60 YEARS HAVE now elapsed since the 1966 World Cup.
For some England fans looking back, it is a painful reminder of the team’s prolonged failure to win the illustrious trophy since then.
But assessing 1966 through today’s lens also provides insight into a very different world, albeit one that has had an irrevocable influence on modern life.
A new book by acclaimed journalist and author Michael Calvin, ’1966′ uses the World Cup as a starting point to investigate the social, political and cultural trends of the time.
Calvin recently caught up with The 42 to share some of the fascinating insights he unearthed, as he looked deeper beyond the official narrative, at some of the tensions surrounding the North Korea side, who made a sensational run to the quarter-finals of the tournament, the reasons why Africa decided to boycott the event and the tragic fate of Soviet Union star Valery Voronin, among other oft-overlooked topics.
Below, the author shares some of the fascinating stories that prompted him to write the book.
The inspiration behind ’1966′
Major sports events are emblematic of their times, from Hitler’s Olympics in ’36 to Qatar in 2022, with the nascent political and financial interests of the Middle East. And now, we’ve got this abomination of the Trump World Cup, so they all reflect times, they reflect prevailing attitudes, and contemporary wars, and I just thought about ’66 in that context.
There are certain Englishmen who have been banging on about the World Cup win for 60 years, and frankly, the world is getting sick and tired of it, and so I did sort of pause and think, well, certainly the one thing that a library doesn’t need is yet another book on the 1966 World Cup.
I wanted to do a much broader look at the environment in which it was set, what it meant socially and culturally, how it actually tied in with the mood, and the zeitgeist of the time, and the research process – I loved the purity of it.
I did a lot of research for my two previous books, which were Holocaust-related. It was humbling to be allowed to touch history with those projects, but they were pretty emotionally draining, to be perfectly honest, so this was a little bit different. The research process was going to the British Library, next to St Pancras, getting the guys in the reading rooms to thread the microfilm for me, and just disappearing down a whole load of 60-year-old rabbit holes.
Newspapers, for good or ill, also reflect their time, and the papers certainly reflected the fact that England and the UK were at an inflection point. In many ways, the ’60s pivoted on Churchill’s funeral in January ’65, but by ’66 you had a clear direction of travel. Music was burgeoning, The Beatles, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan did ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ politics was beginning to evolve, politicians were beginning to understand the peripheral benefits of big sports events, and the game itself was changing.
When you think about it, The Observer did a supplement, pre-World Cup supplement, and that cover was: ‘The game that’s coming out of the gutter.’ Football was in a bit of a mess in so many ways – stadia were neglected, there was incipient hooliganism, and the game’s a bit jaded. It had fallen away from its great post-war heyday in the ’50s.
It was at that sort of connection point between grey post-war austerity and the attendance of class-based reverence for authority to a new sense of possibility, new creative freedoms, almost like a new social class of these models and rock stars. Eventually, football joined that new elite, mainly because of the World Cup.
England’s World Cup winners
The England team pictured at a training session. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
The England team, on the morning of the World Cup final, went shopping in Hendon High Street, unmolested. Can you imagine that today? There’d be millions of security guards with Ray-Bans and walkie-talkies, elbowing people out of the way, and that’s a reflection of the way modern footballers live behind roped-off VIP areas in this social media bubble.
I thought the players were more readily identifiable human beings. And in the case of the England team, there were a number of local heroes rather than international superstars, which you’ll get now, but it changed.
One of the great iconic images of that final was the two Charlton brothers, both on their knees, hugging one another, and one thing that Bobby said to Jack, which was absolutely portentous, really: ‘Jackie, things will never be the same again.’
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If you think about it, every schoolboy knows Geoff Hurst got the hat trick; he did that on Saturday and on Sunday, eventually went home and mowed the lawn. On Monday, he went to the supermarket with his wife. Judith had to be rescued from the biscuit counter in Romford because the crowds were surging around them.
So that was the first indication that this has had a big effect on people, and it will have a massive effect on the game itself, and it didn’t take long.
