The Golden Age of English football
Does England’s only trophy make 1966 our footballing golden age? (No.)
The 2022/23 Premier League and EFL season is over. For me, this has been the season of a lifetime.
For the first time I went to every match played by my team in all competitions. Wouldn’t you know it, we won the league and it was epic. On Sunday I was at Villa Park to see Unai Emery’s Aston Villa qualify for Europe. They’ve come a long way in a short period of time. The old place was bouncing.
Their opponents, Brighton & Hove Albion, will play in Europe too. They’re fantastic. Nottingham Forest avoided relegation under Steve Cooper. Sean Dyche kept Everton up on the final day. My condolences to Southampton and Leicester City, two of the three teams who did drop into the Championship.
That’s about all I have to say about the Premier League. Fortunately, my mate Daniel Storey’s got you covered and then some.
The Golden Age of English football
If I ask you to close your eyes and picture the golden age of English football there’s a good chance you’ll see in your mind’s eye one of three things.
First, 1966. England winning the FIFA World Cup under Alf Ramsey, Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore with Jules Rimet still gleaming, Nobby Stiles dancing – you know the score.
Second, the flagrantly over-advertised “Golden Generation” that achieved the square root of bugger all in the noughties or whatever they’re called, if for no other reason than the word ‘golden’ has been planted into your brain and you’ve been distracted by the label.
Third, the football culture in England in your formative years. Football writer Ian King, among others, argues that the best World Cup is the one that happened closest to your tenth birthday. We each have a football and it’s the football that existed when we fell in love with the game, frozen in time.
1966 is the logical choice. Football came to England and England won the football, Wembley awash in Union flags as Hurst claimed an historic hat-trick and Kenneth Wolstenholme uttered the immortal piece of commentary that seemed to further etch the World Cup win into sporting lore. England have yet to repeat this triumph and it is therefore a pinnacle by definition.
International football matters. It's part of the central nervous system of the game. It meant even more in 1966 and, while the modern temptation might be to under-appreciate its significance in light of representative football's waning popularity in this country and others, it remains the beacon.
But it wasn't a golden age. One trophy, even the trophy, is too meagre a justification in a nation that likes to count itself among the giants of the game. The others have multiple major tournament wins to their names. England must pan for their precious nugget elsewhere.
Football is a glorious technicolour tapestry and there are myriad criteria when it comes to inconsequential debates like this one. Winning the World Cup might be the outstanding success for the nation in its united form but football is rather more complex a landscape than that.
What about club teams dominating on the continental stage? What about influence? The employment of the best players from all over the world? Economic power? Money isn't the deciding factor but even the most ardent romantic would do well to argue against it playing a part.
By those definitions England has produced a number of eras of note in the 160 years since the Laws of the Game were committed to paper. The very fact that it happened here can't be ignored, for one.
November 2023 will mark the 70th anniversary of England’s infamous loss to Hungary. With Nándor Hidegkuti operating between midfield and a front two of Ferenc Puskás and Sándor Kocsis, Hungary became the second team to beat England at home. They were regarded as the best team in the world. England, reeling from the ignominy of the World Cup in 1950, were dismantled by them again in Budapest in 1954.
Much of England’s prestige prior to 1950 had been self-regarding – not competing in the World Cup avoided the probability of evidence to the contrary – but the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first couple of decades of the twentieth warrant a mention. And there it was. Next!
In 1977, Bob Paisley’s Liverpool became the second English team to win the European Cup. The next five winners of the continent’s premier club competition were Liverpool, Nottingham Forest, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool and Aston Villa – six English wins on the bounce ending in 1982.
Ipswich Town and Tottenham Hotspur won the UEFA Cup in 1981 and 1984 respectively. Everton won the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1985. Such a period of domination should be fondly remembered, albeit only three teams took home the top pot in those six years around the turn of the decade.
Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Two weeks after Everton’s final against Rapid Vienna in the Netherlands, the Heysel Disaster happened in Belgium and English clubs were banned from European competition. It wasn’t a one-off. Villa also won their trophy in the Netherlands but crowd trouble at their semi-final second leg – against Anderlecht in Belgium, incidentally – might easily have led to expulsion.
The seventies and eighties included lots of success, some fabulous teams and countless iconic, historic moments and matches. Traditions were sculpted, legends written, but nostalgia for that period is necessarily tempered by trouble and tragedy, not to mention the direct cultural impact they had on football as a spectator sport.
