The Rest Is History - 33. The Beautiful Game

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

It has been described as the most universal cultural mode there has ever been, but is football a worthwhile object of study for historians? Sports journalist and author Jonathan Wilson joins Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland to look at the history of the game and how it became Britain’s most successful export. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. films football beer and above all gambling filled up the horizon of their minds to keep them in control was not difficult so said george orwell in his dystopian masterpiece 1984 football or soccer to our american listeners for so long seen as the sport of the proles, has emerged as the single strongest element of modern day popular culture, breaking out from its working class stronghold and capturing the imagination of men and women of all ages and all classes. How did this happen and what does it mean that we have replaced nearly all forms of combat with the spectacle of 22 men kicking a ball around?

With me is Dominic Sandbrookok keen football fan hello tom responded in your your wolves shirt yeah or gold big wolves fan um one of the founding uh one of the founding clubs of the english football league of course and uh in the premiership yeah um i i'm a big um biller fan also one of the 12 founding clubs of the English Football League and in the Premiership. And joining us is Jonathan Wilson, who is a Sunderland supporter. Jonathan, Sunderland's neither of those two things, is it? Well, we call it the Premier League now, Tom, as I'm sure you're aware. And actually, you touch on a very, I think,

immediately you hit upon a critical point, which is, was the English league, as founded in 1888, really a national league when certain teams were banned from entering for being too far away? Can we really count Preston's two titles in those first two seasons as genuine league titles when essentially it was a Lancaster, or a Lancashire-West Midlands combination, a regional league.

Sunderland, of course, in their first season in the league, did exceptionally well and went on to win it three times in the first five seasons. This is precisely the way I knew he would behave if he'd got it on the podcast. And Tom, don't get me started on the 1913 FA Cup final because we know how Villa cheated there. Yeah, and so immediately I've given the ball away.

Wilson has broken and has scored already i mean the 1913 fa cup final between villa and sonland was so controversial jonathan they couldn't even play the charity shield the following august because sonland refused to take part because they're so outraged and i i hope you feel uh the requisite shame for that tom tom never feels any shame i can assure you of that so so so those listeners um who who are not familiar with jonathan's incredible work um on multiple football and sporting podcasts um in the media author of a range of fantastic books on football um jonathan um i wanted to ask you for those those who are familiar with your work and who may not even like football, is football a worthwhile object of study for historians?

And I'm going to give you a quote from the great historian Robert Coles, whose book for Sporting Life came out last year and i read a couple of weeks ago excellent book and he says about sport generally but this would work very well for football i think it is a major subject not in itself perhaps but in the way it is woven into almost everything else we do and he talks of sport and again by extension football one of england's great civil cultures so um this is obviously a history podcast not a sport podcast how would you convince people who who know nothing about football who might be skeptical about having this as a subject for a podcast that it's it's worthwhile for historians to look at i mean so on the one hand football is entirely trivial you know i recognize that the the details of who won what when and who scored which goals when

is largely irrelevant. But, I mean, David Goldblatt in his book, The Age of Football, which came out, what, two years ago, he makes the point that football now is the most universal cultural mode there has ever been. It is everywhere in the world.

I mean, I remember I was in Ethiopia in 2015 in Lalabela, and I was there to see the rock churches. And on the Saturday afternoon at lunchtime, I was in a restaurant and said, I quite want to watch Chelsea v Liverpool today. Where can I do it? And the restaurant manager said, oh, well, I'm knocking off.

Come with me. We went to this cafe. There's about 200 people in this cafe watching the TV. And then he said, well, if you want the real experience, we should go to one of the video halls. So we went then to watch Swansea v Arsenal. And there was just a big screen at the front of this, I don't even know what you call this,

a muddy bank with seats hammered into the bank. I would say probably 500 people in there. There was sort of tarpaulin over the top. You had to pay five beer or whatever to get in, you know, a notional fee. To me, I guess locals, it probably was quite significant. And this was one of three of these halls in this kind of quite small village. And there's all these cafes.

