WELCOME TO THE MODERN WORLD: 1966 AND ALL THAT

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By Steve Redhead

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Professor Steve Redhead is Professor of

Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Arts, Charles Sturt

University, New South Wales, Australia. He is also

Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies,

York University, Ontario, Canada. He has published

sixteen books, including Football and Accelerated Culture: This

Modern Sporting Life (Routledge, 2015), We Have Never Been

Postmodern: Theory at the Speed of Light (Edinburgh University

Press, 2011) The Jean Baudrillard Reader (Edinburgh

University Press/Columbia University Press, European

Perspectives Series, 2008) and Paul Virilio: Theorist for An

Accelerated Culture (Edinburgh University Press/University

of Toronto Press, 2004). We Have Never Been Postmodern:

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Theory at the Speed of Light was nominated for the American

Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Rene Wellek

Prize. He is editor of the Subcultural Style book series

for Bloomsbury. He is Associate Editor of CrimeTalk and

a member of many international editorial boards of

journals including Sport in Society, Entertainment and Sports

Law Journal, and International Journal of Child, Youth and Family

Studies. He is also a member of the International

Advisory Board of theTeesside Centre for Realist

Criminology (TCRC) at the Social Futures Institute in

the School of Social Sciences, Business and Law at

Teesside University. His personal website is at

http://www.steveredhead.zone

My most recent book Football and Accelerated Culture: This Modern

Sporting Life (1) came out in 2015 a few days before the

forty-nineth anniversary of England’s World Cup Final

victory over West Germany at Wembley. It was my

sixteenth book. Part of it involved my long term

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research based on ethnographic work on global football,

sports culture and modernity, which is still ongoing,

and probably will be until I die. Some of this work

involved a unique study of football hooligan memoirs

and theories of football hooliganism, beginning in the

mid-1960s. Other parts of the work concentrated on the

emergence of football fanzine culture and the links

between football and popular music. What gave me an

insight into football culture that enabled the

ethnographic part of the work to be done over many

years was, partly, oddly the year 1966. It 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. 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

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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 of the

game (1).

I was 14 in 1966 and my family had been living in

Blackpool in the North West of England for a decade. I

grew up watching and playing football from the age of 4

in the North West of England. My primary school

regularly showed black and white film of the whole of

the ‘Matthews’ Wembley FA Cup Final from 1953 between

Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers which Stanley Matthews

straddled with ease but which, in truth, Stanley

Mortensen won through his ruthless hat-trick. After

flirting briefly with the idea of being a train driver

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(or a cowboy), I decided, aged 7 when I went to

Bloomfield Road for the first time, that I only realy

wanted to be a professional footballer (and, no

brainer, cricketer in the summer, opening the bowling

and batting for Lancashire naturally). My father, who

grew up in Lancaster, was a lifelong Blackburn Rovers

fan – it was a geographical choice between Preston and

Blackburn (both a bus ride away) and Rovers won out. He

took me during the late 1950s and early 1960s to games

as a child and young teenager all over the North West –

at Blackpool, Preston, Liverpool, Everton, United,

City, Stockport, Burnley, Blackburn, Oldham, Bolton. I

grew up thinking ‘Lancy, Lancy, Lancy, Lancy,

Lancashire’ was hymn. He was a stoical, taciturn man, a

staunch old school Socialist who kept himself to

himself but he semed to me in my innocence to know

everyone at these grounds. He talked liberally about

football to complete strangers as soon as we got

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through the turnstiles into the terraces, something he

never did in his everyday life. The conversations

carried on throughout the game. Ninety minutes of

talking football and politics. It was a wondrous,

magical experience; what else could there be beyond the

touchline? It only seemed a matter of time, in my

deluded pilgrimage to all these grounds, before I ran

out there too as a fully kitted out, fully paid up

player. And this wasn’t just local, it was

international football culture. Football culture,

passport to the world! In the year of the1966 World Cup

held in England my father, who had been a good standard

rugby union amateur in his day, took me to two of the

greatest games in the history of the competition, both

played at Goodison Park, Everton’s historic ground and

home of the school of science, where even a World Cup

semi-final was played that year (between the old

entities of the Soviet Union and West Germany). On a

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gloomy Friday night, I watched from behind the goal

defended by Communist red shirts in the first half

entranced as Brazil (with Tostao but without Pele who

had been brutally kicked out of the competition by

Portugal) played Hungary (with glorious striker Florian

Albert and flying winger Bene). The unforgettable event

ended 3-1 to Hungary, strongly supported by Everton,

Liverpool, City and United fans in the crowd who,

mainly standing, vastly outnumbered the Brazilian samba

band contingent situated in the stands. Merseyside at

that time had a strong trade union and diverse

Socialist tradition which often manifested itself on

the terraces of Anfield, Goodison and Prenton Park. At

that time its shop steward movement was second to none.

