Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Britain, Sport and the 1980s

by Roger Domeneghetti

A social history of 1980s Britain, told through the sport of the time.

Travel back to the 1980s - to Botham's Ashes and the Brixton riots; the Moscow Olympics and the miners' strike; the Crucible Theatre and the Falklands - to explore how we got to where we are now. Discover how sport became fully entwined in our national story; how sporting heroes were made, and destroyed; how 'wars' were fought on the pitch; and how sport responded to - and drove cultural change in - our society.

From Sebastian Coe to Margaret Thatcher, John Barnes to the ZX Spectrum, Martina Navratilova to Section 28, Everybody Wants to Rule the World speaks to our treasured memories of eighties sports while also throwing light on where things went deeply wrong. In so doing it tells nothing less than the story of how British sport came into the modern era.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

462 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 4, 2023

Reviews

[Ipswichblade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love books about the 70s and 80s and this being also about sport and politics in the 80s really hits the spot. Some great sports stories, some of which I wasn’t aware of makes this an excellent read.

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

**Shortlisted for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History**
To look at the 1980s in British social, cultural, and political history is to unpack a period of profound change, of heightened passions, of convention and continuity, of moments of beauty, and of events marked by tragedy and horror. In a sense, this makes them like any other decade – a random series of events taking place during a ten year period to which we attach a sense of coherence because of the artificiality of the dates we ascribe to a block of time. Yet there is a coherence about the era, largely linked to Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister, and the changes that brought about as well as perhaps more significantly the social and political struggles that marked that period (Thatcher’s term was 1979-1989).

Roger Domemghetti is less obviously concerned with the political history of the decade than he is the social and cultural history. As such he bookends his narrative with two events that mark key aspects of the changes in and transformations of sport – with wider cultural resonance – or more especially sport spectatorship. What’s more, these two events – in one sense profoundly different, in another closely interrelated – were only a month apart in 1985: their juxtaposition and symbolism is profound, and a marker of the insights woven through this valuable, engaging book.

The book’s opening event is a snooker match in April 1985, a world championship game that captivated huge TV audiences (18.5 million people) into the early hours of Monday morning, Conventionally a sport of smoky rooms, bars, and gentlemen’s clubs (although billiards had more cachet there), televised snooker was one of the cultural markers of changing leisure habits, growing in popularity since the 1970s (helped by the spread of colour TV) with the game’s players becoming widely known and celebrated. It was also a sign that sport spectatorship was changing, becoming more mediated. For the closing event, Domeneghetti shifts from Sheffield’s Crucible theatre, 35 miles up the road and a month later the Bradford Football Club’s stadium for an end of season match where a stadium fire killed 56 people; an avoidable tragedy and the first of three stadium disasters involving English clubs that resulted in profound changes in the ways people watched football, leading to associated changes in the class composition of football audiences, all in the context of the game’s changing economics and culture.

Domeneghetti’s treatment of both these events, his ability to weave together sporting and other social and cultural developments, his attention to shifting political cultures, and ambience all mark the quality of this as a scholarly exploration of the era. He builds a case that is episodic, where events and moments speak to contexts, and where those dialogues inform both an understanding of the era and provide rich insight to shifting sporting practices and cultures. An excellent example of the quality of this case is the way his discussion of boxer Barry McGuigan plays out against the background of ‘The Troubles’, but is not limited to the Northern Irish context as Domeneghetti also unpacks the interwoven character of British and Irish football (soccer), given further depth by his framing with both rugby and Gaelic football. This framing does not seem exploitative – McGuigan stands in for both developments in boxing but also as a metonym of the complexities that is the continuing British colonial relationship with Ireland.

This humane and humanising approach is a feature of the book. Domeneghetti shapes and explores the fraught British-Argentinian relationship (and with it a shifting global identity for Britain) in part through a narrative the centres Tottenham’s Argentinian player Ossie Ardiles, highlighting the personal and the human(e) amid the global.

The book’s episodic form – this is no year on year linear narrative – provides ways into the era, making meaning and giving insight to both socio-cultural shifts and changes in the form, shape, practice, and context of sport as a cultural phenomenon. This is also no narrowly focused exploration of the big team sports, and sport as a masculine space. Domeneghetti pays close attention to shifting gender expectations and sexualities. Women’s growing if hotly contested sporting presence is seen in activities as diverse as football, gym-based exercise, running, athletics, and sailing, while the tragedy of Justin Fashanu marks the fraught place of gay male athletes in British sporting cultures and gay men in Britain more generally. Similarly, the racialisation of sporting identities is elegantly teased out through cases such as Linford Christie and Frank Bruno. Domeneghetti does well manage the balance between stories of the personal and the wider issues they inform, reflect, shape, and reveal.

I seem to have reached an age where the era of my adulthood has become the subject of historical writing – and while I didn’t live through the British 1980s I did watch them from afar, engaging with the cultural shifts and closely linked in some ways to the politics of the era as my world underwent the sorts of Thatcherite evisceration that Britain also experienced. What I got from Domeneghetti was a sense of era, its cultural, social, emotional, and political feeling that sport, as an emotional as much as a physical pastime, is so good at revealing. It’s an excellent, accessible, informed way into the era.

[Tom Jerrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent read. It gives great context and insight for historical events, sporting and otherwise, that I have not lived through. Basically explaining why sporting events were significant on a broader scale than just the sport itself. Especially enjoyed the chapters about snooker, Zola Budd and GAA. Highly recommend this book to anyone interested with a remote interest in sport.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easy but hard hitting read, full of insights. I lived through these changes, the majority of the stories I remembered, but here they are treated in more interesting detail. Some chapters deal with things that I missed or had forgotten.
Although nominally about sport and media coverage, it highlights how much the country has changed while retaining some of the embedded prejudices.
Recommended reading even for those who are not sports fans, there are strong political threads through it all, after all politics is about how the monies are shared.

[Tom Thornton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unusually for non-fiction, this is a book which builds momentum slowly from start to finish, as if the chapters were tactically placed with the weaker ones at the start because the best, most researched chapters are found in the second half. As a result, I'm glad I stuck with it because I wasn't sure during the first third. The success of this is the blend of sport AND politics, how the two affected one another. It's not solely a sporty or political book, the USP is how it's both at once. The thing I learned the most about (as somebody born in 1992) is that the world still had its serious problems - they just manifested in different areas, it's not particularly a better world these days, and it was interesting to find out why and how.

[Derek Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Going back to the eighties and looking at the links and interplay between sport, society and the politics of the time. A decade of turmoil, of public disasters and the big bang. Sport was right at the heart of it all from late night snooker finals, threatened Olympic boycotts, anti-apartheid protests, violence and disasters. Much of it reflected and reflecting the general mood of the country and against the background of the Falklands War, inner city riots and the miners' strike and 'no such thing as society'.

Well written and a good read.

[Gary K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book about a decade where an awful lot happened , brought back some good and bad memories.

Well researched and on the whole accurate account of what happened during the decade.

The only inaccuracies I noticed were:

Chelsea fans were not at Heysel (page 167)

Chelsea fans did not pay subscriptions into a Building Society Account (page 246)

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellently researched. Smashing read.

[Clive Lillie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great nostalgic read, for anyone raised in the 80s. Sport on TV particularly nostalgic, alongside some pretty cutting political shelters towards the end. Well written modern history