Article
Community
Culture
Football
Idolatry
Sport
5 min read

The decade that defined sport 

What the sports stars of today owe to the eighties.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Maradona runs in celebration, holding a hand aloft as an England player sits dejected on the ground.
Maradona celebrates, 1986 World Cup.
Dani Yako via Wikimedia Commons

If the 1980s were your formative years as a sports fan, you will carry many images with you even today.  Dennis Taylor potting the last black after midnight to beat Steve Davis.  Barry McGuigan defeating Eusebio Pedrosa in the ring at Loftus Road.  The races between Coe and Ovett at the Moscow Olympics.  The tie break between Borg and McEnroe.  Botham’s Ashes.  Diego Maradona versus England at the Mexico World Cup.   

You will undoubtedly have other memories, though these will have been controlled by a limited number of broadcast editors.  I clearly recall watching Viv Richards’ astonishing century in one cricket World Cup final against hosts England being regularly interrupted on BBC1’s Grandstand with coverage of a routine horse race meeting.  The introduction of the less fusty World of Sport on ITV was a route in for some sports that faced an implicit class bias, but it was all still far removed from the 24/7 reverencing of sport today. 

The eighties was an era of transition as sport began to gain a place in our cultural consciousness.  It was also a decade in which the relationship between sport and politics became cemented on paths we still walk.  In Everybody Wants To Rule The World, academic and journalist Roger Domeneghetti has written an entertaining and informative book subtitled ‘Britain, Sport and the 1980s’. 

In our branding of the twenties as the decade of polarisation, we forget how deeply divided Britain was in the eighties.  Recent commentary on the fortieth anniversary of the miners’ strike has been a reminder of this and how violent public life proved.  Football hooliganism was pervasive and after a riot at a Luton Town – Millwall game in 1985, Margaret Thatcher asked of football officials: ‘what are you going to do about it?’.  In a pithy and telling response, the FA secretary Ted Croker said: ‘Not our hooligans, Prime Minister, but yours.  The product of your society’.  Perhaps more than any other exchange, it symbolised the braiding of sport and politics, threads that endure to this day. 

The sports stars of today have become surrogate saints, held up as an inspiration for what can be achieved and frequently employed as motivational speakers.

The argument that sport and politics don’t mix has a familiar ring for people who live with the tired old trope that religion and politics don’t either, as if our experience of culture and values are sealed off from each other.  Sporting boycotts in the 1980s - from Olympics to apartheid South Africa – placed athletes in the unavoidable position of having to make decisions about participation that would reflect on their values and could affect their careers; positioning that other people were spared.  These were an early taste of the moral standing afforded to sportsmen and women today; a status that somehow asks more of them, perhaps because other professions have become so tarnished and mistrusted. 

Domeneghetti’s book is also a sobering reminder of how ugly and careless much of our shared life was in the eighties.  The Bradford City fire and Hillsborough disaster were awful losses that showed the low priority of health and safety and the culture of institutional cover up that continues to blight the nation.  The author locates these failings in the wider context of disasters like Kings Cross, Piper Alpha and the Marchioness boat as part of his bid to write a social history of sport. 

Yet in a sense, Domeneghetti chose arbitrary parameters.  Football in particular was on the cusp of a revolution with the introduction of the Premier League in 1992.  Cultural sympathy for the game was about to change with the writings of Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch and Pete Davies in All Played Out.  The nasty face of football was to be transformed into a highly marketable model. 

The ugliness of the era is laid bare in the prolific and casual racism, sexism and homophobia that coursed through every sport.  The Windrush’s second generation broke through in the 1980s, notably in football, but was met with staggering levels of prejudice.  Anyone tempted to think this has now been eradicated hasn’t spent any real time at a football ground or on social media.  Women’s sport had virtually no profile in the eighties outside of tennis and athletics and as recently as 1978, Lord Denning had ruled that an eleven-year-old girl should not be allowed to play competitive football against boys the same age even though she merited a place in her team.  Meanwhile, stars like Justin Fashanu, Martina Navratilova and John Curry were targeted for their sexual orientation.  It remains hard for present day athletes to identify as gay, despite the rhetoric of acceptance.  Sport then, as now, held up an unerring mirror to our faces. 

The sports stars of today have become surrogate saints, held up as an inspiration for what can be achieved and frequently employed as motivational speakers.  But there is the gloss of a hyper-individualistic, neo-liberal culture.  Sports stars succeed because of a combination of innate gifting (which cannot simply be replicated) and material advantage (too many Olympic medals are still awarded to wealthy and advantaged Britons). I won because I wanted it more is a dishonest assessment of sporting success in the UK and in this way also holds up a mirror to other walks of life.   

The powerful personal branding of today’s athletes in many ways have their origin in the 1980s and the way the likes of Ian Botham, Carl Lewis and John McEnroe transcended their sports.  The cult of the conquering superstar is a smart diversion from the reality that money usually wins.  Just look at the Premier League table. 

Article
Belief
Community
Culture
Music
1 min read

Oasis: it's all gone a bit biblical at this summer’s musical moments

We’re reaching for some ancient vocab to describe our experiences together

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A silhouette of a musician holding up shakers.
'Cast no shadow'.
x.com/oasis

A biblical narrative keeps whirring around my mind.  