So I worked out that 20% of the male population, of the adult male population of of this village in Ethiopia, or watching the Premier League on any given Saturday afternoon. So this is something that takes up a huge amount of the emotional intellectual space of a huge number of people. And that then I think has two interesting consequences. So one is the very direct consequence of how politicians try to use football as a tool of propaganda. And the other is the point that Galeano makes, Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan poet, politician, theorist, who, as you know, Tom, I have severe doubts about. But the point he makes

that show me how you play and I'll tell you who you are, I think is very significant. That the way a culture's teams, the way a culture plays football, I think can tell you quite a lot about that culture, particularly when it's self-conscious as it is in the case of, say, Argentina. If I can just jump in, thinking about it from a historian's point of view, Tom, when you write about the Romans,

it would be weird for you not to mention gladiatorial games or chariot racing or any of the sort of the hobbies and the things that fascinated ordinary Romans. And for me, writing about post-war Britain, I mean, most people at any given moment didn't give a damn about the social contract or the details of Harold Wilson's plan to revive the economy, or indeed Margaret Thatcher's monetarist policies, the way they understood and structured their lives was obviously about a personal narrative, but it's often about a narrative that's not about political events. It's about sporting events or cultural events, music.

And to not take people's lives in their own terms and understand what matters to them, I think it's actually to miss what life was about but to put that to ask jonathan i mean so the romans they have their gladiatorial sports um you know the greeks have their athletics the peoples of mesoamerica have that have their ball games um but football is coming out of a presumably, a specific cultural context, a national context. It does presumably matter that it emerges specifically from England.

I mean, or could it just have emerged from anywhere? I mean, Jonathan, wasn't the thing that FIFA said that actually its origins lay in China or something? Have I misremembered that? I remember them saying that. I remember Sepp Blatter making that point very explicitly. Sorry, go ahead, Trough. Well, I mean, of course, Sepp Blatter would say whatever. Sepp Blatter making that point very explicitly. Sorry, go ahead, Trough. Well, I mean,

of course, Sepp Blatter would say whatever. Sepp Blatter is the former president of FIFA,

which is the governing body of the sport. He would say whatever was useful to him politically at the time.

I mean, Sepp Blatter saying something is almost certainly guaranteed it's not true rather than the reverse.

So it's not true? China didn't invent football what is clearly true is that lots of different cultures practice ball sports so we have

I think it's 5,000 years ago in China which does appear to be the earliest evidence we find but there's also stories of I remember going to the Roman fort

in South Shields to Arbea as a kid and being told that Roman soldiers there would kick around the heads of their enemies who they decapitated in battle. I think in Columbus's logs, he notes when he gets to the

Caribbean islands, he sees islanders playing a game with a rubber ball. So clearly ball sports have existed in many different cultures and many different forms. Football, as we know it today, very clearly comes from a series of meetings held at Freemasons Tavern near Covent Garden in London in late 1863, which were an attempt by representatives of teams who would come out of the schools and universities to try and get one game. But each school, each university

had its own form of football and they wanted a unified set of laws so that you know when you came from your school you got to university you didn't have these long arguments about what football was you had a set of laws you could play by these schools are public schools well as i say that's the fascination isn't it that from the start you have this tension between the so-called working man's game and the elite you know public school origins of the codified game don't you think that tension's always been there yeah that tension has absolutely always been there because the people who were who were setting those laws are as you say they're from the public schools uh whereas the first club founded is in sheffield um you know It had been founded a few years earlier.

And that was a working class club, a working man's club. So, yeah, that tension has always been there. And, of course, this is why you get the huge arguments over professionalism, which eventually is legalised in 1885. So, Jonathan, the key thing really is about laws, because presumably also you have these kind of ancient traditions that go back to the Middle Ages of towns just kind of kicking pigs' bladders through the streets or whatever. And that's kind of organised chaos, really. There aren't rules.

I mean, that's the rule. There are no rules. Whereas in the 19th century, it's not just football, it's cricket, rugby, tennis, all these sports. It's the codification that really makes them what they become. and the victorians clearly had this great gift for codification and and so you know in any meaningful sense modern football comes from these meetings in 1863 and if you look at the 12 laws they they draw they're remarkably similar to what we have today i mean there's been a series of changes particularly recently um but essentially, those laws are recognisable as football as it is today. Now, I think this is another interesting avenue of what are these games

that the schools are playing? And they seem to derive from a mob game of the villages. And why did you get these games? Normally, they'd be held on, say, Shrove Tuesday or some other feast day, that two villages or two halves of the same village would play a game, which would involve trying to get a pig's bladder

or a sack of hay or whatever your ball happens to be from one end to the other. And there's various theories as to why that should have grown up. One of the most interesting of which, which I mean, it seems plausible, but obviously there's no way of knowing, is that this is some sort of vestige of a fertility rate. And so because of the goals, as it were,

in these early games are often holes in the ground, the placing of a spherical object in the hole represents the fertilisation of the earth by the sun, which is then this great irony that why do the public schools... I'm sceptical. Well, yeah, I'm sceptical, but it's... It's a great theory, though, isn't it? I'm sure James Fraser would have believed this.

