Progressive populism and the national religion

A postscript to Tuesday's post

At the time I first became interested in football, during the Mexico 86 World Cup, the game had reached its nadir. In my primary school some people even seemed to prefer American Football, which was popular enough to have a Channel 4 show. This was a year after Heysel and Bradford, English clubs were banned from European competitions due to incessant hooliganism, and football was characterised by Martin Amis as ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people’.

Public intellectuals agonised about the social roots of the ‘English disease’, one newspaper comparing the prospects of the two cities represented in the fatal 1985 European Cup Final: the prosperous engine house of Turin and the dismal unemployment and despair that characterised Liverpool. How far England had fallen, both on and off the pitch. The game represented everything wrong with the country.

It’s bizarre to contemplate how unpopular football was in polite society back then, that Margaret Thatcher’s government gave the impression of despising everyone involved and her sports minister Colin Moynihan was trying to force a registration of football supporters like they were sex offenders. Chelsea chairman Ken Bates even tried to have his fans confined behind electric fences, but pinko Ken Livingstone’s woke GLC refused his request.

The impression I got from football fanzines was of a deep resentment towards the authorities, and a sense of pariah status. Forty years later and the cultural and social ubiquity of football is instead overwhelming, to the extent that even the Church of England issued a prayer honouring the real national religion before the World Cup.