The game's gone
Faulty memories of ageing men
‘The Football’ is back this weekend. By which I mean, of course, the headache-inducing, never-ending banter-fest of the domestic season, rather than the comparatively uncomplicated joys of an international summer tournament (well done, the Lionesses). Some1 might call this the ‘proper’ football, Clive, but I’m not sure I’m all that bothered about it anymore.
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Until recently, I used to tell myself that I still enjoyed a bit of club football; not so much that I needed to subscribe to one or more of the channels that show all the top-level stuff, but enough to watch the FA Cup Final or catch Match of the Day occasionally.
Increasingly, though, I’ve found myself insufficiently engaged to sustain even that bare minimum level of interest. Falling asleep during Match of the Day is now a regular occurrence, while this year’s final coverage mentioned Crystal Palace’s 1990 FA Cup run so often, I found myself Googling the members of that team in search of trivia, mainly to confirm things I sort of knew already (yes, that England friendly against France in which Geoff Thomas made a disastrous attempt to chip the ‘keeper was indeed his last international cap) rather than watching the match itself.
Even though (spoiler for the 2025 cup final, if you haven’t seen it) Palace ended up making history by winning the game, it was the kind of victory in which they took an early lead and then held on for dear life thereafter as an infinitely better-resourced side queued up to take pot shots at their goal.
While half-watching the match and searching on Wikipedia to find out what happened to John Salako, and whether shape-throwing former manager Alan Pardew used to play as a midfielder or a forward, I started to form the notion that the match was boring because football wasn’t as good as it used to be. Despite being aware of the possible implications of such a thought, even as it was forming, I had it anyway: ‘Didn’t underdog FA Cup victories used to be a bit more exciting than this?’
Based on no real evidence, or even concrete examples that I could call to mind, I had managed to arrive at the conclusion that the game was definitely better when I was young; that in some imaginary and non-specific equivalent game from 30 years ago, the underdog would not only have beaten the higher-ranked team, but played them off the park, earning the victory not just through grit and determination but through a superior attacking performance.2
It’s a dangerous time in a middle-aged man’s life to start having these thoughts, as it seems like an early symptom of developing more sinister and wide-ranging opinions. During my last experience of watching a live match in a pub I sat near a quartet of shirt-wearing fans tucking into a roast dinner with their backs to the action. As their team went behind, one of them (whose shirt bore the number ‘69’ below a semi-rude nickname) glanced up at the screen and said, without any hint of irony, that he didn’t really agree with the modern phenomenon of passing the ball to team-mates and simply leathering it upfield was ‘proper football’.
Thinking that, in modern parlance, ‘the game’s gone’, is a slippery slope. And yet, when an administrative error at home led to me having access to live coverage of the Champions League final, the showpiece match of modern European football, I found myself observing footage of the nu-metal band Linkin Park playing a pre-match show (which, bizarrely, was not shown in full) as well as repeated adverts for the new Superman film in which the cast attempted to draw parallels between football and the plight of their movie characters, it wouldn’t have taken much encouragement to draw those words from my lips.
(I fell asleep during the match, too.)
But, just as I was wondering about whether I was about to turn into a grumpy old git complaining about sport ruined by modern commercialism and gimmickry, I realised that the football of my youth was transformed by modern commercialism and gimmickry, and I absolutely loved it.
I came to football in the early 90s, after a decade during which the English game had been a muddy, unglamorous affair conducted by moderately-paid men of various shapes and sizes in front of dwindling crowds housed in dilapidated stadia. But the Premier League’s ‘Whole New Ball Game’ soon followed, bringing new money and fans into the sport and changing it forever.
The transition was quick, but not without some bumps: in particular, the return of English teams to European football (following a five-year ban during the second half of the 80s, a punishment meted out following the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster) was still a long way from the modern Champions League.
The standing of the English game in international terms had been inflated by England’s run to the 1990 World Cup semi-finals and Manchester United’s capture of the 1991 Cup Winners’ Cup with a famous victory over Barcelona in the final.
However, the 1991/2 season turned out to be a particularly harrowing one in this regard: United were eliminated from the Cup Winners’ Cup in the second round; Tottenham made it to the quarter finals but lost to Feyenoord; Liverpool were well beaten by Genoa in the UEFA Cup, while George Graham’s Arsenal, the penultimate champions of the old Division 1, were humbled 3-1 at home by Benfica in the second round of the European Cup.
