Where do you think the game will be?

SWAR

From Football365 website.

In the last of their series, John Nicholson and Alan Tyers look at how the game has changed over the last couple of decades and wonder what will be different, and what will be the same, in the year 2034...

A quarter of a century seems a long time but it passes quickly in a blur of cold drinks, frantic horizontal dancing and bad haircuts.

One minute you're a thrusting young buck trying to grow facial hair, the next you're trying to remove unsightly hair from every orifice of your body and glue it on your head.

What does the future hold? 25 years from now, will grounds be staffed by monkeys in spacesuits, will we all go to games on moving walkways, or fly in on our own personal jet packs?

Will pies have been replaced by protein pills? Will we be playing on the moon (now renamed 'The Emirates Lunar Pod') or fighting with aliens on Mars in a new inter-planetary cup competition? Or, as seems more likely, will it look quite like today's game? The future is rarely as radically different as we think it will be.

We seem to recall Trevor Horn once predicted the end of live music in 1984, thinking it would be replaced by 'videotechs' instead. That always struck one of us (the old, hairy one) as insanity, because watching a film of Duran Duran on a boat was never going to better seeing Stevie Ray Vaughan wring the blues out of a Stratocaster.

Go back to 1984 and the football landscape looks familiar but a bit wonky, like your own bedroom after a bottle of vodka. Southampton, now struggling to survive at all, had almost won the League, finishing three points behind Liverpool, who had themselves just won their fourth consecutive League Cup. QPR were fifth and Watford were Cup runners-up.

Ken Bates had just bought a financially-bereft, second division-winning Chelsea for £1. Liverpool won the European Cup by playing just nine games in a tournament exclusively for league winners and Spurs won the UEFA Cup. English football was dominant but England failed to qualify for the Euros. Their manager, Bobby Robson, had himself played for the national side 22 years earlier.

Current Premier League stalwarts Bolton and Wigan were in Division Three and 12 of the 22 clubs in the top flight in the 1983-84 season are not in the Premier League today.

You could pass the ball back for the goalie to pick up, you could have running fights in the street outside of grounds and you could do all of this while wearing the newly-fashionable Doc Martens and Levis 501s. Crowds were dwindling as people decided being punched in the face by a psychotic man is less fun than hammering nails into your own bottom and much more expensive.

So that's 25 years ago, so what about in 25 years' time? It's very likely that some of the teams currently in the Premier League won't exist. Maybe Chelsea will have been sold for a pound again: they and others have put themselves in a position where the withdrawal of their rich benefactor would leave them totally, to use the academic fiscal jargon, screwed.

The fact that, as we write, the pound is worth about the same as a small handful of coloured beads suggests that lots of very clever, very rich people don't fancy Britain's chances in the international economy too much. Perhaps we will be the new Argentina (and not in the sense of having brilliantly talented players with lovely woman haircuts). Wheelbarrows will be worth more than the money in them.

Maybe nobody in Britain will have the money to go to football matches any more now that it costs 750,000 Euro Beans, but that's okay: there'll be lots of rich folks in China and India who can get over to the games in their private jet-type-vehicles. Or maybe Man United will take on Samsung West London Kickers in Beijing on a weekly basis anyway.

If 1984 is any indication, an articulate and pleasant ex-England midfielder will be managing England. Step forward Gareth Barry. There will have almost certainly been one or two major rule changes; a third coloured card perhaps to more accurately punish players. Goal-line cameras seem a certainty, as does Chris Hutchings stepping into a job recently vacated by a now 35-stone Paul Jewell - some things just never change .

It also seems certain that a thinning-on-top David Beckham, now in his late 50s, will be wearing a very well-cut suit as some sort of England ambassador in much the same way Bobby Charlton does now. A million grandfathers will get dewy-eyed and say: "You should have seen him play son, he had lovely hair, and it's because of him I'm gay and you were born in a Petri dish at the new Little Chef Bio-Research Laboratory outside of Retford owned and run by Heston Blumenthal's controversially-named son, Gastroscience."

One thing that is very exciting: at least some of the handful of men being hailed as "the greatest players of 2034" have probably not even been born yet, the others are just now wailing to indicate their nappy needs changing (much like C Ronaldo of today).

By 2034 a very bald Steven Gerrard will surely be boss of Liverpool. Sir Alex Ferguson will still be in charge at Old Trafford, by now just a head in a jar. A very red, very angry head. At Arsenal, Arsène Wenger may well be mummified and put in a glass case as a shining example to future managers of how to run a club by signing only small girly men with thick eyebrows.

Sure, some things will have changed but football will still be the core of this country's sporting culture. The greedy, evil oligarchs and airheads will have tried for 50 years to kill it but they will not have succeeded.

Your wife, your kids, your money, your house and the use of testicles may all be gone but football will always be with you. It won't desert you. It is constant.

The people's game is stronger than the ego of any businessman or Brazilian striker and will prevail, if only because we need to cling onto something to divert ourselves from our own mortality; and because we all really like wearing scarves and swearing in public.

John Nicholson and Alan Tyers

I had originally posted this article on its own as I thought it was quite amusing; however Xavi6 correctly pointed out that it may be better to pose a question along the lines of the thread title.

Personally I think by 2034 us liverpool fans will still be moaning, we may not have won the league in 34 years but we'll surely be singing "we won it 12 times..."!

Xavi6

Is there a question in this thread or.....?

In any case, when I were a lad -

SWAR

Xavi6 wrote: »

Is there a question in this thread or.....?

In any case, when I were a lad -

No there's no question...why does there have to be?

Was that the end of your question or...?

Just thought it was an amusing article...some people on this forum need cheering up me thinks...me for one being a Pool fan. Sorry for offending you...I'll have loads of questions in the next thread.

Xavi6

I wasn't having a go. I was just wondering where the discussion was to be in the thread.

Like, if you were to say "What have been the biggest changes you've noticed in the game?", or "What do you see happening between now and 2040?" then it could make for interesting contributions.

As I said, no offence meant. Just thought it could be good if expanded on.

SWAR

Xavi6 wrote: »

I wasn't having a go. I was just wondering where the discussion was to be in the thread.

Like, if you were to say "What have been the biggest changes you've noticed in the game?", or "What do you see happening between now and 2040?" then it could make for interesting contributions.

As I said, no offence meant. Just thought it could be good if expanded on.

Point taken, and I agree...feel free to change the title.

I'm still on the defensive from last nights Liverpool thread discussions