I was reading a piece by a Scottish football fan this morning lamenting the cost of travel and tickets to matches in next summer’s World Cup and bemoaning the fact that he wouldn’t be able to afford to attend the final, ‘should we make it that far.’

On a cold, frosty Worcestershire morning, the prospect of warm days in North and Central America, supporting your country’s latest overseas crusade, is very appealing, isn’t it?

For Scotland fans, this is especially true, having not made the finals since those heady French days of 1998. However, a wee trip over the Channel is not just a far cry, geographically, from transatlantic travel; it is more than a world away from the one we lived in 27 years ago.

Still loyal, still passionate, still herded like animals into stadiums by paranoid police officers, this experience remains the same for the majority of ordinary football fans. Except, none of us is ‘ordinary.’ We are each extraordinary in our support and willingness to put finances, health and even personal safety on the line to follow our team.

And yet, I don't believe that FIFA is interested in the ordinary, much less the extraordinary; it seems to be laser-focused on the money. I suspect it always has been and always will be until one too many corruption scandals force its demise. It is only the sponsorship deals and corporate packages that appear to be important to them. Even the football is secondary to that prime objective. Anything outside of this financial paradigm and you’re on your own. No, really, make your own plans if you really want to, but it’s not our problem if anything goes wrong. It’s there in the small print, in more than 40 different languages.

Why worry about the heat (like everybody else) when your private box is air-conditioned?

Why let yourself worry about the distances required to travel around the continent when there are private jets?

Why restrict yourselves to worrying about local skirmishes when the battle for global reach via the most lucrative broadcast rights in history has already been won?

I’m writing the latest in my History of Football series – The World Cup story. I am currently in Switzerland in 1954. In a post-war world trying to rebuild itself, the World Cup too was an opportunity for European nations to show that the fascist influences in 1934 and 1938 had been well and truly buried. Much of the world was still on its knees, yet the World Cup in those days represented an opportunity for nations to project positive, progressive identities, no matter the cost. Even South Korea made the effort, just a year after the armed conflict had ended there.

Huge numbers of people crossed national borders to watch matches, each believing that they could win the trophy. Scotland appeared in the World Cup finals for the first time, having come second in the British Home Championship, which was used as a qualifying group, finishing second to England. They could have been in Brazil in 1950, having also finished second behind England, but rather sniffily refused, saying they would only attend as winners, not runners-up. Perhaps then, as now, the cost of travel came into it…

I can just remember the 1966 final, because my grandfather had come round to watch it with my father on our tiny black & white television. They didn’t generally get on, although on that glorious afternoon, there were smiles, much backslapping and tinned salmon sandwiches for tea (red, not pink!). Ever since then, I have understood that football can bring people together, whether they be supporting the same team or enduring the banter and good humour that only football rivalries can produce. After watching Brazil in 1970, I was totally bewitched by the mesmerising spectacle of the World Cup, and my current research is both a revelation and a validation of that.

Metrics didn’t really enter my consciousness until 1971; now they seem to be at the heart of everything, and not all of it good. There were certainly arguments and divisions, flaws and downright injustices in those early World Cups. There was also optimism, though. The enduring belief that things would get better, and not just for the entitled few.

At least some of that has survived, as our Scottish football fan worries about what on earth he is going to do about the final, should Scotland ‘make it that far…’

I went to see a production of the RSC’s Measure for Measure in Stratford last night. The first thing I did at the end of the performance was turn my phone back on and look up the England result.

I’m sure football fans up and down the country will recognise this behaviour trait and around the world; after all, this is a World Cup qualifier we are talking about…

By the time I had got home, most of the media reports were featuring not the England players’ performances as part of a winning machine, rather the England manager’s relationship with the fans.

To make a story now out of ‘silence’ is desperate and certainly not news. My club team has one of the loudest fanbases in the country. Visiting some grounds is less about ‘football in a library’ than football in a mausoleum.

Not only that – and with huge disrespect to those players who were so proud to have been given their opportunity – reporters focused on the ‘big personalities’ who were missing.

The first European country to qualify for the 2026 World Cup. Six qualifying wins out of six, with 18 goals scored and not one conceded. Now unbeaten in 37 World Cup qualifying matches – second on the all-time UEFA list.

Not really good enough, is it? Besides, the quality of the opposition was ‘poor.’

We’ve qualified – again – and yet some of the worthies always feel the need to qualify any football successes that we do achieve, don’t they? It’s as if actual success is far less important than some kind of faux Corinthian ideal of what to compete should be all about.

Are we operating on such a higher level that success metrics don’t really matter? Well, I for one do not wish to remain living in an imperial age. I want to compete with the best at club and international level, and win every game.

I’m currently researching the next book in my History of Football series, which will tell the World Cup story. It makes for interesting reading (hopefully the book will, too!)

