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As the tributes to Pele poured in last week, it was hard for anyone of a certain age not to look back to 1970 and all that. I was buying an off-cut in a local carpet warehouse and got talking to the owner about the great man and football more generally in the 1970s. He waxed lyrical about The Big Match, the Leeds team under Don Revie and giants of the game like Jimmy Johnstone and Norman Hunter. And I’m always happy to talk football to anyone. It’s one of life’s great conversational tools when meeting strangers.
It’s easy to be nostalgic about the game. Everyone does it. It doesn’t matter what age you are, there is always a period in your life that stands out as, at least superficially, being superior to now.
But the mind plays tricks. The instinct is to remember the good and forget an awful lot of bad and a life lived looking backwards stifles the future. Brexit has taught us that. But we need a good knowledge of history against which to judge the present in order to invent the future.
When I wrote a book about this called ‘Was Football Better In The Old Days? Or Is Now Better Than Back Then?’ I looked objectively at all periods of the game to overcome both blind nostalgia and what Daniel Storey once coined for me as ‘hindshite’ – the notion that the future is always better than the past, which is just as crippling a condition to suffer from, intolerant as it is, of any challenge to the orthodoxy that modern is always best. The denials involved in asserting that as a truth require the same levels of delusion as nostalgia.
My conclusion in that book was that while some things were worse, and some things better, actually football’s attractions remain pretty constant down the decades, especially once you go down the pyramid. Yes, having cruel, murderous autocratic regimes owning and funding clubs is objectively much, much worse than anything we have seen before in football, but that is just a disease that infects one small part of the football body. If you find that gangrenous infection too much to bear, there is other football to be watched, football that will deliver the joy, misery, entertainment and boredom you crave.
When I see Greenock Morton playing on a cold wet Friday night in the Scottish Championship, that is the football of my past, present and future. The manager doesn’t stare like Bambi caught in the headlights when asked how many people the club’s owners have put to death this weekend. Direct football is not culturally outlawed and there is no VAR saying nebbishly ‘offside is offside’ when ruling over whether very marginal calls which gain no advantage to the player, should rub out goals. In cultural and sporting terms, it has changed little in the last decades. But then maybe this is a bad thing. Conservatism can be a pernicious block to progress or equally be a comfort in uncertain times.
So as we start 2023, what is the state of the game? How will the future judge this past? Good things? It’s often said in society that the vicious right wing has won the economic war and liberal left has won the cultural war. It’s a broad assertion and not without caveats but it holds fairly true in life and in football.
The game as an event is far safer than it once was both inside and outside the ground. There was never any joy to be gained by being hit with a brick thrown by a Millwall fan. The violence, abuse and destruction that went hand-in-hand with football in the 70s and 80s has diminished massively, though hasn’t been extinguished.
The culture around football has become open and accepting in a way it never used to be. People come from all over the world to play here. Racists do still pollute the waters, and institutional discriminations born out of everything from poverty, to gender, skin colour and class, gear so much of the landscape upon which football is played. That will likely always be the case.
Women’s football still attracts gobshite misogynists who can’t resist telling us how they’re sick of having it literally rammed, literally, mind you, down their throats. But increasingly, people scorn such stupidities and that scorn will only become more widespread. While men’s football still has issues to resolve about gay players, the women’s game has shown the way forward on this.
Abuse has shifted from the terraces to social media and looks like something that is out of control, or rather, has never had any control imposed on it worth the name. History will judge it as a tool which had the ability to both bring people together and tear them apart. It’s an ongoing conflict with no obvious path towards peace.
Whether the football on the pitch is better, worse or the same than at any time in the past, all depends on what you like. It’s faster. Is that better? It’s fitter. Is that better? The boots are like slippers, the ball is five times lighter than 50 years ago. Are these good things? There is no objective truth, it’s all subjective.
However strongly we feel, it’s just how we feel. It isn’t a fact. There are no facts to prove anything. If the money has ruined top football for you, the majority of football is not played for silly wages or transfer fees. And some players use their money and status to help the disadvantaged. The player I talked to for ‘Can We Have Our Football Back? Is still giving away everything he earns. Whatever turns you on, there’s somewhere in the football universe that will welcome your support.
VAR is hated by a large majority of fans, but VAR is probably inevitable in an era where football on TV is the financial boss of the game. So maybe all of us TV viewers are complicit in its creation. We don’t have to put up with it, but we probably will.
The pyramid is in a financial mess because the elite will not share enough of their money and the authorities seem craven for that elite approval so won’t demand it of them. As I say, the extreme right wing has won the economic war.
Yet there are also plenty of good people who own clubs, people who understand what the club means to locals and they run them responsibly. The squeaky wheels do tend to get all the grease, especially in the social media era, but they’re not everything.
And at core, at whatever level you want to watch it, football is still, well, its football innit? Chaos from start to finish. You can see someone strike a 30 yarder down in the sixth tier and you can see a multi-millionaire top-flight player fail to beat the first man with every corner all afternoon. There is great skill everywhere, and clownish clumsy stupidity too. Football is profoundly unequal financially, but on the pitch everyone will be a hero and everyone will be a zero and that’s how it always has been and how it will always be. Football is and always has been chaos and anyone who says it isn’t, who thinks it can be tamed by logic, spreadsheets and systems, doesn’t understand its true nature.
So 2023 will bring all the good and bad that football always brings. We need a moral compass to navigate it, but can’t dictate what that compass should be for every person, as much as we might want to. All we can do is be emotionally honest. It’s not our job as fans to sort out all of football’s problems, but neither is it our job to put our heads in the sand and ‘just stick to the football’.
I hope the game delivers some moments of joy and laughter for you in 2023. It always has and, God willing, for all the ups and down, ins and outs, trials and tribulations, it always will.