Because, you know, for James Fraser, everything was a fertility rate. But then you have this beautiful irony that in the public schools, what drives sport? Why is sport so important? Why is it so central to the curriculum? And it's muscular Christianity. It's this idea that you want to toughen boys up for running the empire, but also this terrible fear of what they call solipsism, i.e. masturbation,

that if you leave a boy alone, he's going to partake of this debilitating act. So what you need is him to be running about on a field with loads of other boys performing a fertility rite. Well, before Tom gets in, I want to get in and ask the question that he undoubtedly will ask if I leave him unchecked about muscular Christianity. So a lot of the, well, certainly a large number of this sort of original clubs were founded by churches, weren't they? So Christianity was always, was it because of social control, would you say,

trying to sort of domesticate the surging passions of the growing industrial cities? Do you think that's part of it? There may have been some of that. I think also there was a recognition that sport was healthy, healthier than drinking, for instance. And you see this in various forms in various countries. So, for instance, one of the earliest clubs in Russia

is founded by the Charnak brothers who are from Blackburn. They ran the Morozov Mills these textile mills just outside Moscow and they set up a football club because if they didn't their workers spent Saturday afternoons

just knocking back the vodka and they recognised that playing football was better for them than that so I think there's sort of a sense that

football is a sport is a good in and of itself. And what I think is then fascinating is that this is an idea propagated by muscular Christianity through the 19th century, but then between the wars in Central Europe, it's propagated by muscular Judaism. And so you have, for instance, Chakorach, who are the specifically Zionist club of Vienna.

And they win the Austrian League in 1925. But they are there to promote muscular Judaism and to raise funds for Zionism. And just going back to what you, Jonathan, what you were saying about industrialists spreading football to Russia, the 12 founding clubs of the Football League are basically Lancashire and Midlands clubs. So very much the kind of the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution. And you think about the you know the nickname for for clubs gunners and hammers and so on i mean these are industrial names is is is is football as it emerges in britain we talked about the public school tradition but it but is really i mean the kind of the bedrock is is that it's an industrial sport it It's a sport for industrial workers, industrial towns.

Would that be fair? Yes, I think so. I mean, you see certainly the early, the towns that have clubs that are successful early are all the big industrial towns and cities of the Midlands and North. I mean, we don't have a London champion until 1931. So the league begins in 1888. And I think that's

significant that you sort of see... This is a pattern that's repeated across the world, that in totalitarian states, success is always focused on the capital. In most democratic developed countries, it's the big industrial towns. And it's only later when capital becomes much more focused on the capital. So you see in Italy, for instance, Turin and Milan are two successful cities. Rome is not successful at all by comparison. But you see that pattern repeated, that it's the provincial cities. And I don't know whether that's because there's something specific about industry and obviously one of the key things in the growth of football as a spectator sport is the factory act which gives workers a the Saturday afternoon off so what are they going to do give them football

to go and watch or whether it's a sense that provincial cities need to express their identity need you know the football club has become an expression of local pride and so there's investment in the club. And it's probably a mix of those two factors. That's true of someone like Bilbao, isn't it? I mean, you know, these places that define themselves in opposition to the sort of... To the centre.

Yeah, to the national metropole. I mean, Bilbao is a very specific case. I mean, Atletico, one of only three clubs in Spain, never to have been relegated, which given their budget is incredible. But obviously they take on a whole huge amount of weight of

Basque nationalism. It's yeah, Atletico in Bilbao is a very particular case. Obviously, Barcelona has taken on the idea of Catalan nationalhood as well. So now that we've moved abroad, let's talk about the export of football. So football presumably follows the empire.

It follows, what, the merchant ships? No, no, I don't think that's true, actually. Because if you look at the big imperial, the big colonies, Australia, Canada, India. Okay. the big colonies you know australia canada india okay could i jonathan i've got a question for you from um a spurs fan called simon sharma who i gather has also may have written the old history he dabbles doesn't he dabbles but his main focus is is uh is football um and he asks why didn't football take off as the sport of the 19th century British Empire while cricket did? The honest answer is I don't know, but I wonder if it's something to do with class,

because where football is explored successfully is in what I guess you could call the informal empire. Something like Argentina, for instance, is the great example that, although it was never part of the empire, there was clearly enormous British influence there. Britain ran the meat industry and the processing plants and the money supply, the banking system. I mean, the French seemed to have controlled the docks, but Britain clearly had an enormous political and economic influence over Argentina.