For instance, Alan Ball, who, when you look back, was so young, it was amazing, and had such an impact on that final. He drove home in his old Ford Zephyr and he had egg and chips at a service station on the M6, yet within three weeks, the Zephyr was in the bin. He had a Lotus Elan, and he was agitating for a transfer; he eventually moved to Everton.
So it was changing pretty quickly, and there were victims. Jimmy Greaves was, in personal terms, a victim at that time.
Valery Voronin and The Soviet Union
A September 1965 picture of the Soviet National soccer team at an unknown location. From right to left are: Valery Voronin, Lev Yashin, Albert Shesternev, Vyacheslav Marushko, Vladimir Fedorov, Valentin Afonin, Anatoly Banishevsky, Vladimir Shcherbakov, Vasily Danilov, Slava Metreveli and Mikhail Meskhi. (AP Photo). Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
When I’ve covered sport, I’ve never swathed myself in the flag. It’s quite nice if England do well, because you have personal relationships with either the coaches or the players. But I prefer to look at sports events as global events, so you have to reflect their global nature. So that’s what I try to do in this book, drawing out stories almost from an alternative perspective.
The Soviet Union have been overlooked by history. Yet the story of Voronin, which I didn’t really know that much about, to be honest. I found that really captivating, because he was a mirror image of a hero and a villain. He was loathed by the KGB because of his association with dissident poets and people like Boris Pasternak. Multilingual, a good friend of Pele, George Best, and dazzlingly handsome. He went to the World Cup as an incipient superstar.
They didn’t pick him for the first game to teach him a lesson; he was getting too big for his boots. Came on, still won the tournament’s award for the most elegant player, given to him by the Queen.
And you would have thought he was on liftoff, but then everything fell to bits. Alcoholic. Basically, the establishment turned against him. He was condemned in Pravda. He was then disfigured very badly, physically and mentally, by a head-on road crash, which the conspiracy theorists still believe was an assassination attempt by the KGB.
Basically, his life collapsed, and he died at 44 with a hole in his skull by unknown assailants, found in a bush in southern Moscow. I felt that was an impossibly poignant story.
The Antonio Rattín controversy
German referee Rudolf Kreitlin looks grim as he is escorted from the pitch in Wembley Stadium, London, on July 23, 1966, after the match between England and Argentina. During the game Kreitlin sent off Argentine player Antonio Rattin, which provoked a scene in which play was stopped for 10 minutes. England won the match 1-0. (AP Photo/Bippa). Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
History is written by the winners, isn’t it? But people [in England] are conditioned to believe that Argentina were the uber-villain of that quarter-final.
Well, in many ways, they chose violence ultimately. [Antonio] Rattín, their captain, was the sort of centrepiece of the whole psychodrama in getting sent off. But as a captain, in any sport, surely you have the right and responsibility to make your case to the referee. He was doing so in Spanish, and [Rudolf] Kreitlein, the German referee, a little tailor from Stuttgart, couldn’t really understand him; all he saw was someone very angry yelling at him in Spanish, so he sent him off.
I actually had some sympathy for Rattín, as an Englishman, because in many ways, he was only doing his job. Now he went a million miles over the top, subsequently, by refusing to leave the field and then squatting down on the red carpet reserved for the royal family, and just basically baiting the fans, being football’s answer to the Joker, I suppose.
Okay, I get that, but then that had such far-reaching implications, it stimulated latent but sometimes very current anti-colonial feelings, because England, at the moment, was still tainted by their colonial past.
At that time, it was still giving back some of the colonies, in the Caribbean and Africa. So [the controversy] was exploited by [João] Havelange, who eventually got enough political momentum to get rid of [the then-Fifa President] Sir Stanley Rous, who, although he was flawed and unbelievably supportive of the apartheid apparatus in South Africa, was at least a patrician who believed in those unsustainable Corinthian values that are around.
So that changed Fifa fundamentally, and you’ve had incredible commercialisation through Havelange’s association with [a German businessman who was Executive of Adidas] Horst Dassler. Havelange begot Sepp Blatter, and Lord help me, I actually feel quite nostalgic for Blatter when I see what [Gianni] Infantino is doing.