That Friday night on Merseyside Hungary, briefly,

recalled their majesty of the 1950s and their talisman

Ference Puskas: an era when English imperialism in

sport was turned upside down by two huge defeats in the

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early 1950s before Stalinism created its havoc,

sporting and political, in 1956. Re-runs on TV today of

the whole 90 minutes of the game do not diminish the

spectacle, even in the context of wall to wall English

Premier League ‘best game/goal ever’ saturation. More

was to come, and on a sunny Saturday afternoon North

Korea played Portugal in the World Cup quarter final,

where after the Communist nation had gone 3-0 up in the

first twenty minutes, Portugal (well, Eusebio,

actually, who got four on his own) ran out 5-3 winners.

Again Merseyside (and wider North West) football fans

at the game manically supported North Korea, continuing

the North East fans’ staunch support at Ayresome Park,

Middlesbrough earlier in the competition, where North

Korea had sensationally eclipsed Italy. North Korea,

football team, culture or polity, never again basked in

this kind of global spotlight. Cold war? Cold modernity

more like. I have consistently theorised postmodernism

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as always already within modernity, a modernity which

has multiple facets, or modernities. As 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.

A trip to the World Cup Final itself for yours truly

was not to be though. My father went to the memorable

event on his own, taking a train to London from Crewe,

getting in early and standing for hours on the Wembley

terraces; he came back home triumphantly, holding the

precious Final programme and told us proudly he had

cheered England’s 4-2 victory with the other 100,000.

On the controversial England third goal which bounced

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down over or on the line he said straight away that

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. I can’t remember my father being

bothered about the England national team again. It was

Blackburn Rovers games he was always interested in. In

fact I can’t rememeber any of my friends in Lancashire

being England football fans: England were a Southern

team 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 the Bauhaus’

Marcel Breuer in Bristol when the Nazis forced him out

of Germany. He had no interest in sport. My painter and

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decorator paternal grandfather, dead for several years

by 1966, however had been a ‘money in the boots’

amateur goalkeeper in (non-League) Lancaster and

Morecambe (they literally put money in his boots in the

changing rooms at half time) and had once been offered

a trial by Bolton Wanderers. He taught me to play with

a ball as a very small child. Surely being a

professional footballer was in the blood, a career in

the game a cinch. I played, at 14 and 16, in local Cup

Finals at Bloomfield Road, then one of the best playing

surfaces in the Football League, and we won both times.

Easy! I was then offered a trial by Skelmersdale

United, newtown boys who were at the time gaining a

reputation as a rising amateur team who produced

players like Mickey Burns who went on to play for

Blackpool. ‘Skem’ seemed a long way from my home in

Blackpool, especially if it meant training at night

after school, so I passed, thinking something better

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would come up (big mistake!). But as my peers at school

got snapped up by clubs like Wolverhampton Wanderers

and Coventry City, people like the excellent all round

sportsman Mick Maguire who became a midfielder at

Coventry City and Norwich City and eventually deputy

Chief Executive at the Professional Footballers

Association, I realised this burning ambition had

passed me by. Within a couple of years I was a student

at Manchester University watching Manchester City at

Maine Road every other week and being sucked into forty

years of hurt as I began to fully understand the long

term meaning of the Kippax’s chant ‘What the fuck is

going on?’ Eventually I became an academic specialising

in sport and popular culture and its legal and social

regulation – what is now known in the global university

curriculum as ‘entertainment and sports law’. Paid for

something you love doing! Not a bad substitute, but not

like the real thing either.

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My first academic job allowed me to turn out on a

Wednesday afternoon for the venerable Aytoun Wanderers.

This was the staff football team of the institution and

consisted of two teams. The first team, which I started

off playing for, had conventional masculine amateur

sporting values of the time – play hard, with a modicum

of skill, kick the opponents more than they kicked you,

end up winning whatever it took (or at least not

losing) and have a beer and a curry afterwards. It

comprised staff who worked at the institution but also

included ‘ringers’ – usually students of the

institution who were on the books of professional

teams, could spectacularly nutmeg effete twenty and

thirty somethings like us and were built like brick

shit houses. One of Martin O’Neill’s brothers was one

of our ringers at the time; he loved the bookies and

the pub and would often attend socio-legal studies and

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criminology seminars that I taught straight from these

other establishments. I think we gave up and moved the

seminars there eventually. He was a law student –

Martin himself had been a law student at Queen’s

University Belfast before becoming one of Brian

Clough’s team of supermen at Nottingham Forest and a

manager of some repute over several decades. The second

team though was a different kettle of fish. I started

playing for them after a serious leg break (tib and fib

broken at right angles) sustained in a slightly higher

standard Saturday League game for someone else, where

young failed local professional footballers ran rings

around us but also regularly ‘left their foot in’

frequently with horrific consequences. There followed a

gruelling sixteen weeks in plaster on crutches for

rehabilitation. The second team were serious in their

‘anti-modern football’ enterprise, and committed in one

way or another to what Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek

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(3) have recently called, in the wake of the global