And the English influence or the British influence there, it's a Scottish influence really, is enormous and that's because of the schools that are founded, it's because of companies working in the sort of rapidly industrialising Buenos Aires. So I think

one of the six teams who, I don't think in the first year but I think it's the second or third year in the Argentinian League, which was founded early 1890s. One of the teams is a Scottish plumbing company who were there to put in the sewage works. So it's very much,

organized football is very British there, but it rapidly takes off. And what you then have is in 1913 you have the first Argentinian Argentinian champion

so you had Anglo champions all the way through 1913 Racing Club wins the title and this is I mean it's absolutely

the right moment symbolically because this is the moment at which Britain begins to retreat from Argentina and the coming of the First World War

and Argentina sort of takes of the First World War and Argentina sort of takes control of its own affairs and you have around that time this huge discussion in Argentina of que es Argentina, what is it to be Argentinian? So Leopoldo Lagones, one of the great poets of the early 20th century in Argentina,

gives a series of lectures in 1912 on exactly the subject, que es Argentina. And the reason why this is fascinating from a football point of view is that one of the very few things that unifies this, this great disparate nation, you have a new nation, the indigenous populations essentially wiped out in a series of genocidal wars in the late 19th century.

And the beginning of the first world war, you look at the, the, the makeup of Argentina and it's a million Spaniards, 800,000 Italians, 400,000 Northern European Jews, 400,000 Arabs, 40,000 Germans, 30,000 French, 30,000 British and Irish, all from very different places, very different ideas of what life should be. But what they all agree on is that when the team in the blue and white stripes plays a match against chile or uruguay or brazil they want them to win and presumably also hovering in the back is um a way of asserting independent cultural independence from england well not even in the background i mean absolutely in the foreground and this is again this is what a lot of talk about national styles of football i think can be a little bit tenuous. With Argentina, it is absolutely central.

So to begin with, football is a British import. And so wrestling winning the title is a huge moment for Argentina saying, OK, we had our independence from Spain in 1816, but this is some kind of new independence. And then this question of chaos in Trinidad is problematic because Lugones locates it in the gaucho,

the cowboy who's controlling the great herds of cattle across the pampas. And you can see why that's attractive.

The gaucho is this very romantic figure. He has this great virtuosity, but he's solitary, he's brave, he's battling the elements. But the problem is the gaucho culture is dead by 1912 and the British have killed it. The British import wire. And as soon as you have wire fences, you don't need a gaucho. So the political clout of a gaucho in the early to mid 19th century is destroyed

by a man called Henry Newton, who brings in wire. And then when you get barbed wire 20 or 30 years later, that's obviously even better for keeping your cows in the right place. So the great epic of Argentinian literature is Martin Fiera, which is published in two volumes in the 1870s. And that's about, it's really right at the end of a gaucho period. And it's, I mean,

I think it's quite an ambivalent work about gaucho culture, but of course people don't actually read it. They just like the idea of a gaucho. So you find in the late 19-teens and early 1920s, you get gaucho clubs in Buenos Aires where people dress in their idea of what a gaucho would look like, and they go to these huge asados, the huge barbecues.

And the asados, grilling meat, is still an enormous part of Argentinian social life. And you get people like Borges and Adolfo Boixasaras, who sort of openly laugh at this, saying, you know, a gaucho wouldn't have dressed like this. You're dressed as Rudolph Valentino. You're not dressed as a gaucho.

And there's a recognition this is vaguely preposterous in an increasingly urban society that the gaucho has no place. So where can you find that spirit of a gaucho? And it's found in the pibé, in the urchin of the street. And you get a series of articles in El Grafico, a hugely successful influential football magazine,

a sports magazine, through the 1920s, pointing out that the pibé and the way the pibé plays football, that is somehow representative of the soul of Argentina. 1920s, pointing out that the Pee-Bay and the way the Pee-Bay plays football, that is somehow representative of the soul of Argentina. And this is clearly in opposition to Britain because the British football, as is propagated

by the British in Argentina, was through the schools. It's on these great grassy playing fields. It's about running and about strength. You have a teacher there with a whistle if things get out of hand to control things. The Pee Bay playing on the Potrero

on the vacant lot of the growing city. He's playing on this hard uneven surface. It's maybe 20, 30 a side on a tiny pitch. You've got to be able to control the ball.

You've got to have technical virtuosity. You've got to be able to look after yourself. You've got to have this streetwise character. There's no teacher there with a whistle to stop things when they get out of hand, you've got to be able to look after yourself, you've got to have this streetwise character. There's no teacher there with a whistle to stop things when they get out of hand. You've got to be able to look after yourself.

