ABSTRACT
The 1940s and 1950s hold a special place in the popularmemory of British football. Although similar in many respects to the pre-war years, the game seemed to enjoy a higher public profile, and certainly a greater popularity, than had previously been the case. Conventional wisdom has it that the crowds flocked to watch players earning little more than an average skilled worker performing for teams to whom they were loyal and for communities of which they felt a part. Given the fact that there are increasingly fewer people alive in the twenty-first century who witnessed the game before the Second World War, it is the clubs and players of this period that are generally taken to represent football’s ‘past’. The post-war years are often celebrated as much for what they did not represent as for what they did. In popular memory, this was the age before the creation of the superstar footballer and the all-powerful ‘superclub’, before the intrusion of television, before the emergence of hooliganism and before the rampant commercialisation that turned a ‘sport’ into a ‘business’. These were the ‘good old days’ of British football, after which money and violence arrived to tarnish the game.1