It’s just basically that one game; it wasn’t the fundamental thing, but it certainly lit a touch paper, and there were actually intended consequences, protests about it, perceived British colonialism all around the world.
That 1966 World Cup remains the only major sports event boycotted by an entire continent. The Africans, to a man, took their ball home; they refused to qualify because they were only guaranteed one place in the finals, and that was [involving] Africa, Asia and Oceania.
It was all to do with the spirit of Pan-Africanism, which was an idealist view of the world, that Africa was finally going to fulfil its potential in the ’60s.
But then I contrasted it with what was actually happening on the ground in Africa. They might have shown great, admirable solidarity in football, but it was carnage on the ground.
There were seven coups, two counter-coups, and three unsuccessful coups in 1966 alone. The first was at 3am on 1 January, which installed one of the great monsters, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, in the Central African Republic. Before you know it, this self-proclaimed saviour of the people, who appointed himself emperor, was a reported cannibal who kept the bodies of his erstwhile political opponents in his freezer and fed bits to the lions and the crocodiles in his private zoo.
[Bokassa's] ceremony cost at least a quarter of his nation’s GDP. He flew in 24,000 bottles of Moët [& Chandon champagne], 24,000 bottles of his favourite scotch whiskey. 240 tonnes of food, which they ate behind bulletproof glass in his garden. It was so surreal. The entertainment was provided by a Navy band and a bunch of bar girls from Saigon.
[Kwame] Nkrumah in Ghana was one of the principal forces behind Pan Africanism was eventually deposed in a manner which had the fingerprints of the CIA and MI5 all over it.
I also wanted to find whether there was a ghost team, and Ghana was that ghost team. They had won the Africa Cup of Nations twice. Had they been allowed to [try to] qualify, better judges than I say that they would probably have reached the quarter-finals in England, at least.
And I tell the story of that team through a guy called Osei Kofi. Kofi, by the way, I’ve subsequently learned means ‘born on a Friday.’ And he’s now 80-odd, living just outside of Accra, a former preacher, and he was an ‘amateur,’ like all those players at the time.
He organised a threat not to travel to Tunisia for the AFCON unless they were given 20 quid, which they were. So it was interesting to hear his views on things, but also bringing out almost traditional associations in African football, juju and all that sort of extracurricular stuff.
He was going to go and live in the mountains with a band of dwarves, and he remains also convinced that his friend, a guy called Robert Mensah, who was the goalkeeper, died when he was 32 in a bar brawl, and he remains convinced to this day that he had a curse placed on him.
North Korea’s unlikely run to the quarter-finals
The North Korean soccer team line-up before their match against Portugal, at Goodison Park, Liverpool. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
When North Korea qualified, you see all these secret memos that they’re sending to one another, and the tone of it was set by one guy who basically said: ‘Do we have to have these people in our country?’ Well, the answer to that is yes, because if they weren’t allowed in, the World Cup would have been moved, and that would have caused political embarrassment and carnage, basically.
When they arrived, they were adopted by the working-class community in Middlesbrough and trained at ICI [chemical works]. 3,500 followed them to Goodison Park for the quarter-final, and even 25 years later, after they’d all been through various forms of re-education back in North Korea, some of the players came back to Middlesbrough and were greeted as heroes. So that’s a lovely end to the story.
But the qualifying was nuts – when the Africans withdrew, that left four teams going for that one place that was allocated for Africa, Oceania and Asia. Apartheid South Africa had been kicked out.
So we’re down to three: South Korea, North Korea, and Australia. South Korea basically said, ‘Well, hang on a second, we’re still technically at war with the north, so there’s no chance of us playing them.’ They withdrew.
So you’ve got two teams left for one place, and that’s where it becomes sort of a bad guy buddy movie starring Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator, and Prince [Norodom] Sihanouk of Cambodia.
They were best mates to the extent that Kim Jong Il built Sihanouk a 60-room mansion just outside Pyongyang, complete with its own film studio, so that he could indulge his fantasies about being a Hollywood director.
The qualifying tournament was due to be held in Japan, but these two got together and said, ‘We’ll hold the tournament now,’ because there are only two teams left. We’ll hold this tournament in Phnom Penh.