With Hillsborough, the Taylor Report and the creation of the Premier League coinciding with the changing public mood around the game around and between World Cup Italia 90 and EURO 96, a different football altogether started to take hold. English football was at the forefront of the modern game as we now know it, all pristine pitches and peak performance.
Through its foibles and failures it found itself bested by Italy and Spain time and again but the robustness of the Premier League and its attractiveness to star players made it the world’s league. Another spell of European prominence soon arrived. Between 2005 and 2009 English football supplied six of the ten UEFA Champions League finalists and two of its winners.
All the while, the domestic league continued to be celebrated and respected the world over. Elite club football was in rude health but England embarrassed themselves and the collapse of ITV Digital in 2002, among other causes, continued to inflict damage lower down.
In the same five-year period there were points deductions due to administration for ten Football League clubs (including current Premier League outfits AFC Bournemouth and Luton Town and recently relegated Leeds United and Southampton) as well as a glut of non-league clubs that didn’t all survive.
All of which leads us to a question that’s pretty uncomfortable for cynical old blokes like me, people who like thinking back to muddy pitches covered in sand and the frisson of life on the terraces. Are we living the golden age of English football right now?
There’s a strong case for it. The Premier League is by far the world’s most successful league by a bunch of metrics I don’t care about. It’s richer than god and the coaching and playing talent that comes with that is undeniably here. Every weekend the planet is watching and getting its money’s worth.
Only one of the last six Champions League finals hasn’t featured an English team. There have been two all-English finals in which Liverpool and Chelsea added to their previous European Cup wins. In 2023 Manchester City will seek to become the first English team to beat foreign opposition in the final since Chelsea’s first, against Bayern eleven years ago. They probably will.
Even the national team is playing its part. Gareth Southgate is constantly criticised and that’s the prerogative of England supporters, but it’s important to apply some perspective.
Younger fans might not remember year after year of penalty shoot-out defeats and group-stage exits. They might not have lived through failure to qualify in 1994 and 2008 just as I didn’t suffer through the seventies. England are good. Really good. Deliberately and systematically good.
Yes, the here and now could be the golden age of English football. It might not stack up to those of Italy or Spain or Germany or France or Brazil or Argentina but this could well be ours. Yet many of us can’t experience it as such because these cold calculations come at a competitive and cultural cost.
If we’re to designate a golden age shouldn’t it be one in which it seemed like anyone could win the league in any season, an open and chaotic contest that captured the essence of the sport more purely than perfection ever could?
Shouldn’t it be tied to the soul of football? To the atmosphere of a big game, to European nights that felt like the be all and end all? To proper pubs and wet streets under orange light and everyone watching the FA Cup Final? To at least a semblance of morality and parity?
By every reasonable measure the golden age of English football is now. But football isn’t just about measurement. It has heart and community. Business success and commercial clout don’t really feel like things to be celebrated in these terms. They seem like meaningful criteria for debate but the truth is they’re just hot air.
All of football’s most powerful phenomena are intangible – intrinsically human, often universal, yet impossible to grasp. It’s not mere economics. Football is politics and psychology and sociology too. It’s magic.
There is no objective golden age of English football. The bigger picture is too complex for that, the details too wrapped up in life and love.
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“With all of that in mind, I find myself thinking back to the man on the train. What I want to tell him now — and can’t, because I don’t know where he is, and it’s not like he’d understand or care anyway — is that Forest won’t finish the season surrounded by trophies, but then City won’t have had what we had on Saturday evening.
“They won’t have had that, or a Brighton moment, or a Southampton, or a West Ham, because it’s a different vibe. And vibe is just about the only thing in this life you can’t buy.”
Phil Juggins deservedly attracted some attention last week for his excellent article on The Loving Feeling about Nottingham Forest confirming their place in the Premier League next season.
This was my favourite part. I’m not going to add any context – go and read the article. It’s great.
Salty beef extracts
The story of Everton v Bournemouth by a Cherry born a Blue who wishes Dad was there too (Football365)
Unai's Aston Villa carve themselves into legend - Europe beckons (House of V)
Brighton and Hove Albion: De Zerbi, the Starlizard secret weapon and the Premier League’s most romantic team (Fotbollskanalen)
Amad Diallo Primed for Man Utd Audition After Antony Injury (The Analyst)
Mark Robins rouses reconstructed Coventry to verge of Premier League (The Guardian)
Alex Scott: 'Going back to grassroots football was one of the best decisions I ever made' (England Football)
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