After taking a very public stand on ‘broken time’ payments, when international football competition was still the preserve of the Olympic movement, the FA resigned from FIFA in 1928 and missed out on the first three World Cup tournaments.

In confirming Uruguay as the first World Cup host nation in 1930, FIFA insisted that they bear all the costs and associated risks, but not even a direct appeal to the FA from the Uruguayan Football Association could make them change their minds about not travelling to South America.

In Victorian England and certainly up until WWI, it had been hoped that the FA would be in the vanguard of football’s development around the world. These opportunities were politely refused. In 1950, we deigned to participate in a World Cup for the first time, only to be taught a lesson by those ‘upstarts’ from North America.

Unfinished business there next summer then…

And so, back to Thomas Tuchel. He might be good enough, and his team are certainly showing the kind of promise that needs to be dealt with by increased expectation – by ramping up the pressure until they crack, as has been the case since 1966 when we last beat the best teams in the world. Ah, but the linesman was from Russia…

After all, it’s not the achievement that counts, is it? It never has been for the few.

To borrow from Claudio's speech from last night’s play, “Ay, but to qualify, and go we know not where...”
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Well, we do know where we’re going now, and when. We might even win the World Cup again next year. Will that be good enough, though? I doubt it.

​My wife and I have just completed a road trip that covered the length and breadth of the country. Yesterday evening, we passed Droitwich on our way home as I reflected on the recent and not-so-recent past.

We’ve returned to all the pay-to-view hype about this week’s Group Stage of the UEFA Champions League, with interest rates taking centre stage once more.

Arsenal face Athletic Club from Bilbao in the first competitive match between the two clubs. All eyes will be on how many injuries Arsenal can sustain overseas this time, putting paid to yet another Premier League campaign, before going out in the knockout rounds.

Tottenham take on another Spanish club - Villarreal - after winning one of the dullest European finals in recent history. Obviously, they will progress nicely until facing a smaller club that they are bound to beat…

Chelsea are at Bayern Munich in a repeat of the 2012 Final. Will Harry Kane come back to haunt them or remember, at the last moment, that he isn’t supposed to win anything other than a title in a local, supposedly inferior league?

Liverpool face yet another Spanish side, but slightly less athletic – Atlético Madrid – in a repeat of the pre-Covid match that had absolutely no effect on contamination rates in the city, honest.

Manchester City face an expat team from Italy, led by Antonio Conte, who may well have self-combusted before kick-off, and Newcastle will be watching Barcelona run rings around them, as Isak did all summer.

It all sounds great, doesn’t it? I really liked the new format of the competition last season and wish each of our football teams all the best out there. And yet, I can’t help thinking that there is just so much of it. So many teams and so many matches, when not that long ago, you had to become champions of your country to compete at the highest level.

I remember Celtic becoming the first British team to win the European Cup in 1967, and Manchester United the first from England to lift the trophy on that unforgettable night at Wembley a year later.

I understand that things have to move on, and it’s great that Champions League, Europa League and Conference League qualifying keep our own Premier League interesting until Liverpool or Manchester City eventually win it. More teams mean more opportunities and many more bonuses for the bean counters at UEFA.

However, all of this makes it harder to single out any particular European match for greatness these days. So many provide great entertainment, but are they really special in the way that a European football night used to be?

‘Sportsnight with Coleman’ would give us suitably grainy highlights of the big matches, but it was to the radio that I would turn, full of excitement and anticipation, to listen to radio commentaries from the likes of Maurice Edelston (who had played for Great Britain in the football tournament at the 1936 Olympic Games) alongside the old school charm of Peter Jones.

My mother had donated me our big old black wireless from the kitchen, complete with valves that needed warming up for what seemed like a lifetime (and certainly longer than any pre-match routines), when the Light Programme was replaced by Radio 1 and Radio 2 in 1967, and she upgraded to a shiny, silver transistor radio.

Radio 2 was transmitted on the long wave signal on 200 kHz / 1500 metres from Droitwich. Although occasionally venturing right and left, tuning into Eastern European programmes or those from France and Spain, my radio dial remained pretty much fixed on the place just a few miles away from where I now live in Worcestershire.

Just as I still enjoy football commentaries on Radio 5 Live these days, I was lost as a child in the far-off worlds of European football. The places we visited together then, sharing such memorable experiences, may not seem so far away now, but the memories live on as backdrops to where I was and what I was doing at the time.

We were visiting my aunt in Penzance in 1971 when Peter Osgood and John Dempsey scored in the replay of the UEFA European Cup Winners’ Cup Final against Real Madrid to secure Chelsea’s first European trophy. UEFA had sanctioned penalty shootouts for the competition that season, but not yet to decide the outcome of a final!