Cambodia was being bombed by the US as an adjunct to the Vietnam War, so you’ve got this North Korean team who spent the previous 10 months in military-style training facing the Australians, who had a training camp in Cairns, only played one game against a local little team, rocked up in Phnom Penh, and did all the things that they tell you, as tourists, not to do. They ate street food, and they drank the local water.
Surprise, surprise, it was a digestive nightmare. Everything and anything was leaking. So they played their first game, debilitated by that, and lost 6-1. The weird thing about it is that, to all intents and purposes, game over, right? But had Australia won the second leg, they would have had to have a third leg, because Fifa, at that time, didn’t believe in goal difference.
So they played the second game, Australia took the lead, but they lost 3-1, so they were down 9-2 on aggregate.
North Korea turned up, trebles all round in Pyongyang and Phnom Penh, so it was just a surreal process, and I suppose that they’re the sort of stories which fascinate me, rather than what I call the forehands and backhands, this goal or that goal or that player or that centre half, or whatever it is.
Would the Premier League be the beast it is today without England’s 1966 triumph and the sport’s subsequent explosion in popularity?
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(L-R) Football League Secretary Alan Hardaker and President Joe Richards. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
I think it would probably have happened anyway. In fact, in many ways, it might have been accelerated had England done badly. I looked through [the British political economist and academic administrator] Norman Chester’s archives. He was a far-sighted guy, and there was talk at that time of the creation of a Super League. There was some political momentum behind them, allowing players from other countries to play in England, so the ideas were there; they were beginning to bubble up.
Now, they were suppressed at the time because, in essence, football administration was an extension of the civil service, or certainly civil service attitudes. It was an unaccountable, old-fashioned bureaucracy, and they hated change, because change would have underlined their vulnerability. And so, Alan Hardaker, who ran the English football league, wasn’t having any of Chester’s ideas at any price.
But what they tried to do, and this is typical Whitehall as well: ‘Okay, old boy, I know you have these ideas? Would you care to come for lunch at my club? And then we’ll talk about it.’ And they talked about it, and then they just forgot about it.
We can debate whether ultimately the Premier League has been a good or bad thing. But in many ways it’s a commercial phenomenon. Is that a good thing? Well, we’ve got stadiums in England now, which are basically full of tourists, and they’ve got bags full of merchandise, which is great for a certain number of clubs.
But one of my journalistic heroes is Arthur Hopcraft, and his book, ‘The Football Man,’ remains, I think, the greatest football book ever written. He’s the canary in the coal mine, because he’s looking at the game, and he’s saying: ‘We’ve got to sort these antisocial kids out, because they’re going to cause real damage if we don’t.’
He understood the challenge of hooliganism, but he also had a great passage from the World Cup final, where he didn’t sit in the press box; he sat in the crowd. Now, actually, I’ve done that a couple of times out of homage to him, really, because you get a feel for people, for the occasion, for mood and everything else, and he made the point that it wasn’t a football crowd. He said it was full of people from the home counties in rugby club blazers. The phrase was something like ‘the sort of person you only encounter in Conservative Party meetings’.
And I thought: ‘Okay, he got it.’ He understood: ‘Who’s that chap from Manchester? Who are those brothers?’ They didn’t really have a clue what they were doing, but they wanted to be there because they needed to be there to boost their social standing.
So that’s in ’66. Take that 60 years forward, and it’s absolutely now a fundamental element of going to a football match. ‘Who’s going to see me at the football match? Oh, well, I’ll pull a funny face, and I’ll stick it on Instagram.’ That sort of stuff.
There is this raft of so-called celebrities who now associate themselves with football because they feel it gives them a certain resonance with the great unwashed. So it was changing, and you needed someone as perceptive as Hopcraft to really nail it.
Conclusion
Queen Elizabeth II presents Bobby Moore with the World Cup. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
You can see how football has become something more than a bunch of guys who kick a piece of leather about. You can see all these things inching towards the precipice that we all fell over in the last 20 years.
I think it was almost like a cumulative surprise [in doing the research] and also curiosity. How on earth did that happen? Why on earth did that happen? And that’s the beauty in recording the world in a way that maybe people have overlooked.
