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70 years on,<\/em>\u00a0Mark Perryman<\/strong>\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0Guardian football cartoonist<\/em> David Squires<\/strong>\u00a0(see image above)<\/em>\u00a0revisit<\/em>\u00a0LS Lowry’s\u00a0greatest painting<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n Reputedly a Man City fan LS Lowry’s 1953 masterpiece\u00a0Going to the Match<\/em>\u00a0depicted not Maine Road but Bolton Wanderers’ then ground, Burnden Park. A ground that no longer exists, long replaced by an out-of-town stadium named after a building products company who paid a decent sum for the right to have Bolton’s home named The Toughsheet Community Stadium, having previously been known since 1997 as The Reebok, Macron and University of Bolton Stadium. What price the durability of history versus naming rights deals and their expiry dates?\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0football cartoonist David Squires’ 70th anniversary\u00a0recreation of Lowry’s original artistically catalogues seven decades’ worth of this and many other changes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Lowry’s 1953 version of\u00a0Going to the Match<\/em>\u00a0is of course most famous for his matchstick men Bolton fans, identically dressed, as far as we can tell all male, all white, the 1950s industrial working class writ large. The manufacturing economy represented by factories hemming in Burnden Park, from where these men exited the belching smoke for ninety minutes of unadulterated bliss.\u00a0The factories have long since closed down, and working practices, class uniformity and what theorists term ‘Fordism’ \u2013 an entire way of life and social organisation \u2013 has gone with them.<\/p>\n Writing a couple of decades earlier JB Priestley put into words what LS Lowry had portrayed in his painting:\u00a0<\/p>\n “It turned you into a partisan, holding your breath when the ball came sailing into your own goalmouth, ecstatic when your forwards raced away towards the opposite goal, elated, downcast, bitter, triumphant by turns at the fortunes of your side, watching a ball shaped Iliads and Odysseys for you; and what is more, it turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Football remained relatively unchanged until the 1970s. The Manchester\u00a0United players who lost their lives in the 1958 Munich Air Disaster weren’t ‘the subject of ‘tragedy chants’; instead Liverpool FC lent players \u00a0to their bitterest rivals so United could complete their season.\u00a0When England won the World Cup in 1966 it didn’t elevate the players into multi-millionaire celebrities. Ten years after Munich, Man Utd won the European Cup at Wembley, lining up for their opponents Benfica Eusebio and Coluna immigrants from the Portuguese imperial outpost Mozambique, that rarity in those days, black players in a football shirt.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Globalisation of line-ups<\/strong><\/p>\n For United their European Cup-winning foreign contingent consisted of a Scot, a Northern Irishman, two Irishmen and a Scottish manager. The United 1999\u00a0team that won it for them the next time?\u00a0A starting line-up consisting of one Dane, one Norwegian, one Dutchman, one Swede, one Trinidadian and Tobagonian, one Irishman, one Welshman, alongside their four English players and a Scottish manager \u2013 bloody hell!\u00a0<\/p>\n But it wasn’t simply the globalisation of the line-ups that had changed in those intervening year, it was the monetisation of their playing skills too. In Rome\u00a01977, Liverpool won the first of six consecutive European Cups by English clubs. John Williams, author of a social history of Liverpool FC, The Red\u00a0Men,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>describes the scenes\u00a0in Rome after their victory and what has changed since:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe extraordinary party in Rome after the 1977 final involved Reds supporters and the players together. These groups were still broadly drawn from the same stock, drank (and got drunk) in the same pubs, had pretty much similar lifestyles and diets, and footballers had not yet moved into the sort of wage brackets that later had them sealed off behind tinted-windowed cars the size of small, armoured trucks.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Globalisation of team line-ups, player wage rises that outstrip inflation a millionfold and more, funded by no longer free-to-air broadcasting deals of a scale unimaginable prior to the 1992 creation of the Premier League and the Champions\u2019 League, both serving to attract foreign investors to take over clubs and fund such largesse on a previously unimaginable scale.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 1980 sociologist Stuart Weir described the state of the relationship in English football between clubs and their supporters as:<\/p>\n “The clubs are under the control of local business elites who restrict the participation of their followers to separate supporters’ clubs.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n There’s only one word that needs to be changed in that sentence four and a bit decades on \u2013\u00a0loca<\/em>l becomes\u00a0global<\/em>. In the era of Lowry through to the early twenty-first century, clubs were owned by the local butcher, baker, candlestick-maker. In Man Utd’s case quite literally, the Edwards family were butchers.<\/p>\n Now such owners are almost entirely replaced by Russian oligarchs (until the Ukraine war forced their sanctioning), European, Chinese and US investor conglomerates, and Middle Eastern petrodollar states. Many favouring the multi-club model which is the money men’s\u00a0antithesis of what it means to be a fan. ‘A multi-club fan’ oxymoronic, and then some.<\/p>\n Football disasters<\/strong><\/p>\n None of this however\u00a0should allow an over-romanticisation of football’s past.\u00a0Lowry’s Burnden Park in\u00a01946 had been the scene of a stadium disaster, 33 fans died and\u00a0hundreds more injured\u00a0because\u00a0of a human crush\u00a0caused\u00a0by poor crowd management. It happened again with the Ibrox Stadium disaster of 1971. By the 1980s such horrors should have been confined\u00a0to\u00a0the history\u00a0books, but they\u00a0weren’t.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last game of the 1984-85 season, Bradford City at home, they’ve already won the Third Division championship, a party atmosphere. In the 85th minute a fire starts in the wooden main stand. Season after season a pile of litter had built up in the space below the tier where fans were sat. A cigarette started a fire which within minutes engulfed the entire stand. 56 fans lost their lives, simply because they’d gone to a football match.