thE iLLustratEd HistORY
Of
FOOTbaLL
thE iLLustratEd HistORY
Of FOOTbaLL
DaViD sqUiRes
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © David Squires
David Squires has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by Century in 2016 www.penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781780895581
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives Plc
Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.
FoR saRah
introduction
Before the arrival of organised football, people would drift through life, bereft of purpose. Sure, there was cheese-rolling, and the amateur pillaging scene was competitive, but neither quite satisfied the innate human desire to whip a free kick in at the near post.
The little leisure time people had would be spent whittling root vegetables into conversation pieces or tending to the dung bunker. Without recourse to gather in large numbers to grumble about short corners, folk would resort to war and disease as a means of distraction.
Mercifully, the creation of football led to the blissed-out state of utopia the world enjoys today. All aggression famously ended on the day that the rules for football were drafted in a London pub in 1863. Conflicts would now be limited to light-hearted discourse about the length of dagger a gentleman footballer should be permitted to holster upon his knickerbocker hip.
Admittedly, 150 years later, news reports exist purely to catalogue our species’ capacity for cruelty and to register the enthusiasm with which we hurtle towards extinction, through a slavish dedication to stupidity, but they have the football results at the end, just before the weather. Hearing those familiar team names and score-lines releases soothing endorphins in the brains of all football fans who don’t support Leeds. The modern man would not need to placate himself with eight flagons of mead and a mace fight in the cart park (again, this mostly applies to people who don’t support Leeds).
Accounts of football matches from the pre-photography age are captured in timeworn texts, often accompanied by lavish etchings depicting the action. Football and cartoons have also enjoyed a long and happy relationship. Children these days are more interested in their Commodore gamestations and meow meow benders, but this wasn’t the case in the early 20th century. Back then, children would tear into a fresh packet of cigarettes, their yellowing eyes glistening in anticipation of finding a card containing a caricature of their favourite player. Didn’t find the Fatty Foulkes card? Not to worry, kid, chainsmoke those twenty and have another go!
Later, Roy of the Rovers came along, providing comic escapism to a new generation of football fans. Melchester Rover’s Roy Race tapped into the
qualities that British football supporters valued most highly in a player. He was heroic, he ran a lot, he usually scored the winning goal and was often suspicious of foreigners. For me, though, despite his occasional lapse into xenophobia, Race was too clean. With his helmet of blond He-Man hair and perfect toothy smile, he was the Superman of football and who likes that bloody do-gooder?
There was also the inescapable fact that there was a darker side to football. The first season I became seriously interested in football coincided with what is widely considered to be the grimmest in British football history: 1984/85. Attendances were plummeting, crowd violence was rife and there was a higher than acceptable chance of seeing David Icke on the television. My personal connection between football and cartoons came later, with the discovery of a discarded copy of Viz magazine, whilst skiving a school swimming lesson. The pleasure I derived from the hilarious tales of Billy the Fish, the heroic goalkeeper of Fulchester United, was of far greater importance than learning to swim, a skill I would surely never need.
At this time, the fanzine scene in British football was also burgeoning. By the late-eighties, supporters had grown sick of being herded into dangerous, decrepit stadiums and started to organise and protest. Local industrialists who were simply trying to make an honest day’s work from milking dry a town’s football club were now faced with hundreds of supporters peacefully but vociferously protesting beneath the directors’ box. This could be distracting when you’re trying to ply a council official with enough Black Forest Gâteau to coerce funds for a roof over the disabled toilets (funds you could then spend on a new conservatory for the summer house).
Humiliatingly, many of the fanzines also contained unflattering cartoons that openly questioned the authority of the people who ran football. My local club was Swindon Town and its fanzine was called Bring the Noise, a title that highlighted the obvious links between the sleepy Wiltshire town and the music of Public Enemy. It ran a regular cartoon called ‘McBag’, which satirised events at Swindon, who at the time were mired in a financial scandal.
It was through the fanzine scene that I was able to get my first cartoon published, in 1992. But this isn’t my life story, you can read that in a twentyvolume series that will undoubtedly be published at a later date (or you could just wait for the HBO adaptation). No, this is the story of football, as told over the course of ninetyish cartoons, starting with the earliest kick-abouts of primal man, through to the sophisticated modern era of Jamie Vardy.