I’m not going to blow my own trumpet, but I do think that there’s so much superficial nonsense written about sport at the moment, and so much almost unofficial branding.
I want a bit of reality, please. And I want to know about these people as people. They’re not a brand. They’re a person, for goodness’ sake. So I thought that was when it was starting to change, really. It’s like the light switch went on in ’66, basically.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
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‘The England team, on the morning of the World Cup final, went shopping’
60 YEARS HAVE now elapsed since the 1966 World Cup.
For some England fans looking back, it is a painful reminder of the team’s prolonged failure to win the illustrious trophy since then.
But assessing 1966 through today’s lens also provides insight into a very different world, albeit one that has had an irrevocable influence on modern life.
A new book by acclaimed journalist and author Michael Calvin, ’1966′ uses the World Cup as a starting point to investigate the social, political and cultural trends of the time.
Calvin recently caught up with The 42 to share some of the fascinating insights he unearthed, as he looked deeper beyond the official narrative, at some of the tensions surrounding the North Korea side, who made a sensational run to the quarter-finals of the tournament, the reasons why Africa decided to boycott the event and the tragic fate of Soviet Union star Valery Voronin, among other oft-overlooked topics.
Below, the author shares some of the fascinating stories that prompted him to write the book.
The inspiration behind ’1966′
Major sports events are emblematic of their times, from Hitler’s Olympics in ’36 to Qatar in 2022, with the nascent political and financial interests of the Middle East. And now, we’ve got this abomination of the Trump World Cup, so they all reflect times, they reflect prevailing attitudes, and contemporary wars, and I just thought about ’66 in that context.
There are certain Englishmen who have been banging on about the World Cup win for 60 years, and frankly, the world is getting sick and tired of it, and so I did sort of pause and think, well, certainly the one thing that a library doesn’t need is yet another book on the 1966 World Cup.
I wanted to do a much broader look at the environment in which it was set, what it meant socially and culturally, how it actually tied in with the mood, and the zeitgeist of the time, and the research process – I loved the purity of it.
I did a lot of research for my two previous books, which were Holocaust-related. It was humbling to be allowed to touch history with those projects, but they were pretty emotionally draining, to be perfectly honest, so this was a little bit different. The research process was going to the British Library, next to St Pancras, getting the guys in the reading rooms to thread the microfilm for me, and just disappearing down a whole load of 60-year-old rabbit holes.
Newspapers, for good or ill, also reflect their time, and the papers certainly reflected the fact that England and the UK were at an inflection point. In many ways, the ’60s pivoted on Churchill’s funeral in January ’65, but by ’66 you had a clear direction of travel. Music was burgeoning, The Beatles, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan did ‘Blonde on Blonde,’ politics was beginning to evolve, politicians were beginning to understand the peripheral benefits of big sports events, and the game itself was changing.
When you think about it, The Observer did a supplement, pre-World Cup supplement, and that cover was: ‘The game that’s coming out of the gutter.’ Football was in a bit of a mess in so many ways – stadia were neglected, there was incipient hooliganism, and the game’s a bit jaded. It had fallen away from its great post-war heyday in the ’50s.
It was at that sort of connection point between grey post-war austerity and the attendance of class-based reverence for authority to a new sense of possibility, new creative freedoms, almost like a new social class of these models and rock stars. Eventually, football joined that new elite, mainly because of the World Cup.
England’s World Cup winners
The England team, on the morning of the World Cup final, went shopping in Hendon High Street, unmolested. Can you imagine that today? There’d be millions of security guards with Ray-Bans and walkie-talkies, elbowing people out of the way, and that’s a reflection of the way modern footballers live behind roped-off VIP areas in this social media bubble.
I thought the players were more readily identifiable human beings. And in the case of the England team, there were a number of local heroes rather than international superstars, which you’ll get now, but it changed.
One of the great iconic images of that final was the two Charlton brothers, both on their knees, hugging one another, and one thing that Bobby said to Jack, which was absolutely portentous, really: ‘Jackie, things will never be the same again.’
