Football Moves with the Times

What is it about football? In halcyon days of yesteryear, football was  played by those who looked like their profession was chosen for them based upon their sartorial suitability in wearing England gear. Or so it seems. Such sentiments are rooted in recollections of the sepia-toned photos of my formative years, the Jules Rimet trophy indelibly linked with well-coiffured players postured as real-life idols in their mud-stained heroism. The red England shirts as evocative as the blood-stained cloak of a Latin toreador. The coaches stand hegemonic on the flanks, dry authority cultured with age mirrored by drab grey of tracksuit top-and-bottom. 

Yet these days things are a different ball game altogether. Apart from the ball game itself.  The current coterie of football practitioners are certainly not undistinguished epigoni of the past masters. This generation doesn't dress with the same sprezzatura as the golden oldies. Nor do they look as effortlessly cut out to play the Beautiful Game itself. They have uncomfortably mutated into mal-presentations of the sport.

Take the oft-derided Wayne Rooney, Shrek-like in appearance and photographed with his wife as an accessory. From waggish to WAGgish, style based upon favourable gentlemanly traits to style based upon the bane of our culture, chavs. His team mate Cristiano Ronaldo (above) is little better. The anathema of many a rival fan, it is not only his humiliation of my local football team which irates me. It is far more than that. His peroxide hair layered with Brylcreem presumably bought wholesale. His unnashamed bling. His mock-retro leather jackets. Perhaps microcosmic of Western culture's progressive degeneration. And he is spawning progenic doppelgangers aplenty. Current Boy Wonder Federico Macheda (below) presents himself as a disgusting clone. Sporting the same horribly gelled hair, equally incorrigible in his tendencies towards bling (often 

masquerading as rosary) and surrounded by

the faux-blondes and perma-tanned girls which represent his and our games inexorable shift towards horrible dress and even worse mannerisms.

Casual, but no longer casually suave, does the appearance of these players represent the game's progressive déclassement? The maxim that "football is a watched by gentleman and played by holligans" is becoming increasingly apt. 

The managers seem to have remained staid and immutable in presentation. But this is not entirely true. Hull manager Phil Brown  (below) presents himself as aberrant from football's 

authoritative and unflashy puppet-masters. Wearing a headset that figures him as a call centre assistant, sardonic comic strip artists have yet to satirize, with a speech bubble of him promising his wife to buy a pint of milk on the way home surely on the cards before long.

Whatever happened to the grass-centric managers paying due deference to the game by allowing nothing to distract them from the match itself, including choice of attire?

I'm not the only one who has noticed. In its latest marketing campaign, Reebok has refigured the brave figures of 1960s British football in their wonderfully relevant ads, offering a throwback to the glory days of football costume.

The vintage looking attire recalls a time when players and managers truly did look like the only ones fit to walk on to the pitch.