As someone new to the game, there was something both shocking and exciting about these defeats of famous English clubs across the board; and with little information about them freely accessible, their European conquerors acquired near-mythical status in my mind. The 5-1 defeat of another British team, Celtic, by the Swiss side Neuchâtel Xamax led me to believe (incorrectly) that they were another legendary footballing superpower.
Meanwhile, England failed to win a game at Euro 92, and their tournament ended early after defeat to Sweden, a crunch match for which manager Graham Taylor selected a side featuring Andy Sinton, Carlton Palmer, Neil Webb and Tony Daley, and with David Batty at right-back.3
Paul Gascoigne, the hero of 1990, was by this point absent due to his career-threatening injury sustained in the 1991 FA Cup final, although Taylor had previously caused a stir by selecting Aston Villa’s Gordon Cowans ahead of Gascoigne for the first competitive match after the World Cup, a Euro 92 qualifier against the Republic of Ireland.
Gascoigne, and his eventual move to Italian side Lazio, was a factor in Channel 4 securing the rights to show live Serie A matches in 1992/3, along with the fact that domestic football had moved to Sky. Although the first match was a 3-3 draw between Sampdoria and a Gazza-less Lazio, access to regular league action had the effect of demystifying the European game somewhat, in that there were, as in any league, a fair few duff games too.
Meanwhile, English teams, newly rich with TV cash, began to sign more players from overseas. Transfer rumours involving my own team indicated that Leeds manager Howard Wilkinson was willing to expand his footballing palate by replacing target man Lee Chapman with a younger Czech equivalent, Tomáš Skuhravý, who had helped Genoa beat Liverpool in that 1992 UEFA cup match, although this never came to pass.4
The process was pretty hit and miss in those days, and two of Benfica’s triumphant conquerors of Arsenal in 1991/2 later had unexceptional spells at unglamorous English clubs: two-goal Isaias managed the same number in 14 games for Coventry City after making the move to the Midlands in 1995, while in the same year striker Sergei Yuran transferred to Millwall, where he did little to distinguish himself, except to earn a place in history as one of the club’s worst ever signings.5
Like the modern fan imploring his big team to splash the cash on some overseas starlet on the basis of some YouTube videos, there was a risk of managers getting overexcited. As Harry Redknapp famously remarked to Four Four Two magazine in 2002 of one of his greatest transfer mis-steps: ‘I signed Marco Boogers off a video. He was a good player, but a nutter. They didn't show that on the video.’6
But as the Premier League and Champions League began to expand, building their own hype, self-importance and commercial partnerships, it all felt rather novel and sophisticated: more games, better coverage, and lots of advertising for various European beers.
The current state of affairs is, perhaps, just the logical continuation of those trends that once seemed so exciting. It’s a tricky argument to say that you enjoyed a certain level of bullshit, but now it’s gone too far.
Really, at the centre of the ‘game’s gone’ philosophy is a deeper and more fundamental fear: that you no longer enjoy some of the things that you used to really love. It’s perhaps no surprise that some people would rather complain about overpaid players, rampant commercialisation, or even the concept of passing the ball to team-mates, than confront that reality.
Not me, but some.
The 1988 final, in which Wimbledon beat Liverpool 1-0, was also invoked during the 2025 match. By all accounts, the two games were pretty similar, although I’ve only ever seen the highlights: the goal, the penalty save, and the bit at the end where the late John Motson says that line about the Crazy Gang beating the Culture Club. (Which I’ve never quite understood, seeing as the original ‘Crazy Gang’ were a comedy troupe in the 1930s — on what terms would their battle with Boy George’s pop group have been conducted?) [You’re overthinking this — Ed.]
Taylor was often unkindly (and unfairly) lampooned in the English media, but this kind of thing really didn’t help.
In any case, looking to Serie A for a big centre forward felt a little bit like going to an Italian restaurant and ordering an omelette. Wilkinson had already signed and then sold Eric Cantona — a bit too rich for his tastes — before settling on Brian Deane of Sheffield United.
Said Yuran: ‘Joining Millwall was one of the gravest mistakes of my footballing life. Not only did I learn nothing new but I lost what I did know.’
If this was a learning point for Redknapp, it didn’t seem to have a noticeable effect on his subsequent transfer dealings.