If you think about it, every schoolboy knows Geoff Hurst got the hat trick; he did that on Saturday and on Sunday, eventually went home and mowed the lawn. On Monday, he went to the supermarket with his wife. Judith had to be rescued from the biscuit counter in Romford because the crowds were surging around them.
So that was the first indication that this has had a big effect on people, and it will have a massive effect on the game itself, and it didn’t take long.
For instance, Alan Ball, who, when you look back, was so young, it was amazing, and had such an impact on that final. He drove home in his old Ford Zephyr and he had egg and chips at a service station on the M6, yet within three weeks, the Zephyr was in the bin. He had a Lotus Elan, and he was agitating for a transfer; he eventually moved to Everton.
So it was changing pretty quickly, and there were victims. Jimmy Greaves was, in personal terms, a victim at that time.
Valery Voronin and The Soviet Union
When I’ve covered sport, I’ve never swathed myself in the flag. It’s quite nice if England do well, because you have personal relationships with either the coaches or the players. But I prefer to look at sports events as global events, so you have to reflect their global nature. So that’s what I try to do in this book, drawing out stories almost from an alternative perspective.
The Soviet Union have been overlooked by history. Yet the story of Voronin, which I didn’t really know that much about, to be honest. I found that really captivating, because he was a mirror image of a hero and a villain. He was loathed by the KGB because of his association with dissident poets and people like Boris Pasternak. Multilingual, a good friend of Pele, George Best, and dazzlingly handsome. He went to the World Cup as an incipient superstar.
They didn’t pick him for the first game to teach him a lesson; he was getting too big for his boots. Came on, still won the tournament’s award for the most elegant player, given to him by the Queen.
And you would have thought he was on liftoff, but then everything fell to bits. Alcoholic. Basically, the establishment turned against him. He was condemned in Pravda. He was then disfigured very badly, physically and mentally, by a head-on road crash, which the conspiracy theorists still believe was an assassination attempt by the KGB.
Basically, his life collapsed, and he died at 44 with a hole in his skull by unknown assailants, found in a bush in southern Moscow. I felt that was an impossibly poignant story.
The Antonio Rattín controversy
History is written by the winners, isn’t it? But people [in England] are conditioned to believe that Argentina were the uber-villain of that quarter-final.
Well, in many ways, they chose violence ultimately. [Antonio] Rattín, their captain, was the sort of centrepiece of the whole psychodrama in getting sent off. But as a captain, in any sport, surely you have the right and responsibility to make your case to the referee. He was doing so in Spanish, and [Rudolf] Kreitlein, the German referee, a little tailor from Stuttgart, couldn’t really understand him; all he saw was someone very angry yelling at him in Spanish, so he sent him off.
I actually had some sympathy for Rattín, as an Englishman, because in many ways, he was only doing his job. Now he went a million miles over the top, subsequently, by refusing to leave the field and then squatting down on the red carpet reserved for the royal family, and just basically baiting the fans, being football’s answer to the Joker, I suppose.
Okay, I get that, but then that had such far-reaching implications, it stimulated latent but sometimes very current anti-colonial feelings, because England, at the moment, was still tainted by their colonial past.
At that time, it was still giving back some of the colonies, in the Caribbean and Africa. So [the controversy] was exploited by [João] Havelange, who eventually got enough political momentum to get rid of [the then-Fifa President] Sir Stanley Rous, who, although he was flawed and unbelievably supportive of the apartheid apparatus in South Africa, was at least a patrician who believed in those unsustainable Corinthian values that are around.
So that changed Fifa fundamentally, and you’ve had incredible commercialisation through Havelange’s association with [a German businessman who was Executive of Adidas] Horst Dassler. Havelange begot Sepp Blatter, and Lord help me, I actually feel quite nostalgic for Blatter when I see what [Gianni] Infantino is doing.
It’s just basically that one game; it wasn’t the fundamental thing, but it certainly lit a touch paper, and there were actually intended consequences, protests about it, perceived British colonialism all around the world.
Africa’s conspicuous absence
That 1966 World Cup remains the only major sports event boycotted by an entire continent. The Africans, to a man, took their ball home; they refused to qualify because they were only guaranteed one place in the finals, and that was [involving] Africa, Asia and Oceania.
