The timing of the death this weekend of Ken Bates, the former owner of Chelsea and Leeds United, will have struck many older football fans as significant, incongruous or – as football commentators are apt to say – ironic.

On the same morning in which millions of Englanders of all backgrounds were preparing to cheer on a conspicuously multi-ethnic England team, the announcement of his passing, aged 94, will have undoubtedly evoked memories of time when the sport in this country was in a very different state, and when some of its fans were of a very different disposition.

Hooliganism was rampant and racism on the terraces endemic. In the eyes of many, the club whose supporters epitomised this malaise was Chelsea

Hooliganism was rampant and racism on the terraces endemic. In the eyes of many, the club whose supporters epitomised this malaise was Chelsea

In contrast to the good-natured scenes we’ve witnessed at home and in North America in recent weeks, football in the 1980s was, one is obliged to repeat, ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people’, as a famous Sunday Times 1985 editorial put it.

It was dying: in the 1985-86 season the aggregate attendance at games in the top tier of English football slumped to their lowest ever postwar levels.........

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