There doesn’t seem to be much romance in football anymore, does there? Leicester City and Jamie Vardy’s tandem rise to the top of English football is almost a decade old and within a matter of seasons they were relegated out of the Premier League once more. After their immediate return to the top flight was secured, the 2016 fairytale title win felt like a distant memory. The narrative now was all about Financial Fair Play and whether they would be able to comply and compete or face life back in the top flight served with a side dish of a points deduction.
Going back just a decade further into the ‘noughties’ and the romance seemed even more sparse. England’s top flight was dominated by Manchester United, Arsenal, and Chelsea with six, two, and two league titles each, but September 2024 has begun with a social media wave of nostalgia for the era. Barclaysmen, they’ve called it. You can’t scroll the full length of your screen on Football Twitter without seeing a compilation of someone like Rory Delap or James Beattie set to some early 2000s chart music.
So is the romance dead or is this just another example of the ‘Golden Age’ phenomenon?
Succinctly summarised by Michael Sheen’s Paul character in 2011 rom-com Midnight in Paris, ‘Golden Age Thinking’ is “the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in—it’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”
If you like your philosophising like you like your unromantic football (backed with data), Swedish historian Johan Norberg pointed out that “a U.S. poll found that people born in the 1930s and 1940s thought the 1950s was America’s best decade, while those born in the 1960s and 1970s preferred the 1980s.” In a Wall Street Journal article, Norberg summarised this as “historical nostalgia…coloured by personal nostalgia.”
But if you, like me, prefer your philosophising to come at…
Source link : https://www.footballparadise.com/its-never-too-late-the-incredible-story-of-jose-el-brujo-martinez/
Author : Jordan Florit
Publish date : 2024-09-24 13:30:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.