It was all to do with the spirit of Pan-Africanism, which was an idealist view of the world, that Africa was finally going to fulfil its potential in the ’60s.
But then I contrasted it with what was actually happening on the ground in Africa. They might have shown great, admirable solidarity in football, but it was carnage on the ground.
There were seven coups, two counter-coups, and three unsuccessful coups in 1966 alone. The first was at 3am on 1 January, which installed one of the great monsters, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, in the Central African Republic. Before you know it, this self-proclaimed saviour of the people, who appointed himself emperor, was a reported cannibal who kept the bodies of his erstwhile political opponents in his freezer and fed bits to the lions and the crocodiles in his private zoo.
[Bokassa's] ceremony cost at least a quarter of his nation’s GDP. He flew in 24,000 bottles of Moët [& Chandon champagne], 24,000 bottles of his favourite scotch whiskey. 240 tonnes of food, which they ate behind bulletproof glass in his garden. It was so surreal. The entertainment was provided by a Navy band and a bunch of bar girls from Saigon.
[Kwame] Nkrumah in Ghana was one of the principal forces behind Pan Africanism was eventually deposed in a manner which had the fingerprints of the CIA and MI5 all over it.
I also wanted to find whether there was a ghost team, and Ghana was that ghost team. They had won the Africa Cup of Nations twice. Had they been allowed to [try to] qualify, better judges than I say that they would probably have reached the quarter-finals in England, at least.
And I tell the story of that team through a guy called Osei Kofi. Kofi, by the way, I’ve subsequently learned means ‘born on a Friday.’ And he’s now 80-odd, living just outside of Accra, a former preacher, and he was an ‘amateur,’ like all those players at the time.
He organised a threat not to travel to Tunisia for the AFCON unless they were given 20 quid, which they were. So it was interesting to hear his views on things, but also bringing out almost traditional associations in African football, juju and all that sort of extracurricular stuff.
He was going to go and live in the mountains with a band of dwarves, and he remains also convinced that his friend, a guy called Robert Mensah, who was the goalkeeper, died when he was 32 in a bar brawl, and he remains convinced to this day that he had a curse placed on him.
North Korea’s unlikely run to the quarter-finals
When North Korea qualified, you see all these secret memos that they’re sending to one another, and the tone of it was set by one guy who basically said: ‘Do we have to have these people in our country?’ Well, the answer to that is yes, because if they weren’t allowed in, the World Cup would have been moved, and that would have caused political embarrassment and carnage, basically.
When they arrived, they were adopted by the working-class community in Middlesbrough and trained at ICI [chemical works]. 3,500 followed them to Goodison Park for the quarter-final, and even 25 years later, after they’d all been through various forms of re-education back in North Korea, some of the players came back to Middlesbrough and were greeted as heroes. So that’s a lovely end to the story.
But the qualifying was nuts – when the Africans withdrew, that left four teams going for that one place that was allocated for Africa, Oceania and Asia. Apartheid South Africa had been kicked out.
So we’re down to three: South Korea, North Korea, and Australia. South Korea basically said, ‘Well, hang on a second, we’re still technically at war with the north, so there’s no chance of us playing them.’ They withdrew.
So you’ve got two teams left for one place, and that’s where it becomes sort of a bad guy buddy movie starring Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator, and Prince [Norodom] Sihanouk of Cambodia.
They were best mates to the extent that Kim Jong Il built Sihanouk a 60-room mansion just outside Pyongyang, complete with its own film studio, so that he could indulge his fantasies about being a Hollywood director.
The qualifying tournament was due to be held in Japan, but these two got together and said, ‘We’ll hold the tournament now,’ because there are only two teams left. We’ll hold this tournament in Phnom Penh.
Cambodia was being bombed by the US as an adjunct to the Vietnam War, so you’ve got this North Korean team who spent the previous 10 months in military-style training facing the Australians, who had a training camp in Cairns, only played one game against a local little team, rocked up in Phnom Penh, and did all the things that they tell you, as tourists, not to do. They ate street food, and they drank the local water.
