James Hamilton on Sport History and Psychology
Fifty years separated Chelsea’s first League Championship from their second, and it’s hard not to notice that the half-century of Burnley’s last triumph is hard upon us. Stranger things have happened. But the strangest thing of all is that Burnley haven’t been back up since 1976 – they were a modern, progressive club with intelligent…
I’d like to thank Rob Marrs for putting me onto this particular story. I don’t follow European football particularly well, and the Deisler situation had completely passed me by. I doubt very much I can do more with it than rehearse the usual things, but here’s what I make of it nonetheless. Depression is “my”…
You’ll know that most of the Edwardian film footage of football that we still possess was the work of the northern firm Mitchell and Kenyon, and that they also produced travelling panoramas. Like this one: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpU4DgefFPo] I came across a more modern equivalent during an idle surfing session yesterday. Three films, on Youtube, taken from…
Co-author of the book behind the article that was the subject of yesterday’s post, Stefan Szymanski, has very kindly taken the time to expand on the subject for those of us yet to receive our copies of his and Simon’s new book. He did so in the comments to the original post, but I felt…
Dearieme points us to this Simon Kuper piece in the FT: Time to End Our Deluded Obsession with Club Managers. From it, we learn that Stefan Szymanski, economics professor at Cass Business School, studied the spending of 40 English clubs between 1978 and 1997, and found that their spending on salaries explained 92 per cent…
You get so used to false talk of heroism in football that you come to discount it. But occasionally, a real one comes to light, and when a real one comes to light it illuminates all the others. And heaven knows, at the end of the 1860s, Edinburgh’s impoverished and embattled Irish community were in…
That’s Widnes there, the chemical town where I was born. There are several versions of this photograph in circulation, and this is the mildest. The others have had additional smoke added: perhaps the photographer knew of worse places, and wished to compete. I came along some 12 years after the Clean Air Acts, and still…
New technology and the new sport of Association Football just seemed to go together in the last years of the nineteenth century. Not only was the modern game as we know it born in amongst cutting-edge manufacturing and mining in the English and Scottish industrial urban towns, not only did the arrival of telegraph, telephone…
In comments yesterday, George Szirtes enquired rhetorically about why Bobby Robson was so loved, and he answers his own question magnificently here. “The right sort of sportsman”, in other words. Most of the great football clubs of England were founded by firms or by churches to provide godly uplifting activity and entertainment to men in what…
Sir Bobby Robson died this morning, having suffered many years from cancer. Of course, he’s condemned to an afterlife as a kind of footballing Betjeman. A cross between teddy bear and moral exemplar, the outstanding memorial to the days when football had values (and passion and commitment and all of that). “They don’t make them…