You've got to have sharp elbows. And so the P-Bay becomes this new gaucho. It's a gaucho in an urban environment. It's the representation. This is Maradona, right? And then you get, in 1928, you get the famous editorial

by Bob Cotto, who, like most Argentinians, most great Argentinians, is actually Uruguayan, the editor of El Grafico. And he writes this piece saying, if you erect a statue

to the spirit of Argentinian football, it's the pibe with his mane of untamed black hair, his teeth worn down by eating yesterday's bread, his vest eaten away by the mice of care.

And he had a picaresque smile on his face, a twinkle in his eye. And if you gave somebody that description, who is this? 100% of people would say it's Diego Maradona. And this is 49 years before Maradona makes his international debut. And that's why Maradona comes with this.

He comes with a force of prophecy. He is Christ answering Ezekiel's call. I think it's time for the referee. I hear the referee's whistle. Let's have a break and we'll come back and change ends and see what the second half brings. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Well, it's a podcast of two halves. Welcome back to The Rest Is History.

We're talking to football writer and historian Jonathan Wilson. Let's pivot to the modern game and its place as a global sport. We've got a question here from Bruno Leiter. Can we say the world is culturally appropriating our culture when football is played? Is football our greatest gift to the world? I mean, it's hard to think of any greater tool of British soft power. It's hard to think of any British invention that's been taken on by so many different countries and so many different cultures. And of course, the Premier League is by a long way

the most successful league in the world in terms of viewership and in terms of TV rights. But is it really an English league anymore? A lot of the players aren't British, a lot of the managers aren't British, a lot of the club owners aren't British, and a lot of the viewers aren't British. And that actually presents us with quite a difficult tension as to what is a football club. Because I grew up in Sunderland. I'm a Sunderland fan. Sunderland is an expression of my relationship with a home

I left 23 years ago. My relationship with my dad was almost entirely conducted through football. It was the one thing we did together was to go and watch football. Why do I go back to the Northeast now? It's to see mates and go and watch football. It was the one thing we did together was to go and watch football. Why do I go back to the Northeast now? It's to see mates and go and watch football. And if a football wasn't there, I probably wouldn't go and see those mates.

So for me, and I suspect many other people who grew up in provincial northern towns in England or Britain, football is a way of processing our relationship with our homes. It's a very profound part of our identity. And worse than ever to win anything. And as we record this, we're two days from a major cup final,

which isn't just some tin pot little thing that's only for small teams. It's one of those paint trophies or something. What is it? It's the chequered trade. I can't believe you demean the Papa John's trophy like that. Papa John's trophy. And so part of me wants to say, yeah, football is for the community that's grown up around the club.

And, you know, a lot of clubs do a lot of great social work in their own communities. But at the same time, can I really turn around to the kid in Bangalore who has grown up from the age of five or six, going to bed late at night to watch his beloved Manchester United and he saves up a little bit every week. And eventually when he's 30, he can afford his trip to go to Old Trafford to watch Manchester United 1, Burnley 1. Can I really say that his right to support United or his sense of affiliation is any less than mine?

And I don't really think you can say that. I think this raises so many interesting questions, but one I just wanted to get in on. It's the nub of the issue of globalisation, right? It is. But one on the chronology, though. I mean, we all grew up at the same time, roughly, sort of 70s, early 80s,

at a point when English football was widely thought to be dying. And actually, having written about 70s, 80s Britain, you know, writing the story, it often surprises me that it didn't. Because attendances were in free fall the game was associated overwhelmingly in the public mind not just in britain but around the world with hooliganism you know england disgraced themselves at tournament after tournament with their hooligan behavior english fans disgraced themselves again and again were banned from europe

in 1985 and at that point i, if you were a betting man, you would say this is a dead sport. It's a Victorian sport, born in industry, in the world of the church, in muscular Christianity, all of which have gone. Why will it endure? And actually the question is, why did it endure? Why didn't it die?

Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. It seems to me incredible that my mam let me go and watch football. Because there's the three major disasters. You have a Bradford fire, which kills 56 people in 1985. Then Heysel, which is Liverpool versus Juventus in the European Cup final. Hooliganism leading to a wall collapsing, killing 38 Juventus in the European Cup final hooliganism leading to a wall collapsing killing 30 38

Juventus fans and then you have Hillsborough in 89 the terrible crush in 90 96

killed in an FA Cup semi-final which was to do with crowd safety issues and the design of the stadium and policing rather than hooliganism per se although of course if it hadn't been hooliganism there wouldn't have been fences

at the front of the stand um so yeah the idea that and some of the some of the things i saw as a kid going to football i mean i remember quite clearly being i don't know must have been 15 or 16 being in a game at birmingham and seeing something i wouldn't say he was a mate but I knew him we were in the car driving away from the game saw him getting punched in the face and his jaw was broken

and you saw him go down and you sort of think should we stop and help and then he's like no we can't I remember being at Derby once stopped at traffic lights and people kicking

in the side of the car and you went back every week and I've got no idea why we did that it seems bizarre that we did it and you're right the stadiums were crumbling. There's a smell of urine about everything.

