Jon Spurling

Longlisted, William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2025 In the 1980s, politicians declared war on football; football supporters declared war on each other inside crumbling stadiums that resembled bomb sites, and the '82 and '86 World Cups were played against the backdrop of the Falklands conflict. It was a decade in which some fans died watching the game they...

Four years after the crowning glory of 1966 and a decade after the abolition of the maximum wage, a brash new era dawned in English football. As the 1970s took hold, a new generation of larger-than-life footballers and managers came to dominate the sport, appearing on television sets in vivid technicolour for the first time. Set against a backdrop of...