European Championship Stories; 1996, a whole new ball game

The arrival of the European Championships in 1996 was treated as a celebration of the rebirth of English football, but it had fallen a very long way in the first place.

It almost goes without saying that the near-death – and very much beyond – experiences suffered by English football during the 1980s shaped the game that we watch today. There was a time—a period from the middle to the end of that decade—when the definite feeling that this was a game on its last legs became tangible.

Crowds dwindled to somewhere beyond what might have been considered the bare bones, whilst an unhappy trinity of disasters carried both a literal and symbolic loss, with deaths that represented scores of personal tragedies alongside a wider sense of corrosion in what had been the nations number one pastime. Yet well within a decade, the hype was telling us that all was right with the world again, and the 1996 European Championships became a celebration of this rebirth, whether we liked it or not.