There was that sense of hostility the whole time. And then that begins to change early 90s that you have a Taylor Report which mandates all-seater stadiums for top flight clubs, which clearly does a lot to make ground safer. It makes crowd control a lot easier. It makes the environment a lot more comfortable. It begins to attract different people. It led to a rise in prices, which, I mean, Lord Justice Taylor specifically says

there is no reason for a rise in prices, but prices double mean, Lord Justice Taylor specifically says there is no reason for a rise in prices, but prices double over the course of three or four years, which again clearly affects the makeup of who's going. You also have Italia 90, which from an English point of view, I think has a huge effect on how we viewed football and somehow... Because it becomes associated with opera

rather than with paganism. Well, yeah, and things, moments, you know, it's a great moment of national unity of everybody watching a team actually, an England team actually playing well in a major tournament, which was the first time it happened in my lifetime. And also Gazza's tears and

the sense that masculinity didn't have to be aggressive. It could be this softer side to it. But also that it is in Italy and you have got Pavarotti and it suddenly comes to be associated with rather desirable middle-class Mediterranean holidays rather than with kind of, I don't know, kind of rainy subways and wolves or whatever.

What is this? I mean, that sounds like that was your experience of it, Tom. And I'm sure that that was what people thought. I mean, in the 90s, it becomes a middle class sport as well as a working class sport. Is that the cliche or is that not true? Because I think middle class people had always liked football, but they hadn't gone. Yeah, I think they'd watched it on TV. So when TV, there is an argument among football historians

that what happens when TV comes in is TV actually sort of nationalises football. And middle-class people who wouldn't have gone to games and now watch. So at my prep school, which was basically a Victorian school preserved in Aspig in 1980s England, every boy had a team, collected football stickers, watched on TV, but virtually none went to games.

And they were all pretty sort of middle-class West Midlands children. So I think already there was a middle-class element. But maybe Jonathan would agree that what changed in the 90s was that they actually started to go to the games. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot had already gone to the games. I mean, I was middle lot had already gone to the games. I mean, I was middle class of some denomination

and I went, my dad had always gone, his dad had always gone. I mean, there's a story my dad used to tell. Sunderland played Manchester United in 1964 in an FA Cup replay and the official attendance was 64,000, but the gate collapsed and God knows how many got in.

But my dad worked sort of, I don't know, a mile from me. His mother lived very close to the 200 yards from Rucker Park and he worked about a mile away. So he would walk home at night, he'd go and have his tea and he'd go to the stadium. And because there's so many people there this night, he couldn't get home. And so he went to the ground in his suit carrying a briefcase.

And his story was always, he saw all these other blokes in suits carrying their briefcases because they'd all found exactly the same problem. So I think, I don't know if figures actually exist for this, but I think it's far too easy to suggest that 80s purely working class sport, 90s purely middle class sport, but certainly the proportion changes.

And you also get things like All Played Out, Fever Pitch, Football Against the Enemy, these three canonical works of football literature, which persuade publishers, for instance, that football is something that the reading classes want to read about. I think football coverage in the newspapers changes. I think what you see as a decade goes on. So you get kind of Oxford graduates writing about it.

Yeah, you get post-lancers like me writing about it. People like you. But this is actually quite a serious kind of shift. And I came slightly too late for this, but within the press box, there were a lot of tensions around the turn of the millennium between the old school who had not gone to university and the new university-educated football writers. And one of the reasons that you suddenly get this wave

of university-educated football writers is that football writing is suddenly seen as a desirable profession in a way it never would have been in the 80s or early 90s. And you have Sky and the Premier League as well. That's the other factor. But yeah, come on. But could I also ask about the structure of employment and the gradual impact of capital,

which is the kind of Marxist perspective that I know Dominic will be keen to explore. I love that kind of stuff. Love it. He would have been in the early 90s, wouldn't he? Basically, basically. I mean, football in England for most of the 20th century is based on a kind of apprentice system, isn't it?