Four years later, I was on a school exchange trip in Aumale in Northern France, listening to Leeds United beat Barcelona in the semi-final of that year’s European Cup, shouting out loud when Allan Clarke scored the second goal, also in a 2.1 win. It was lost in translation as the family I was staying with were watching their local heroes, St Etienne, battling it out with Bayern Munich on the TV.

In 1980, a group of us sat around a kitchen table in a student flat in Leeds listening to Arsenal becoming the first English team to beat Juventus at their Stadio Communale ground in Turin. A 1.1 draw in the first leg of this Cup Winners’ Cup semi-final meant that the away goal favoured the Italians before 18-year-old Paul Vaessen scored for the Gunners just two minutes from the end to put Arsenal through to the final, and over 66,000 heading disappointedly to the exits.

Two years later, as I was about to begin a postgraduate degree in information science in Sheffield – in a pre-Google world – Peter Withe proved that a ball bouncing off part of the leg other than the foot could still be effective as he scored the only goal for Aston Villa as they beat Bayern Munich to win another European Cup for the British.

I’ve revisited many similar moments in my Football History series of books, recalling key events that make up the stories of not just football clubs, but our own stories too.

These were special nights, described eloquently by football fans with microphones, and shared with me and so many others as their messages came through loud and clear throughout the land. They became diary entries in football history, much more than just fixtures in a seemingly ever-expanding list.

​The first league game of the new English football season took place on Friday, featuring Luton Town and AFC Wimbledon. It was an intriguing fixture featuring a team that had been relegated last season against one that had been promoted. If the League One playing field was level, the game was rather flat. Let’s hope a similar fixture next Friday between promoted Birmingham City and relegated Ipswich Town in the Championship will be a bit more exciting. Naturally, it’s also being televised for an international soccer audience.

This is what we love about football, isn’t it? Your team can reach for the next level or ignore the one below it at its peril. Mobility through the leagues is as important as the opportunity for giant-killing in the FA Cup. Or is it?

My friend is a Wimbledon fan who has followed his local club since it emerged from the ashes of corporate greed in those training sessions on Mitcham Common in South London. I was with him when The Dons got back into the league at Etihad Stadium in 2011 by beating, er, Luton, on penalties in that year’s play-off final to regain their place in the Football League.
The first incarnation of the club had, of course, climbed from the Southern League to the First Division, with the culmination of that feat in 1986, following three promotions in four seasons, and an FA Cup win against mighty Liverpool two years later.

During that same period, a club from the West Midlands (close to where I now live), Wolverhampton Wanderers, slipped all the way down to the fourth tier before recovering again.

Undoubtedly, the team of the 1950s, becoming English champions three times and also runners-up three times in that decade, not to mention that heady European night in December 1954 against Honved from Belgrade – inspired by the mercurial Hungarian legend that was Ferenc Puskás – when Wolves won a friendly match 3.2 and were pronounced by some as ‘world champions.’

Only the seventh match played under lights at Molineux, it was also broadcast live on the BBC, which was an unusual event at the time. It was only just over 70 years ago, but in the context of the media coverage of football around the world today, this sounds like something from the Dark Ages, doesn’t it? Except that it probably hastened the introduction of the European Cup the following year.

A generation later, Wolves fans travelling to Fourth Division grounds around the country must have been wondering what could have happened, before, always hopeful, they commenced the long journey back to the top tier.

Fans of Swansea City and Northampton Town who have also (I’m afraid we don’t mention Dukes of York in polite company) marched to the very top and then marched back down again, must similarly live in hope… and fear.

So, the prospect of shifting sands is why we love football, except that this isn’t how the rich and powerful people who run the game see it. Those who have never had to walk or stand with the little people for hours in the pouring rain, or squeeze into overcrowded trains to travel home again, only to find that, sure enough, they’ll be ‘detrained’ at the next stop. For the big people, it is all about ‘football nobility.’

Just take a look at that word again. It isn’t just that a single letter has changed. The two words are worlds apart. Nobility is all about social class, usually hand in hand with an aristocracy and ranked just below royalty. Mobility – the fear or joy of it – is what keeps ordinary football fans engaged.

If UEFA – and certainly FIFA – see themselves as football royalty, perhaps that is why Chelsea were described by some as ‘football nobility’ when winning the new Club World Cup. Even Donald Trump, presenting the trophy, was relegated to a mere president of a federal republic, where sports franchises have always moved with the money.

For Gianni - the bean counter in charge of the world’s biggest football budget - it determined ‘for the first time in history, which will be, really, the best club in the world.’ In his greedy land grab for the rich hinterlands of club football, he seemed to forget that FIFA - his plaything - had already re-invented the Intercontinental Cup, which confers the title of ‘world champions’ on the winners.

