The NFL and the death of football: the Thatcherite's dream team

On the eve of the new American football season, it seems bizarre to recall that gridiron was used as a weapon against the national sport in the 1980s

“What do you like most about American football?” The question was in an interview for the editorship of First Down, a weekly magazine dedicated to the sport. The answer was simple.

“The violence.”

The interviewer winced but, remarkably, I got the job. This was in the mid-1990s. By then, I’d been a fan of the New York Jets for more than 15 years. My first paid sportswriting gig was a high school gridiron match report for the Los Angeles Times’ Orange County edition. I could never have imagined working in any sport when I first got into the game at the dawn of the 1980s. And it was hard to conceive that the NFL would become popular in the UK.

Then, in 1982, Channel 4 started showing an hour-long highlights show on Sundays – a week after the games had been played. The promotion of the sport in the UK in those early days centred not on the big hitting on the field that attracted me but the lack of violence in the stands. The NFL was quickly viewed through a Thatcherite lens. It was framed as a “good” sport when compared to Association Football.

In the age of the Premier League, it seems ludicrous to think that football was the pariah pastime. The Sunday Times called it “a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people who deter decent folk from turning up.”

The Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, were in the midst of an assault on working-class culture. Football had its problems – many of its venues were ramshackle deathtraps and violence on the terraces was an issue – but hooliganism was over-amplified by an excitable right-wing media. Those of us who went to the match on a regular basis knew where the flashpoints would be and the fixtures where anarchy was likely to occur. We were able to avoid much of the madness.

What was most objectionable to Thatcher and her cohort of radicals hell bent on changing the nature of British existence – something they succeeded in doing, hence the mess we are in now – was the sense of community underpinning football clubs. In a political climate that was determined to embed the notion that “there is no society” in the nation’s psyche, the cornerstones of working-class life were under attack.

Put simply, Thatcher believed that most football supporters came under the label of “the enemy within.”

So gridiron was pitched as a family game, aimed at the middle-classes: as American and aspirational as apple pie and Reaganomics.

This created a resistance from some football fans who resented the way the NFL was presented in comparison to football. When the Chicago Bears played the Dallas Cowboys in the American Bowl at Wembley in the summer of 1986, almost all the news coverage was focused on how attractive the game was to families and how the sport was not bedevilled with hooliganism.

Ironically, by then terrace violence had passed it zenith. Football was well on its post-Heysel path to the Premier League. Clubs were sending people to the United States to see why the NFL was so successful. Manchester United came back from the Los Angeles Raiders with the idea of an all-black kit. David Dein, the vice-chairman of Arsenal and one of the architects of the Premier League, returned with the belief that half time breaks should be extended from 10 minutes to 15. Cynics thought Dein wanted to sell more food and drink in the elongated hiatus. In reality he thought fans would appreciate a longer toilet break.

But, for a while, the NFL was considered as much of a symptom of the age of Thatcher as Yuppies. It seemed like an integral part of the “Greed is Good” package imported from the States. These days, that fatuous association has been largely forgotten.

Also, anyone who visited certain NFL stadiums in the 1980s would scoff at the idea that there was no trouble in the stands. Channel 4 interviewed a police chief in Cleveland for one show, after a Thursday night Browns game against the Cincinnati Bengals. The cop said it had been a quiet night, with just 105 arrests, mainly for “drunkenness and fighting.” It was memorable because Liverpool had played Manchester United at Old Trafford the day before the interview aired and there were only eight arrests.

Trouble manifests itself in different ways at different sports and American football stadiums could be quite fractious places at the time – and still can be.

The 1980s was a time of excess in the NFL on the field, too. Players were pumped up to an outrageous size with steroids. They were huge and quick. The advances in helmets and padding gave them a sense of invulnerability. A false one, because the violence that attracted people like me to the game was creating widespread brain damage. It is still an explosive sport that can take a heavy toll on the bodies of players but there is at least some consideration for their safety these days.

Things are very different now from when the NFL first pitched up on these shores. It remains a brilliant spectacle, even if the hits have toned down. And football and gridiron can coexist, despite what the Thatcherites thought.