It's, you know, you get Bobby Moore turning up when he's 15 and cleaning out the toilets and things. And even Billy Wright hanging out with his landlady, even when he's captain of England. And the amount of money that footballers are earning is minusc compared to to what they then go on to earn what is it that change how is it that that footballers go from from basically earning the amount of money that that a skilled manual worker would be earning in the 50s and 60s to to kind of being stratospheric earners now what's that what's the process that in it that facilitates that well you had a maximum wage until 1961 which was 20 pounds a week season, £18 a week out of the season. And that was flat across the board.

So you might have played 100 times for England or you might be a talented 17-year-old and you would get 20 quid a week. And obviously some people earned less than that. And then a series of court cases and that maximum wage is lifted. Famously, Johnny Haynes immediately goes to £100 a week at Fulham, which is largely published by Tommy Trinder,

the great musical impresario who ran Fulham. But even then, you didn't get huge wages. So Manchester United and Liverpool, you had Matt Busby and Bill Shankly, the two managers, and Shankly certainly promoted this sort of, football is this great socialist ideal. And yet they stitched it up to now be earned more than 35 quid a week if you played Manchester or Liverpool.

So Shankly was just as exploitive when he had the need to be as anybody else. I mean, football is beyond anything else a game of profound hypocrisy and always has been. But you also then have what was called the retain and transfer system where a club would hold your license to play.

So even if you even if you want to leave even if you're refusing to play they could stop you signing for another league club. And that only ended beginning of the 80s. And then you have

the Bosman ruling comes in in, what, 96, which means anybody who's out of contract is entitled to a free transfer rather than the fee being set by a tribunal. And that gives players much more power to determine their own futures. So it's a kind of liberalising,

liberalising of trade structures. It's Thatcherism. It is. I think what's really striking, Tom, is how late footballers move to genuinely wealthy levels. So if you read accounts of footballers in the seventies and eighties, the sort of Kevin Keegan's and Trevor Brookings, I mean, they would give interviews to football magazines

and they would show you inside their lovely home and they'd show off their new lawnmower and their kind of, you know, their, their Austin Allegro or whatever. And their lives were really not so different from, you know, a reasonably prosperous kind of middle class, you know, middle manager. Yeah, I mean, you look at Bobby Charlton. Bobby Charlton, I think, is one of the more sensible footballers. And when he decided he was going to become a footballer at age 15, he leaves Ashington to go to Manchester United and there's an uncle of his ran a green grocers

and he said to him how much do I need to set up a green grocers and this uncle says about £2,000 and so Bobby Charlton thinks right 20 year career I'll save up £100 a year and then buy a green grocers when I'm finished Well that was a classic thing wasn't it run a sports shop, run a pub I mean I remember in late 90s, so at a point where football was starting to earn

about, what, £20,000 a week, perhaps something like that, talking to an American historian friend of mine about this. And I did this sort of stock thing that people did, which is to say, it's terrible they earn so much, you know, the sort of performative outrage, if you like. And he said, what I can't understand as an American is how they earn so little. There is so much money in this game, and compared with the US sports stars, why on earth is it taking so long

for them to realise their bargaining power? Well, and the question I always ask when somebody kind of complains about how much footballers earn is, where do you think the money in the game should go? Is it better if it goes to the sheikh in Abu Dhabi or the hedge fund manager in New York but that's one of the interesting things about the globalized football isn't it that the club itself often makes remarkably little money and basically acts as a middleman to take money from tv companies and give it to footballers and their agents so you don't go

you don't invest in a football club if you want to be rich because basically you're handing a lot of money to your... Well, you didn't. I mean, I think since financial fair play, regulations have come in over the last decade or so, I think now you can get rich owning a top successful football club. And the negotiations are going on now

about the restructuring of the Champions League, I think will increase that. But that's only the very very top right? The very very top yeah yeah. And people who invest in football clubs now when they invest in them lower

down the idea is to get them up a division to essentially spin them and sell them on and a lot of the takeovers are leveraged so you're not actually investing very much of your own money

you're taking a debt that's got the club as a guarantee. Do you think that the kind of hostility to the money that star footballers earn is a kind of vestige of expression of class hostility? I mean, people don't complain about actors, Hollywood stars getting that amount of money.

Yeah. I mean, look, I think there's two things there. One is it kind of is disgusting that Mesut Ozil was earning 17 times in a week what a nurse would earn in a year. There's something wrong about that in a wider sense. But at the same time, yeah, I think there's a class and probably a race-based thing that there is something still that offends people about the idea of a young black kid from Lewisham making 20 million pounds a year.