Surprise, surprise, it was a digestive nightmare. Everything and anything was leaking. So they played their first game, debilitated by that, and lost 6-1. The weird thing about it is that, to all intents and purposes, game over, right? But had Australia won the second leg, they would have had to have a third leg, because Fifa, at that time, didn’t believe in goal difference.
So they played the second game, Australia took the lead, but they lost 3-1, so they were down 9-2 on aggregate.
North Korea turned up, trebles all round in Pyongyang and Phnom Penh, so it was just a surreal process, and I suppose that they’re the sort of stories which fascinate me, rather than what I call the forehands and backhands, this goal or that goal or that player or that centre half, or whatever it is.
Would the Premier League be the beast it is today without England’s 1966 triumph and the sport’s subsequent explosion in popularity?
I think it would probably have happened anyway. In fact, in many ways, it might have been accelerated had England done badly. I looked through [the British political economist and academic administrator] Norman Chester’s archives. He was a far-sighted guy, and there was talk at that time of the creation of a Super League. There was some political momentum behind them, allowing players from other countries to play in England, so the ideas were there; they were beginning to bubble up.
Now, they were suppressed at the time because, in essence, football administration was an extension of the civil service, or certainly civil service attitudes. It was an unaccountable, old-fashioned bureaucracy, and they hated change, because change would have underlined their vulnerability. And so, Alan Hardaker, who ran the English football league, wasn’t having any of Chester’s ideas at any price.
But what they tried to do, and this is typical Whitehall as well: ‘Okay, old boy, I know you have these ideas? Would you care to come for lunch at my club? And then we’ll talk about it.’ And they talked about it, and then they just forgot about it.
We can debate whether ultimately the Premier League has been a good or bad thing. But in many ways it’s a commercial phenomenon. Is that a good thing? Well, we’ve got stadiums in England now, which are basically full of tourists, and they’ve got bags full of merchandise, which is great for a certain number of clubs.
But one of my journalistic heroes is Arthur Hopcraft, and his book, ‘The Football Man,’ remains, I think, the greatest football book ever written. He’s the canary in the coal mine, because he’s looking at the game, and he’s saying: ‘We’ve got to sort these antisocial kids out, because they’re going to cause real damage if we don’t.’
He understood the challenge of hooliganism, but he also had a great passage from the World Cup final, where he didn’t sit in the press box; he sat in the crowd. Now, actually, I’ve done that a couple of times out of homage to him, really, because you get a feel for people, for the occasion, for mood and everything else, and he made the point that it wasn’t a football crowd. He said it was full of people from the home counties in rugby club blazers. The phrase was something like ‘the sort of person you only encounter in Conservative Party meetings’.
And I thought: ‘Okay, he got it.’ He understood: ‘Who’s that chap from Manchester? Who are those brothers?’ They didn’t really have a clue what they were doing, but they wanted to be there because they needed to be there to boost their social standing.
So that’s in ’66. Take that 60 years forward, and it’s absolutely now a fundamental element of going to a football match. ‘Who’s going to see me at the football match? Oh, well, I’ll pull a funny face, and I’ll stick it on Instagram.’ That sort of stuff.
There is this raft of so-called celebrities who now associate themselves with football because they feel it gives them a certain resonance with the great unwashed. So it was changing, and you needed someone as perceptive as Hopcraft to really nail it.
Conclusion
You can see how football has become something more than a bunch of guys who kick a piece of leather about. You can see all these things inching towards the precipice that we all fell over in the last 20 years.
I think it was almost like a cumulative surprise [in doing the research] and also curiosity. How on earth did that happen? Why on earth did that happen? And that’s the beauty in recording the world in a way that maybe people have overlooked.
I’m not going to blow my own trumpet, but I do think that there’s so much superficial nonsense written about sport at the moment, and so much almost unofficial branding.
I want a bit of reality, please. And I want to know about these people as people. They’re not a brand. They’re a person, for goodness’ sake. So I thought that was when it was starting to change, really. It’s like the light switch went on in ’66, basically.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
1966: A Moment in Time is published by Bantam. More info here
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