The Last Game, Indeed

Congratulations to Jason Cowley, Editor of the New Statesman, on his new book, The Last Game, about the remorseless moral, social and cultural decline of football over the last 20 years. The only quibble that an interlocutor on the Today programme had was that the rot really started in 1981, when home clubs were allowed to keep all their gate receipts. But even he was only half-right: it goes all the way back to the abolition of the maximum wage.