing their replica shirts and watching their matches on satellite television.

Another interference with the straightforwardness of football is the play-off process. In the past the top three clubs were promoted from Second to First Division, but now there is an end-of-season extravaganza of four clubs competing for the third promotion place. Exhausted players must compete for three more matches, with the final game at Wembley Stadium. The winner gets a trophy and publicity in excess of the team that actually won the division. Of course, the play-offs are a money-spinner, but they prolong the season and shorten the summer break, to the detriment of our other national game of cricket.

The spectating environment changed for the worse in the 1980s, as shrinking crowds forced clubs to sell sections of their estate.

Crystal Palace, Bolton and Notts County allowed supermarkets to build into terracing behind one of the goals, a sheer wall imposing on the hallowed ground. Charlton Athletic shaved the top off the highest terrace in England to erect a lower grandstand. In my youth I could tell you the ground of all 92 league clubs, but now I’d struggle, as so many sold their premises to developers to move to a bland all-seater stadium. Walsall was one of the pioneers, leaving Fellows Park in 1990 for a characterless new home, now charmingly renamed as the Bescot Poundland Stadium.

The Hillsborough disaster and subsequent enquiry led to replacement of terracing by swaths of coloured plastic seating at First and Second Division grounds. The fences were removed; pitch invaders were deterred by threat of arrest and a lifetime ban. Fans tend to rise from their seats when excited; while clubs tried in vain to stop this unruly behaviour, they have mostly succeeded in making the modern football ground a sterile environment (Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium is known as the ‘Library’).

I’ve saved the worst for last.

VAR is making its presence felt at Premier League games (the lower leagues have yet to introduce it). A goal is scored, but the fans can only cheer provisionally, because the defending team appeals about a possible offside, shove or handball and the goal is disallowed. Video replay does not always produce a satisfactory decision: in the Euro tournament earlier this summer, a penalty kick was awarded to Romania despite VAR clearly showing that the player was fouled outside the penalty area. VAR checks are increasingly frequent, causing delay and lengthening matches – a particular problem for away fans with trains to catch. I predict that the future televised Premier League game will be scheduled for at least three hours, with VAR reviews elongated by design, to allow for lengthy advertisement breaks.

So, I would say football in the 1970s was better than what we are served today. 

Let me finish with a memory of Cappielow Park, home of Morton, where I first attended football matches in the late Seventies. Designed for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, the ‘Tango’ ball could be made to curve in flight, so that a defensive wall at free kicks could be bypassed. The Scottish Premier League used this ball in the following season, and the lumpy figure of Andy Ritchie took full advantage. A free kick within thirty yards of goal was a nightmare for the goalkeeper, who knew that the line of defenders he had marshalled was as useful as a chocolate fireguard. Which top corner? Ritchie would decide, and the ball was promptly nestling in the net.

Today there is a wealth of global talent in British football, but most players have no connection to the club or its fans. They go wherever they are best paid, and supporters must pay their grossly inflated wages. Many Premier League clubs are owned by foreign oligarchs. To illustrate globalisation, stand outside Stamford Bridge in London and you will see banners on the streets proclaiming ‘One World, One Chelsea’ and trite slogans of diversity and inclusivity. These clubs will gladly play an important match in Kuala Lumpur, ignoring their season ticket holders. The raucous and raw terracing of the Seventies needed taming from its tribal excesses, but compared with the corporate-controlled circus of the present, football felt more real.

Niall McCrae is the author of ‘Green in Tooth and Claw: the Misanthropic Mission of Climate Alarm’ (2024).