<\/p>\n The next day this is how the\u00a0Sunday Times\u00a0<\/em>reported on football’s part in the tragedy at Bradford City:<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cA slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people, who deter decent folk from turning up.”<\/em><\/p>\n It is scarcely credible such words were used back then, the day after 56 deaths,\u00a0but it is also scarcely credible such words would be used today to describe football, the stadiums games are played in and the fans in the stands.\u00a0<\/p>\n But before that would happen yet another stadium disaster, in 1989 at Hillsborough. Here\u2019s John Williams, again:<\/p>\n ” The disaster was attributable to a planned general deterioration of public facilities in Britain, a development that had also brought a range of recent disasters on public transport, as Tory policies had prioritised the private sector and devastated areas such as Merseyside. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that the deaths were also connected to deep-seated problems in terrace culture and poor relations between some football fans and the police. The English game had gone down a fatal route and was routinely treating\u00a0all\u00a0its customers (sic) as potential threats.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The 1980s saw Hillsborough; over 800 England fans arrested\u00a0and deported from Euro 88; the team knocked out at the Group Stage; and all English\u00a0club sides\u00a0banned from European competition following crowd trouble at the 1985 European Cup\u00a0Final. Different causes,\u00a0different consequences, but overall, the game looked\u00a0irrecoverable.<\/p>\n An evening with Gary Lineker<\/strong><\/p>\n And then Italia 90, with England the least welcome guest at the World Cup party, and the draw fixed so all their group games were to be played on the island of Sicily, 60 miles off the Italian mainland. In England’s group were Holland, Egypt, one of Africa’s strongest teams, and the Republic of Ireland, who’d beaten England at Euro ’88. Home before the postcards reach England? That was the widely held expectation, and for our Italian hosts, hope.\u00a0<\/p>\n The morning of the semi-final every English newspaper led their front pages\u00a0with dire expectations of win or lose, England fans would be rioting. But then instead\u00a0an entire\u00a0nation spent ‘an evening with Gary Lineker’ \u2013 and everything changed.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Pete Davies wrote a runaway Italia 90 best seller\u00a0All Played Out<\/em>\u00a0and coined the brilliant term ‘planet football’. Nick Hornby wrote\u00a0Fever Pitch\u00a0<\/em>about what it means to be an Arsenal fan, and in his wake just about every club has had a book published about what it means to be their fan too. Pre-digital media, club fanzines are written, published, flogged outside the ground, creating another alternative narrative of our fandom.\u00a0<\/p>\n A fanzine style football magazine\u00a0When Saturday Comes<\/em>\u00a0is on the shelves of WH Smith. The Football Supporters Association emerged as an effective and respected fans’ campaign, with the group’s founder Rogan Taylor a hugely impressive TV and radio studio guest.\u00a0<\/p>\n Product placement alert!<\/strong><\/p>\n Fantasy Football League starts, is adopted by every national newspaper, goes from being a cult radio show to peak time TV. And \u2013 obligatory\u00a0product placement alert \u2013 Hugh\u00a0Tisdale and Mark Perryman, a pair of self-styled ‘sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ co-founded Philosophy Football.<\/p>\n All to the good, especially the T-shirts! But before the tournament had even begun one critic, Stan Hey, was already predicting what a successful Italia ’90\u00a0on the pitch might produce beyond the touchline:\u00a0<\/p>\n ”\u00a0The global success of football has almost certainly sown the seeds for the game\u2019s corruption. There is now a momentum which seems to be beyond control. Those of us who have retained an optimism for football\u2019s capacity for survival and ability to re-invent itself are already checking our watches. It\u2019s starting to feel like we\u2019re in injury time.”<\/em><\/p>\n Injury time? Within two years of Italia 90 we were already well past that. In 1992 the\u00a0English first division is reinvented as ‘The Premier League’ with the sinister Orwellian consequence that the old second division becomes the Championship, and to take the Orwellian parallel to a ludicrous extremity the third and fourth divisions became League One and League Two. A pedant writes? No, as Orwell taught us, language matters because it is indicative of powerful forces at work behind the bastardisation of language.<\/p>\n And the European Cup, the finest cup competition in world football, bar none, in 1992 was reinvented as a Champions\u2019 and Rich Runners\u2019-up League. Purely to serve the interests of the mega clubs, and the element of risk that they might not make the competition’s latter stages and win it was almost entirely removed.<\/p>\n Is there any hope that the commodification, the foreign investors, the corporate sponsors, and the media moguls won’t have it all their own way?\u00a0<\/p>\n Yes! Because in the 2021 summer of lockdown, fans of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Man United, City and Spurs protested and defeated a proposal that\u00a0entirely served their own self-interest. It was for a so-called ‘European Super League’ with their clubs not having to compete for qualification but guaranteed entry not via points on the board but the marketing men’s co-efficients.<\/p>\n No, those fans didn’t look very much like Lowry’s 1953 stick men going to the match, but they did stand up to be counted, and saved at least for now and however much already compromised, a part of football’s heritage \u2013 competition. Even if it meant sacrificing\u00a0a guaranteed place in Europe, where they all wanted their clubs to be. Win, lose, draw, the final score, league position, European qualification never a dead cert. Whatever the cost, something every bit as valuable to those fans at Lowry’s painting, which was sold at auction in 2022 for a cool \u00a37.8 million.<\/p>\n And David Squires’ version of Lowry’s original? The commodification and regulation of our fandom, sponsors’ logos ruining a classic kit, the scourge of ever-present betting, football on the phone, never mind the match in front of us, VAR, kick off times dictated by broadcasters at maximum inconvenience for away fans, our stadiums named after airlines and the like.<\/p>\n Going to the match has changed a lot in seven decades, yet still we go. Thank you LS Lowry and David Squires for reminding us then, and now, why.\u00a0<\/p>\n