I preferred it when that cup was fought for by the leading clubs from Europe and South America, usually with a massive fight in the final. Who can forget The Battle of Montevideo in 1967 when three Celtic players and two from the Racing Club of Argentina were sent off?

In this year’s beautifully wrapped cake, melting in either the sun or thunderstorms of the USA, Chelsea were always going to be winners, regardless of the result against PSG. $100 million better off, they will doubtless now think they are invincible, as Gianni does, until a lack of a proper pre-season and summer tiredness potentially catches up with them. In 1971, Chelsea won the European Cup Winners’ Cup against Real Madrid. In 1975, they were relegated from the First Division.

They qualified for this competition by winning the 2021 Champions League trophy. It is the closest thing we have seen to an invitation-only, closed Super League by stealth, and far away from the movement up and down the league tables we still enjoy at the local level. Yes, the upper end of the Premier League contains some of the biggest football clubs on the planet; then again, thankfully, money oils the wheels, but it does not guarantee success in football. Two of the original ‘big five’ teams finished 15th and 17th last season.
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The nobility – in this case, the biggest clubs - willingly acts and collaborates to preserve its existence, while paying the cheapest possible lip service to the pyramid. Fortunately, the unpredictable nature of football derives from the game still being based on the trajectory of a ball. The simple mobility of a sphere means that certainty cannot prevail, no matter how much the football royals in authority spend to sponsor such a transition.

So, Paris Saint-Germain only won the UEFA Champions League because they ‘ditched the Galáctico approach.’

You’ll have read similar soundbites from so-called professional writers leading up to last Saturday’s final and, certainly, since then. I get that there has been a change of approach at PSG in terms of developing players – often young and inexperienced prospects – rather than buying ‘finished products.’

However, it also smacks of lazy journalism to me, where reporters have jumped on the social media bandwagon in order to try and make their trumpet solos heard.

It may be that incoming manager Luis Enrique favoured a new approach which worked out for him pretty much straightaway, but to simply suggest that taking superstar influence out of the dressing room and off the field of play was enough to assure instant success is infantile.

Those same infants are now salivating about ‘big money deals’ in the transfer window. I know. I know. It’s all about eyeballs rather than insights these days, isn’t it?

For too many of today’s football ‘experts’ in texting and typing, football only began in 1992 when Sky started to pour money and commercial know-how into the sport.

Back to the game, what if PSG had failed in the final again? What would the writers have said then: where were the superstars with the skills and experience who could have changed the game?

Admittedly, the ‘right blend of experience and youth’ so beloved of those without an ounce of original thought, might have been thrown in the bin by PSG’s Qatari owners who haven’t often had to do their own cooking. But you still need special ingredients in any recipe for success.

Paris Saint-Germain didn’t do so badly in their previous Champions League final in 2020 against the serial killers of hope, Bayern Munich. A team including Mbappé and Neymar lost by a single goal from one of their former players (Kingsley Coman) having beaten RB Leipzig in the semis (who had beaten Atlético Madrid who had beaten Liverpool).

Indeed, the origins of the Galáctico policy date go back to the 1950s when Real Madrid president Santiago Bernabéu signed star players for huge fees. Those players delivered the club’s finest era, winning twelve La Liga championships and six European Cups. He was so successful that they named a ground after him.

Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskás would have been football superstars in any era and any team would have been enhanced by their presence.

I understand that big-name players can bring big-name egos, which can blunt the hunger of and deny opportunities to young, emerging talents. I also deplore those clubs who have simply tried to buy instant success (with managers as well as players) and haven’t the patience to build from the ground up.

The Football Association may also be guilty of this… let’s see how it plays out.

But isn’t it a bit insulting to Luis Enrique that his supposed political demands at the club have been highlighted rather more than his people management on the pitch, not just in terms of young unknowns such as Désiré Doué, but also those players who had temporarily lost their way such as Ousmane Dembélé who had underperformed at Barcelona and not yet worked out how to go forward at PSG? I haven’t read much about that.

Football history tells us that PSG were only formed in 1970, following the merger of Paris FC and Stade Saint-Germain, yet Enrique’s coaching, tactical prowess and encouragement of his charges to ‘play without fear’ has now enabled them to beat some of the finest and oldest clubs in Europe – including England’s Manchester City, Liverpool, Aston Villa and Arsenal.  
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And, in achieving his second domestic ‘treble’ as a coach, after his success, ironically, in Barcelona before personal tragedy intervened, he has already moulded a team of superstars in the making, which – with the possible exception of Barcelona – could dominate European football for years to come.
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For now, let’s admire the coach - and the club for going along with his vision – and have some proper coverage and appreciation of his body of work, not just copycat headlines or competitive search phrases.