And what about the future? So football is becoming, I mean, it's incredibly popular worldwide, but it's becoming increasingly stratified, less competitive, arguably. Is there a scenario, I mean, this will be anathema to you, but there must be some kind of scenario at some point where football dies. I mean, everything dies in history. You know, nothing, people don't do chariot racing anymore. So at what point, how do you see it dwindling? I mean, let's say after we're all gone, what would be the sort of the process by which football would would fall from grace yeah i mean i think that's really interesting you know especially uh in the

context of these negotiations which which are happening at the moment about how the champions league may be restructured uh which essentially the rich clubs are trying to stitch it up so they get even more money and so they're insulated from the possibility of failure. But Agnelli, the chairman of Juventus, the biggest, most successful Italian club, he has suggested that football is not getting take up among 18 to 24 year olds. And I mean, he's clearly a clown. Let's not think about the bush about this. Agnelli is not a man whose view I would necessarily trust. But it's interesting he's raised this issue and he's suggesting modern attention spans

mean that people are not going to be prepared to sit down and watch a 90-minute game. Not good news for test cricket. Well, quite. And one of his ideas is you sell subscription packages so you only watch the last 15 minutes of games, which clearly is ludicrous that's like watching

the last act of a play or something that's completely demented his argument his analogy is if you're watching a golf tournament the only action

takes place over the last six holes and you're sort of like yeah but if if one player is already ten shots clear

that's actually the bit you want to see and equally if you turn on a game and Liverpool are already beating Burnley 5-0... Sorry, I keep picking on Burnley. I apologise. Our producer is a Burnley fan.

I didn't know that. You're going to get cut off, Jonathan. Why would you watch the last 15 minutes? It just doesn't make any sense. But I think the wider point are younger people still watching football there's definitely an issue

in terms of going to the game I mean I remember years ago it must be 15 years ago now talking to a director at Manchester City so this is before the Abu Dhabi takeover and him saying

his great fear was he'd looked at the average age of season ticket holders at Manchester City and in the previous decade it had gone up by eight and a half years. So it was the same people buying the tickets and kids weren't coming in. Because one of the reasons for that is it's really expensive.

When I started going, it was two quid or £2.50 for an under-16 to get in. And you were under-16 until you were 21 in those days, unless you were particularly unlucky with your development of facial hair or whatever but yeah if you were a parent

if you were if you were a father with your three kids wanting to go to a game now you're talking about 150 quid to take them to a Premier League game

Jonathan I think we're almost into injury time but just on a slightly sunnier note, of course, there is a massive growth area in football,

which is women's football. And I did a kind of radio show, oddly, about this. You know nothing about either of those things, football or women. The Dick Kerr Ladies, Jonathan. The Dick Kerr Ladies. Dick's ladies ladies um and uh what was it lily par um the chain smoking toothless striker who could break a man's leg with a penalty kick and they were massive weren't they over during the first world war and after because there wasn't any other

football and then it got kind of crushed and evil industrialist men stopped the women from playing but now that is coming back so that is a huge growth area it should be a growth area yeah so yeah you're right the the the the normal league the the men's league the professional league which have been ongoing since 1888 is abandoned uh in 1915 and you then get a series of regional games happen, but also women's football really takes off. And the Dixie Co ladies would get crowds of tens of thousands. Then 1921, the FA decides to outlaw all women's football played on grounds belonging to clubs affiliated to the FA. So effectively, it kills it at a stroke.

Now, why they did that, I think has never quite been adequately explained. I think partly it was some kind of moral panic. There was something somehow unseemly about women playing sport. And it wasn't just football that women had, where women's sport was sort of a long way behind. You know, the Robert Cole's book,

You Were 30, talks about how there's very little record of women playing sports in the 19th century I think there were some England, Scotland football internationals in 1881, 1882 but it's clearly lagging a long way behind, there's some sort of sense that this wasn't

quite right, this wasn't quite proper but I think also the FA were driven by this fear that the clubs which obviously had terrible wars, had been getting no money coming in, a lot of players had been killed, that they were going to lose fans to this new form of the sport. And I think they were acting to protect that. And that ban is not lifted until 1968.

So disgracefully late. And the Women's Super League only went fully professional two years ago, three years ago? Right. Well, that's's jonathan i'm blowing the whistle there it's full time um we've avoided the lottery of penalties can't thank you enough jonathan um absolute podcasting technical masterclass there um we are releasing the rest is history twice a week currently so do keep an eye out for us on mondays and thursdays please send in your questions we tweet the subject matters up for discussion about a week ahead. Just reply to either myself

or Dominic with your question. Thanks so much for joining us. If you run now, you can avoid the traffic outside our metaphorical stadium. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.