Book review: The Age of Innocence, edited by Reuel Golden
The default footballer's style now is such that unless at least 75 per cent of your body is tattooed and your hair is a deadly weapon, you don't get picked.
edited by Reuel Golden
Taschen
The default footballer's style now is such that unless at least 75 per cent of your body is tattooed and your hair is a deadly weapon, you don't get picked.
What happened to the days when footballers' wildest fashion extravagance was etching their laser-drawn side-parting on the right rather than the left? The answer is in this slab of a book.
"Football was not so much transformed in the 1970s as fundamentally recast," writes 's Barney Ronay in the only essay of four in worth reading. "Its every surface refashioned in some lighter, softer … space age material."
The 1970s saw the first colour World Cup on television, from exotic Mexico, the first beamed worldwide through new satellite technology; a confluence of money, music, film, fashion and celebrity culture led to the transformation of the footballer into rock star style icon.
The essays perfunctorily tick off the history of the World Cups (Mexico 70, West Germany 74, Argentina 78) and European Cups (the Total Football of Johan Cruyff's Ajax, the relentless Bayern Munich of Franz Beckenbauer, and the period of dominance by English teams), then it's into the real point of the book: 300 pages of tremendous photographs.