In the first century, Paul – planter of churches, writer of letters, spreader of the way of Jesus – finds himself in Athens, the Graeco-Roman city where meaning is made. He wanders around this city, soaking up its culture, noticing its priorities, watching its habits. But he doesn’t do so silently. Paul pulls out his usual party trick; yelling about Jesus here, there, and pretty much everywhere, eventually catching the attention of the local philosophers. They want to hear more, and Paul finds himself thrown in front of the Areopagus, the meaning-making council at the heart of the meaning-making city. The cultural epicentre of the Graeco-Roman world, one could argue.  

Never one to miss an opportunity, Paul gets to his feet and unleashes a monologue for the ages, kicking off with this line: ‘People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious…’ 

Quite the opener, isn’t it? 

It’s that opening line that my imagination seems to have gotten snagged on.  

There is so much going on around me – right here and right now, in 2025 - that makes me want to find a place into which I can scream the exact same thing. There and then, here and now, I can see that in every way we are very bloomin’ religious.  

What Paul and I don’t mean by such an assertion is that everyone our contexts are signed up – hook, line, and sinker - to an organised religion. Such an assertion would be silly, considering the data tells a different story. What I’m pretty sure Paul meant, and what I know I mean is this – in every kind of way, people are searching for that which is bigger, deeper, truer than ourselves. We are directing our attention, our energy, our worship in certain directions. We are seeking ritual and practice, wrapping ourselves in stories that give meaning to our day-in-day-out experiences, stories that tie our lived reality into something that transcends it. We’re grasping for a world that is more full of beauty, truth, and sense than we imagined; pledging allegiance to our inkling that there is something more. Yup. In every way, we, the good old human race, are very religious.  

Paul said it with his chest then, I think he’d say it with his chest now. 

There are a hundred different places that I could go in order to pluck some ripe evidence for my theory – but for now, my evidence of choice is the language being used to describe the long-awaited Oasis reunion.  

‘Biblical’ 

That’s the word being used – in national headlines and personal Instagram captions alike, ‘biblical’ is the adjective of choice.  

Isn’t that strange?  

I don’t really know what people mean by it, to be honest. According to my research, they’re taking their cue from Liam Gallagher himself, who was the first to describe the band as such. Stay humble, Liam.   

Is using ‘biblical’ as the descriptor of choice a reference to the reconciliation of warring brothers? That’s certainly a biblical motif, which I guess is being played out in real-time, witnessed by those who could afford the £400 ticket (no, I’m not bitter). Is it implying that this event is so monumental, it should be canonised somehow? Written about? Memorialised? Poured over for millennia to come? Or is it a reference to the fact that what we are witnessing is the fulfilment of rumours, prophecies, hopes and expectations?  

Maybe it’s all of the above, maybe it’s none of the above. It doesn’t really matter. What matters, at least to me, is that people are wanting to express that these gigs are more than the sum of their parts; there’s something transcendent about them, something awe-inspiring, wonder-infusing. Something that feels, dare I say it, religious about them.  

It gets even more interesting, because such sentiments aren’t reserved for the reunification of the Mancunian brothers.  

I’m still stunned, curious to the point of distraction, about the fact that we – in a secular, materialist, rational culture – cannot help but stretch toward spiritual language. 

In a podcast episode recorded in the days leading up to this year’s Glastonbury festival, the DJ and broadcaster, Annie Mac, described the event as ‘communion’, explaining that ‘when you don’t go to church, you need to get that somewhere.’ On the flip side, in the days following the festival, another DJ and broadcaster, Miquita Oliver, teased the endless Glastonbury posts that were filling up her social media feeds – she jokingly stated that ‘it all gets a little churchy after Glastonbury… like “it’s heaven on earth”… can we all relax?’  

So, here we have it again – people reaching for religious language to describe significant musical events. Be it the Oasis reunion or Glastonbury – I’m fascinated by the fact that we’re not content with stating that these gigs are merely talented people doing what they do well, and in so doing, giving us an enjoyable time. Such language may be factually accurate, but it doesn’t feel true enough to us. Rather, we’re grappling with the feeling that these events feel like something we were made to experience somehow, they they’re tapping into the deepest parts of us, perhaps?  

In the past, I’ve wondered whether this is down to the sense of profound togetherness that these events provide – how they have the ability to remind us that we’re bound to each other, only if for a night. They’re a direct afront to individualism, the biggest and sturdiest lie of our age. I’ve also reflected on the fact that they instil as sense of awe within us: raw awe. An elusive emotion that can be hard to come by, but that we were made to feel. I still think all of that comes into play. 

I’ve pondered this a thousand times and yet I’m still stunned, curious to the point of distraction, about the fact that we – in a secular, materialist, rational culture – cannot help but stretch toward spiritual language. Nothing else quite hits the spot; nothing else feels quite deep enough, big enough, true enough. Religious references and language, we’re determined to keep them in our repertoire, aren’t we? Our reliance upon them betrays us. Indeed, I’ve come to see our unceasing usage of them as a crack in the façade of disenchantment. 

Oh, people of 2025 and beyond, I can see that in every way you are very religious.  

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