financial crisis of 2008 and beyond, ‘the idea of

communism’. They were mostly hard core leftists who

expressed the view, off and on the field, that

competition, winning, caring about league position, and

number of goals scored in the season were ‘bourgeois

concepts’. Style (soccer style) was OK though; the

second team played in copycat Juventus shirts, black

and white stripes, with white shorts, easily eclipsing

the horrible red and green shirts of the first team,

and some of the stuff we played was, momentarily,

glorious. The experience was like being an extra on

cool TV’s Ready, Steady, Go! (4), or seeing for the first

time the sharp, ‘mod’ black and white cover of With The

Beatles, or listening to The Who’s jagged, razored,

repressed ‘I Can’t Explain’, or marvelling to the

‘thin, wild mercury sound’ that Bob Dylan had sought to

achieve on Blonde on Blonde. Even if the second team

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players were individually good enough to go up to the

first team, they would rather stay in the second team

because it was an important part of a more general

commitment to an everyday Socialist and Communist life

that they had – various left political organisation

memberships, Marx’s Capital reading groups, trade union

activity, selling the left’s papers, labour movement

debates, sustained critique of football and sporting

culture in the wider capitalist world. The politics of

football culture in everyday life was a serious

business back then. It mattered. One Wednesday

afternoon though, the most notorious opponents of both

teams - the Bin Men – stole our ball!! Every team had

to provide things like their own priceless, precious

ball for the weekly games, so this infamous incident

went down into club and institution folklore until it

seemed apocryphal amongst all the conversations about

‘jumpers for goalposts’ football being better than the

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stifling, machine-like, cynical fare served up every

week by the various professional clubs we all followed.

As the Bin Men story was told and re-told for years at

the beer and curry after-match sessions, memories faded

and became more hazy with the passage of time. Reader,

I assure you, it happened (PS. can we have our ball

back?).

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

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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.

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In the contemporary world there is a feeling that both

politics and football are, after fifty years, starting

to come out of a ‘reactionary period’ and into a new

dawn. As Alain Badiou has put it (5):

In keeping with the current reassessment of the Idea ofCommunism…the word’s function can no longer be that of an adjective, as in “communist party” or “communist regimes”. The party-form like that of the socialist State, is no longer suitable for providing real supportfor the Idea.This problem first found negative expression in two crucial events of the 1960s and 1970s: the Cultural Revolution in China and the amorphous entity called “May 68” in France. Later, new political forms, all of which are of the order of politics without a party, were –and are still being – tried out. Overall, however, the modern, the so-called democratic form of the bourgeois State, of which globalised capitalism is the cornerstone, can boast of having no rivals in the ideological field. For three decades now, the word “communism” has been either totally forgotten or practically equated with criminal enterprises. That is why the subjective situation of politics has everywhere become so incoherent. Lacking the Idea, the popular masses’ confusion is inescapable…Nevertheless, there are many signs…suggesting that thisreactionary period is coming to an end’.

Observing and participating in the renewed left

politics of football culture today, is an energising

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experience. As an expat living in Australia these days,

where the Hyundai A-League continues to improve and

boldly take on the dominant football codes of AFL,

rugby league and rugby union and football politics

online sites like Thin White Line embody all that is

good about Australia, I am optimistic about the present

period rather than nostalgic about 1966 and all that.

There is a rediscovery of radical ideas about football,

showcased at the Writing on The Wall Festival in

Liverpool a couple of years ago. There is a host of

wonderful writing around - Phil Thornton’s unique take

on football casual history, Emma Poulton on the

question of the use of ‘Yid’ by Spurs fans and the

trials and tribulations of being a female ethnographer

of football culture, David Conn on the changing

ownership of football clubs and the politics of the

Hillsborough inquest or Martin Cloake on the everyday

politics of ticket touting, ‘pryo’, football ultras and

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anti-modern football. Beautifully written, Martin

Cloake’s pieces for the New Statesman and Thin White Line

and David Conn’s journalism for The Guardian are

absolutely indispensable for anyone remotely interested

in how the so-called beautiful game could become so

dirty, sordid, greedy and plain stupid and yet still

hold the attention of ‘the people’ who were invoked in

all those homilies about the ‘people’s game’ (which

usually in the past meant boys and men) you can find in

TV reruns of World Cup years or even twenty odd seasons

of ‘invented tradition’ English Premier League games.

The rather hackneyed phrase the ‘politics of football

culture’ today is starting to mean something again. I,

for one, am glad to be involved in it right now, free

of the nostalgia for the World Cup win of 1966 but

conscious of the importance of ‘66 in the development

of the movement for ‘anti-modern football’ and,

eventually, a better world.

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Notes

1. London and New York: Routledge.

2.https://www.facebook.com/pages/Against-Modern-

Football/247030311967 and Martin Cloake ‘Why Stand

Against Modern Football?, New Statesman, August 23, 2013,

http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2013/08/why-stand-

against-modern-football

3.Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis. London: Verso,

paperback, 2015, and Alain Badiou, ‘The Idea of

Communism’ in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek (eds)

The Idea of Communism, London: Verso, 2010.

4. Shawn Levy, Ready, Steady, Go! Swinging London and The Invention

of Cool. London: Fourth Estate, 2002.

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5. Badiou, ‘The Idea of Communism’, page 13.

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