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I liked football when teams went out to win competitions. When getting to a final was a life highlight for every fan. Now teams consider finishing fourth and qualifying for a tournament they have little chance of winning as a success. Because it means they will get the money to attract the players to finish fourth the following season.
Playing weakened teams in the league cup and the Europa . there is another sport like this, that rewards losing so highly that fans believe it to be success. I miss the importance of the fa cup final. 1991 fa cup final was one of the best days of my life. I will never ever forget it. Finishing fourth doesn't come close to that.

Money , FIFA, uefa, blatter and pratini have done this to football and I fear it will never be the same. Even the great champs league cannot compare to the old straight knock out if the European cup

Bah humbug.

No bah humbug at all, spot on mate.

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And we were Champions in the 70's

The 80's...

Not gay but loved the tighty whiteys...

http://www.sportsignings.com/images/products/products/Celtic/sat1g.jpg

Doing a Klinsman celebration over some freshly mowed grass

Doing a Klinsman celebration over some freshly mowed grass, where someone has dumped an empty can of coke.

Doing a Klinsman celebration in the 90s over some freshly mowed grass, where people walked dogs

70s and early 80s was great for football, you had the european cup brought back to england between 1977-82 with liverpool, forest and villa all winning the cup and lfc, forest winning it back to back.

Domestically the football was competative with many teams capable of winning the league and we had genuine british world class players.

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Miss the semi finals being at neutral grounds
Has devalued Wembley terribly

Itv4 I think used to re-run 1970's matches.
If they come around again you have to watch them.
As has been mentioned the league was very competitive with many great British players.

Rickety old sheds for stands and pitches that would be deemed unsafe to play on these days, the Old Baseball ground was truly atrocious but made for great viewing.

Looking back it all probably looks a bit grim but at the time it certainly wasn't.

The 90s were probably the transition point to the modern game and the modern footballer. It may have been because it was the pre mass Internet days but the coverage wasn't as saturated as it is today. As a result I probably savoured what exposure I got. Now I can go to google news and no doubt it will have something about becks having taken a dump. All gets a bit meh.

Got to be the 50's to the 70's

Lots of competition at the the top end with different teams winning the title regularly (16 different winners from 1950-1979)

Big crowds, the national team was good (largely), and by the 70's we were dominating European football too.

The 80's was without doubt the worst decade as hooliganism took hold, gates collapsed, grounds were dilapidated, not to mention the tragedies of the 80's, even if it included some of my favourite teams and players as a Liverpool fan.

The 90's is only the best for people who think football was invented in 1992.

I think a lot depends on how old you are. When your young, become interested in football, then start going to games, this era (what ever it is) is probably more likely to impact on what you perceive as the best time for football.

I agree with with GB. The 70's and the 80's were the best for me. The money a club generated was less important and the manager had more of an effect in terms of the players he could bring in rather than an enormous budgets.

Tackling was still an art form. Pitches could be a leveller and internationally we had some fantastic competitions. The 1982 WC was a particular highlight for me. The Brazillian team was the best international team never to win the world cup, the emergence of an excellent French team, the clinical Italians and the effeciency of Germany - what a competition that was. Domestically you had English teams dominating Europe with Merseyside battling it out at the top and less fashionable teams such as Forrest, Villa and Ipswich capable of winning the biggest prizes. Plus the home nations summer tournament was an important part of any season and was fiercely contested.

The 90s??

Football became a business in the 90s and commercial success started to dictate success on the pitch.

The 60s/70s were the best decades in football

The 90s was about the first decade where the players stopped or at least cut back on the heavy boozing and lifestyle choices that the players of previous decades got away with.

posted 3 minutes ago
The 90s was about the first decade where the players stopped or at least cut back on the heavy boozing and lifestyle choices that the players of previous decades got away with.
....

No wonder the quality went downhill then

The 90's and Sky killed football.

United capitalised on commercial era that's for sure.

I once heard that Beckham shirt sales in Asia alone generated more in one year than all the sponsors of the premier league put together

The 90s for me would be the best also, but only because that's when I properly started to first watch football. And like someone else said, when coverage was less extensive it made you appreciate the matches you did get to see. Everyone stayed up to watch Match of the Day, big games meant a trip to my uncle's house who was the only person I knew who had Sky, Saturday afternoons were spent with my eyes glued to Teletext and actually celebrating when Cantona '36 or whatever came up. That is how I watched the classic 3-3 draw with Liverpool. It's how I first found out about Cantona's infamous kung fu kick and had to put myself through the whole ten O'clock news bulletin just to make sure I didn't miss the footage of it. The confusion and mystery surrounding what had happened only made it more exciting. Anything happens today and everybody knows about it in no time. United's European nights were electric, even the group games. Now the group games are excruciatingly boring.

Plus the newspapers and Sky were probably just as sensationalist back then but being young and naive I was swept away in it all.

comment by Metro_ (U6770)
posted 9 minutes ago
United capitalised on commercial era that's for sure.

I once heard that Beckham shirt sales in Asia alone generated more in one year than all the sponsors of the premier league put together
------------

That's not how shirt deals work. The maker pays the club a flat fee. They benefit from the extra sales.

comment by Statman John (U7425)

posted 3 minutes ago

comment by Metro_ (U6770)
posted 9 minutes ago
United capitalised on commercial era that's for sure.

I once heard that Beckham shirt sales in Asia alone generated more in one year than all the sponsors of the premier league put together
------------

That's not how shirt deals work. The maker pays the club a flat fee. They benefit from the extra sales.
------------------------------------------------
Is that always the case?

I think football globally is worse than it was in the 90s to be honest. Technically there are less good players and world stars. I think recently there has been an upturn in decent players technically in the premier league, with carzola, mata, hazard, van persie hitting form etc but nothing compared to the 90s where every team had a player who could take free kicks and corners to perfection, zola, giggs, beckham etc. Now we are lucky if mata(who is probably the best technical player in the league with berbatov and RVP) doesn't hit the first man at a corner, shocking deliveries.

Look through the top leagues back in the 90s and they all had stars, batistuta and totti at roma, inter had ronaldo, juve had del piero, inzaghi, trezeguet, thuram etc, ac milan had shevchenko,maldini, barca had kluivert or rivaldo, romario, ronaldo, madrid had zidane,figo, raul, some of these players all moved from barca to madrid etc aswell but i believe there was more global stars with actual talent...nowadays you have a couple good games and your on the front of a game(chamberlain) or blown out of proportion.

90s represents the time when the hype began to overtake the quality of the football. It's the time money really began to spoil the game and become the main reason for teams success. A bit of a boom and bust era.

For all the emphasis on the Acadamies we have now they actually seem to produce less players who make it to the top than before.

The big disappointment for me was how while Alex Ferguson was harnessing the talent coming through at Old Trafford we somehow manged to contrive to fail to get the best out of what we had. How we have failed to win the Premiership in that decade is a scandalous waste of talent.

nowadays you have two stars in world football because the two other stand out players are in the same team as messi.