The time of their lives

Fifty Years of Hurt. By Henry Winter. Bantam Press; 388 pages; £20.

Out of Time: 1966 and the End of Old-Fashioned Britain. By Peter Chapman. Wisden; 268 pages; $30.Bloomsbury; £18.99.

When We Were Lions: Euro ‘96 and the Last Great British Summer. By Paul Rees. Aurum Press; 328 pages; $28.99 and £18.99.

ALMOST exactly 50 years ago, England won football’s World Cup for the first and only time. Since then, much effort has gone into repeating this feat. There have been near-misses, in 1990 and 2002, but as Henry Winter notes in “Fifty Years of Hurt”, England have failed to qualify for these tournaments more often than they have reached the semi-finals. For a football-mad country, he argues, this constitutes a national disgrace. Following their ignominious exit on June 27th from Euro 2016, two questions are raised: why is the team now so mediocre, and how did it once become the best in the world?

Peter Chapman turned 18 and was living in London in 1966. “Out of Time” is a gentle and affectionate portrait of the capital’s gradual awakening to the charm of pop culture at that time. Mr Chapman’s World Cup anecdotes reveal a quaint, even naive, event. England were not expected to do well. The visiting Brazilians were concerned about being accused of doping, owing to the amount of caffeine they drank. On the day of the final, the Times ran a football story on its front page, but it concerned a former international, Stanley Matthews, who had suffered minor injuries in a car crash. When the tournament started, no one thought much of England’s chances. But by the final, this had changed. Mr Chapman was certain England would beat West Germany. His confidence was explicable: England had played eight games against the Germans and won seven.

Mr Chapman and Mr Winter saw 1966 as a triumph for the England coach, Alf Ramsey. He combined European intellectualism with English brawn. Until then tactics were viewed as “devious plans” employed by “foreigners”, but Ramsey disregarded this prejudice. He was also tough. He threatened to resign if the Football Association interfered with team selection. After an uncertain build-up, Ramsey coaxed the best from creative players, such as Bobby Charlton and Martin Peters, while Alan Ball and Nobby Stiles harassed their opponents into submission.

Thirty years later, England hosted the 1996 European Championships. As in 1966, the home team were unfancied and interest in the tournament was tepid. Paul Rees, in “When We Were Lions”, says Euro 96 threatened to fall between two stools. “The supporter base was still the working classes, and they were in the process of being priced out of the game. But a bigger, more affluent replacement audience had not yet been tempted.” England, under the tutelage of Terry Venables and soundtracked by the ubiquitous “Three Lions”, were irresistible, or at least until they had to play the Germans.

Yet it was the Premier League—thanks to the savvy marketing of BSkyB—not the England team that benefited from Euro 96. Ticket prices rose, foreign players were lured in and the grounds sanitised. Mr Rees summarises this transformation succinctly: “In 1985, Chelsea chairman Ken Bates threatened to erect electric fences to deter hooligans from invading the pitch. Thirteen years later he would open a four-star hotel on the site.”

The success of the Premier League is a problem for England, according to Mr Winter. His book is in two halves. The first runs through a potted history of the England team. His excellent contacts have brought him interviews with key players. In turn, he allows them plenty of airtime and quotes them verbatim. This works well with the articulate Gary Lineker; less so with the garbled Chris Waddle. The second half analyses where the old pros think they went wrong. Many of these arguments are well trodden: the number of foreign players has diluted the talent pool; national-team coaches are suspicious of flair and try to stifle these players with restrictive tactics; players’ appetite for representing England has been diminished by the glamour of the Premier League.

Mr Winter finds fresher material when speaking to Colin Gordon, a player-turned-agent, who has witnessed some of the vampiric practices of the business. To a promising youngster, his competitors “offer jobs, cars, houses, money. They’ll message 14-year-old kids: ‘What’s going on? Have you got an agent? We’ve got so-and-so, will you meet us?’” Noting the life-changing financial impact of having a child prodigy in the family, even well-intentioned parents have their heads turned.

There is an elegiac tone to all three works. English football is now unfathomably rich, drawing in the world’s best players. Roy Hodgson (pictured) was comfortably the highest-paid coach at the Euros. But this money has yet to deliver success for the England team. The 1966 win was unexpected, a happy coming together of “spirit, virtuosity and tactical organisation”, according to Mr Winter. Mr Rees quotes Noel Gallagher of Oasis, who hit their peak in 1996 with two enormous concerts in the English countryside: “We flew into Knebworth in a helicopter, but we were all wearing Adidas trainers. It was still a little bit unprofessional. Once [guitarist] Bonehead and [bassist] Guigsy became millionaires, I think they wanted out.” There is an obvious parallel here. English football used to be driven by ambition, even if it was ragged at the edges. Now it has grown fat, its hunger sated.