In April my friend and former colleague Mark Perryman’s excellent edited collection of essays 1966 And Not All That is published by Repeater Books, the guys responsible for the superb Zero Books. I am really pleased to say I have a chapter in this book alongside numerous fabulous writers on sport, politics and culture collected together by Mark. It celebrates and critiques all the facets of the fiftieth anniversary of England’s July 1966 victory against West Germany at Wembley in the football World Cup they hosted that year, including nasty cold war nationalism – ‘One World Cup and Two World Wars’ as England fans used to chant. Oddly the year 1966 was also the ‘moment’ when my own commitment to playing football, rather than watching it, started to wane; it was the moment of ‘becoming’ a fan of modern football, a moment that to some extent I still inhabit today in my professional work and my digital leisure time. Modern football, modernism in football, also, dialectically, contained within it the seeds of anti-modern football, its polar opposite. It was also, in my view, the beginnings of what we refer to today as ‘anti-modern football’. Being against mercenary and overpaid players, prohibitive ticket prices, sterile stadiums, the alienation of traditional fans who wish to stand safely, and so on, is to be ‘against modern football’, to be against the relentless commodification and corruption of the global game.
I was 14 in 1966 but did not get to the World Cup Final. I was washing dishes in a seedy Blackpool seafront cafe. A trip of a lifetime to the World Cup Final itself for yours truly was not to be. But my father went to the memorable event on his own, taking a train to London from nearby Crewe, getting in early and standing for hours on the Wembley terraces; he came back home to Blackpool triumphantly, holding up the precious World Cup Final programme and told us proudly he had cheered England’s 4-2 victory with the bulk of the other 100,000. On the controversial England third goal which bounced down over or on the line he said straight away that Liverpool’s Roger Hunt was on hand and could have finished the move off if he had thought there was any doubt about the goal’s legitimacy. Instead Hunt wheeled away celebrating the goal. I can’t remember my father being bothered about the England national team again. It was Blackburn Rovers games he was always interested in until his death at the age of 90 in 2012. In fact I can’t remember any of my friends in Lancashire being England football fans: England were a Southern team to them and club allegiance was all. We all supported the England cricket team though. My mother, a high Tory if ever there was one, had apparently opined after watching the World Cup Final on TV that ‘we always were a great nation’! The family connection to football culture actually was significant. My maternal grandfather, John Parkinson Hully, was a well known British modernist designer who had hosted for eighteen months the Bauhaus’ Marcel Breuer in Bristol when the Nazis forced him out of Germany in the mid-1930s. The British Bauhaus! He had no interest in sport though. My paternal grandfather did play football as a goalkeeper for Lancaster and Morecambe and had a trial once for Bolton Wanderers.
Cold war? Cold modernity more like. I have consistently theorised postmodernism as always already within modernity, a modernity which has multiple facets, or modernities. As today’s global force, neo-liberalism, emerged with its full force in the early 1970s, a colder, much more dangerous modernity beckoned after the ‘hot’ modernity of the mid-1960s. We are still in this era which pushes on ever deeper around the globe, if a little disrupted by the earth shattering event of the Global Financial Crisis and the post-crash condition after 2008. 2016 itself has begun with predictions of a new Global Finanical Crisis. Within a year of 1966, football fandom in Britain was manifestly changing. Skinhead, or ‘hard mods’, started to ‘take ends’ (other fans’ kops or main terraces) in 1967 and overnight an entire hooligan memoir industry was born, featuring an alternative, ‘low’ culture sports journalism about who ran from whom and how and where, not to mention a whole criminology of ‘soccer deviance’. With hindsight the 1966 World Cup was the highpoint, not the beginning, of the ‘cool modernism’ of professional football. The period 1963-1966 was a mod (literally ‘modernist)’ era, never to be repeated, however many mod revivals there were to be in the next fifty years. And it applied to football, too. All the icons were there: Bobby Moore, Lev Yashin, Pele and George Best (not at the World Cup because he was from Northern Ireland, but a background presence all the while, eventually enshrined photographically on a Wedding Present album cover and lauded by Steven Patrick Morrissey in his autobiography). The speeded-up (in several senses) mod culture of football (later an inspiration for football casuals) contained the seeds of what I later called ‘accelerated culture’, everything (history, media, politics, culture) speeding back on itself. The iconic political events of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China and May 68 in Europe were to speed up in the wake of the 1966 World Cup as football waited for its own great leap forward.
