oments before the 2021 Uefa Champions League final between Manchester City and Chelsea, BT Sport ran an odd little sketch. Unashamedly nostalgic, it filtered relevant pop culture iconography – Frank Gallagher v Phil Daniels; Oasis v Blur – through the gauzy lens of football. In reaching back to the 90s, the sketch felt slightly desperate, like a jaded raver, double–dropping in a doomed attempt to recapture that first, ecstatic buzz. But even so, it was a reminder of a unique crossing of the streams in English cultural life: when football and music fed into each other’s aesthetics, sensibilities, politics and presentation. But how did it happen? And where did it go? Back in 1985, football’s name was mud. In the wake of the twin horrors of the Heysel and Bradford stadium disasters, the Sunday Times described the game as “a slum sport, played in slum stadiums, increasingly watched by slum people”. It was an ill–considered line but, at the time, this verdict on the violent, dilapidated footballing nation wasn’t that much of an outlier. The Beautiful Game had never looked uglier. However, something was stirring: a lively fanzine culture that had first surfaced in Liverpool thanks to the Farm’s Peter Hooton and his fanzine The End but entered the mainstream via the 1986 emergence of zine turned magazine When Saturday Comes. A different kind of football fandom was being born. David Goldblatt, the football academic responsible for the definitive history The Ball Is Round, recalls this new tone of voice as marking a sea change in football discourse. “Many of the fanzines had the same audience as the fanzines for indie music. The moment When Saturday Comes launches; that was the new, changing sensibility.” In 1990, the football/music crossover went nuclear. It’s hard to overstate the significance of New Order’s World Cup anthem World in Motion – so ubiquitous now, such a bolt from the blue at the time. “We ain’t no hooligans,” rapped John Barnes, “this ain’t a football song.” The sheer audacity of that single line took the breath away, particularly in the context of previous England pre–tournament rallying cries. “Most football songs are military and martial and about doing your best,” says Goldblatt. “This one was saying: ‘Express yourself!’ And English football was ready – it combined the wry, ironic wordplay of indie pop with African-American/Black British music culture.” In the context of a nation still in the saucer–eyed early throes of rave (ecstasy culture is thought to have played a significant role in reducing crowd violence during this period), and welcoming a new, more free–flowing sensibility in its national football team, it was perfect; a glimpse of fresh horizons. After the operatic tragedy of England’s journey through Italia 90 came the deluge. Rave fashion–wear was notably sport–inflected: functional, loose–fitting and primary coloured. Vintage football shirts started appearing everywhere. Bands such as Saint Etienne appropriated the game’s language and looks on purely aesthetic terms. Meanwhile, English football fans waited impatiently, enduring the failure of Euro 92 and the team’s non–qualification for USA 94. Euro 96 loomed with Blur and Oasis riding high and dance culture now at the heart of the mainstream. It was time for consummation of a lingering flirtation. Could England seal the deal and give a new generation a memory comparable to the summer of 1966 with its World Cup win and blissful Beatles music? If Italia 90 was new, Euro 96 was nostalgic. There were still lingering traces of ecstasy in the half-time oranges but by this time the soundtrack was less futuristic. Even the team anthem, Baddiel & Skinner & Lightning Seeds’ Three Lions – which arose from Fantasy Football League, the BBC comedy show whose sardonic tone owed more than a little to fanzine culture – felt more like a hymn to stoicism than a harbinger of anything new. The 1990 World Cup had led to the establishment of what is now the Premier League. The gentrification of football was well under way. Paradoxically, a big part of that process involved the fetishisation of the working-class sensibilities that were being driven from the game by rising ticket prices. Paul Gascoigne, the star of Italia 90, was a troubled figure by now – Euro 96 represented his final lunge towards destiny. In the golden goal period of the semi-final against Germany, Gascoigne found that destiny in the shape of fresh air as he stretched – and agonisingly failed to reach – a cross from Alan Shearer. Had he made contact with the ball, England would have reached the final. Instead, the dream died. “English football for the last 30 years,” says Goldblatt, “has been one long, plaintive, sorrowful, nostalgic goodbye to industrial working-class England.” Eventually, Euro 96 felt like part of that farewell. Gazza was often posited as a new kind of footballer. But actually, he was more like the last of a dying breed. By 1998, things felt very different. The picaresque edges of the previous decade were being smoothed away. Gascoigne’s omission from Glenn Hoddle’s squad – in favour of David Beckham, who represented a mainstream celebrity rather than a niche indie relationship with wider pop culture – felt symbolic of this. The manner of that omission did too. Hoddle, in his wisdom, hoped Gazza’s anguish might be eased by a musical backdrop of Kenny G as he broke the news. We can only speculate as to Gazza’s reaction to this trauma-reduction strategy. But one thing seemed certain: English football wasn’t that cool any more. The 1998 World Cup did produce one notable crossover curio. Fat Les’s glam anthem Vindaloo (co–written by Guy Pratt, Blur’s Alex James and actor Keith Allen, the latter also involved in World in Motion) feels like an inflection point. The song, and in particular the video, is a riot of signifiers. Comedian Paul Kaye mimics Richard Ashcroft in the Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony video, storming along a pavement, colliding with everyone in his path. A mob of 90s archetypes – a drunken ladette, scampish kids in England shirts, Allen as puckish ringmaster – pursue him. There are black pearly kings and queens. The song itself is, of course, a tribute to Britain’s new national cuisine, the curry. Goldblatt, who has a soft spot for the song, sees it as “a Hogarthian satire”. It’s also right on the edge of the line where nationalism becomes slightly more troubling. It tried to have its ironic curry and eat it. But, for some at least, the song sounded too uncomfortably like a bunch of drunk lads being obnoxious in an Indian restaurant to work as a parody of the same. It was time for popular culture and football to once again go their separate ways. These days, football–music crossovers tend to be slightly more internationalist in their outlook, in keeping with the continental quality of the Premier League. When rapper Dave welcomed a fan on stage at Glastonbury in 2019, the song celebrated a Brazilian footballer (Thiago Silva) and the fan wore a Paris St Germain shirt. But traces of the early 90s spirit remain. This year, when the European Super League was destroyed within the space of 48 surreal hours, the proactivity and quick wit of football fans was once again to the fore. Supporters’ trusts and fan–owned clubs – ideas long championed by the likes of When Saturday Comes – were once again up for discussion. Football culture at its best remains a truculent and stubbornly self–generating thing, resistant to cheerleading and brutally dismissive of artifice. And this sensibility is in no small part fuelled and maintained by the broadening of horizons that took place in the 90s. “Football fans are a lot more organised than they used to be,” says Goldblatt. “Supporters’ trusts know what they’re doing. They’ve run successful campaigns over safe standing and away ticket prices. Smoke bombs on the pitch at Old Trafford is an amazing piece of civil disobedience and I thoroughly approve!” Perhaps in some ways, the world is still in motion.