1990
Football hit rock bottom. The World Cup showed exactly that and it was the logical conclusion of decade plunging into the abyss.
Even the official poster of the finals was reminding a coffin. During the 1980s problems piled up, most of them voiced out, but not addressed – the sport was into fundamental crisis. From aging and increasingly dangerous stadiums to fan violence, which spread like the plague from country to country. By now a football match was really like a war – an invasion of merciless army of fans destroying everything they met on the road to the stadium. Win or lose, the carnage was always present. It was not better on the pitch, where tactical fouls, hunting of the best players of the opposition, vicious tackles, physical battle, time wasting, simulations, and constant complaining of every call of the referees were not just elements of the game, but became the game itself. Referees were no better – their too many mistakes were no longer viewed as mistakes, but deliberately done ‘against us’ and the referee, never really liked, now was considered entirely incompetent, but ill-minded devil. Coaches behaved in a way, which only fueled the fire: jumping, gesticulation, screaming, protesting and abusing the referees every time they blew the whistle. Their ’emotions’ were calculated to increase the tensions and succeeded. A football match was no longer fun and joy, but mean and dangerous event, in which only victory counted, no matter how achieved. Violence ruled the game and everything surrounding it. And by the end of the 1980s something else was evident: a leveling of players and teams. Yes, it was great to see many lowly teams, particularly those from Africa and Asia, improve and coming close to the traditional football leaders, but the traditional powers were not getting better – they were getting worse. Everybody was playing the same kind of football, with the same tactics, it was difficult to distinguish one team from another . The players were also becoming generally the same, similar robots just from the assembly line of mass production. The 1990 World Cup just illuminated all the ills of the game – it was the dullest World Cup finals ever, the final match was simply a shame, leaving the bitter taste in viewers of three hours entirely wasted. Football was dying and the only way to bring it back to some kind of life was by radical surgery. Thus, rules had to be changed and an era of constant changing of rules started. Yet, one key element, perhaps the most important one for the ills of the game, was increased in importance: money. Big money. In 1990 ‘classic’ football expired. Something different was born. Something artificial. Something like a sick patient kept alive only by constant medical intervention, plugged in machines and mechanisms – unplug them and the patient will collapse dead immediately. What started in 1990 was the road on which a player with fantastic salary is terribly injured before even the season started and is constantly complaining of ‘unhappiness’. 1990 was the dead end.