You’ll read stories of heroes, villains, victories, defeats, stadiums, kits, trophies won and cups stolen, administrators both visionary (Jules Rimet) and foul (almost everyone who followed). Along the way, you’ll discover the answers to questions so profound that no-one has even thought to ask them before: what became of Garrincha’s dog? Why did Peter Beardsley keep the same hairstyle for over thirty years? What would the world have looked like if Geoff Hurst’s goal had been disallowed? How much fun would it be to go on a caravanning holiday with Roy Keane? Plus, there’s an exciting window into the future to see what we can expect from the game of tomorrow. You don’t get that level of entertainment with your Amstrad entertainment cubes and your Charlie pipes.
I hope you enjoy it, it took me ages.
thE iLLustratEd HistORY
Of
FOOTbaLL
Thigh bones for goalposts
Early
football
From the dawn of human existence, across every continent, human beings have been playing some form of football. In some cases, a bundle of rags would be chased after; in others, an animal bladder rabona-ed. Basic match reports appeared in cave illustrations with primitive paints used to scrawl heat maps and pass-completion stats.
What we do know is that no matter how rudimentary the ‘ball’, it almost certainly didn’t have its own social media account. This may explain why the game took so long to evolve into the much-loved, slickly administered money machine we know today.
the Magical Mayans
Football in ancient cultures
A form of football was played in many early cultures. Competitive games were played in ancient China and medieval Japan, where a game called kemari became popular. Kemari was played on a patch of dirt, with trees planted in each corner. To visit a British football stadium in the 1980s was to be unwittingly transported back to twelfth-century Japan. Also, much like British football, the aim of kemari was to keep the ball in the air for as long as possible. Historians are divided as to whether visiting fans were also chased back to the bus station by firms of samurai, fired-up on primordial glue.
The indigenous people of Australia and North America also played games that involved kicking ball-like objects, and the people of Mesoamerica played using a heavy bouncing ball, crafted from local rubber trees. Contemporary pundits may have remarked upon the latest ball moving too much in the air.
The Spanish conquistadors who arrived in the sixteenth century were spellbound by this exotic ball game and shipped the ball, players and equipment back home to perform in front of King Charles V and other members of the nobility. At first the Castilians were thrilled by their new acquisition and wideeyed at the prospect of the amount of gold that would swap hands through replica cape sales and duvet covers. But the novelty soon wore off and it wasn’t long before the king was publicly courting Aztec imports through the local media.
Wealthy urban aristocrats played a game called calcio in Middle Ages Florence. Two teams of twenty-seven players would use their hands and feet to try to shoot the ball into goals at either end, and which ran the width of the sand pitch. If you’re thinking that a target that big couldn’t be missed even by a medieval Hélder Postiga, you’d be wrong; there were two goalkeepers and an official sitting in a tent to block the path to goal. The removal of tents is another sad indictment on a sport that some believe has lost its soul. AGAINST MODERN CALCIO.
cobblestones and corporal punishment
The game in Britain
The streets and villages of Britain bore witness to riotous scenes as unruly football matches weaved their destructive path. Numerous monarchs suppressed the game throughout the ages (although Henry VIII did own a pair of football boots). Pottery stalls were overturned, parsnips trampled; the rough game was unpopular with local business owners and heightened the enduring British fear of crimes against property. Just imagine what a rampant pack of muddy serfs crashing through your hamlet would have done for hut prices.
As Britain moved into the nineteenth century, the authorities were also anxious about any congregation of large, violent mobs, given the popular uprisings occurring elsewhere in Europe. What if the players lost their ball in a particularly brambly hedgerow; would their aggression be redirected towards their landowning oppressors?
Eventually the increased urbanisation of an industrialising Britain put pay to this form of the game. Kids turned their backs on the game, preferring to stay indoors, playing with their lethal cotton-spinning machinery and chimneys.
However, football was to be revived through the more refined environs of private schools, famously never an incubator for brutality. It was believed that the playing of games prepared the ruling classes for the wider world, helping them to build character and develop into gentlemen – crucial qualities for any man of breeding to possess when embarking upon an imperial war against poorly armed foreign infidels. Huzzah!