The tyranny of the box goal

The global homogenisation of football has robbed it of some its charm.

There are points when I ascribe the fact that this still bothers me to my rapidly advancing age. “You’re just pining for the olden days,” my ever-helpful inner monologue tells me, “again”. But that’s not the whole story. It mattered when I was younger. It mattered when I was young. If football is a game in which its most important moments happen in and around the goal, why does that artifact itself, the actual goal, have to look so damn ugly, so much of the time?

I’m not the only one. I know I’m not. When Jonathan Wilson isn’t inverting pyramids, he’s pining for these long-lost days. He was doing so in When Saturday Comes in February 2010. Six and a half years later, he was still banging on about the same thing. I recognise the belief that “there was a time between 1984 and 1996 you could have shown him the pattern of any goal net from any top-flight ground in the country and he’d have been able to correctly identify the club from which it came”. If anything, I think I’d stand a decent chance if you pushed that start date back by ten, fifteen, or perhaps even twenty years.

This is not a boast that I make lightly or with pride. If anything, it’s a boast that comes with a side-order of faint shame. Sometimes, I fantasise about all the space in my brain that could have been taken up with something useful or which at least might have made me more interesting. And when you couple this with the fact that these alluring spaces at the end of the pitch—the actual, literal goals—have been homogenised beyond any point of no return, and in a shape that is so grimly functional.

In the first place, there wasn’t even a crossbar, never mind anything to hang from it. The first Laws of the Game, published in 1863, set the width of the goal at 8 yards, but made no stipulation for height whatsoever. After rows started breaking out between teams over wildly different interpretations of the rules—some were reported to have claimed any shot going between the posts counted, regardless of height, while others disagreed—clubs started attaching a length of string or tape between the posts to set a definite height, which was eventually formalised at 8 feet.

This, of course, didn’t end the arguments. Shots bounced back out off crowds, broke the tape across the top of the posts, and passed just one side of the post or the other. The solid wooden crossbar followed in 1882, though this didn’t come without issues. The quality of some early posts was questionable, and it took a long time to work out that they should be made in a slight banana shape curved upwards, so as to counteract the effects of gravity in the middle of the crossbar and prevent sagging.

And the icing on the cake was the invention of the goal net by the Liverpool-based engineer JA Brodie in 1890. By attaching nets to the goals, disputes over whether balls had entered a goal or not would presumably now end forever. The Football League sanctioned their use quickly and the FA formally ratified them early in 1892. They were used in the FA Cup final for the first time that year, the last to be played at Kennington Oval between West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa.

Even though they weren’t compulsory—even now, the Laws of the Game say only that, “Nets may be attached to the goals and the ground behind the goal; they must be properly supported and must not interfere with the goalkeeper”—but as early as the 1894 Raith Rovers were being made to replay a Scottish Cup match against the 5th King’s Rifle Volunteers which they’d won 6-3 after they failed to supply nets for the match. They lost the replay 4-3. They may only barely exist in the Laws of the Game, but league and cup competitions have considered nets more or less mandatory since more or less the point at which they were first introduced.

It was recognised very quickly that these new nets had to be tethered back from the pitch itself to prevent players—and in particular goalkeepers—from becoming entangled in the goals themselves, particularly at moments of high drama. In the first place, a second set of poles would often be employed behind them, pulling them back from the goal. The result of this was that early netted goals sometimes ended up looking very much like their modern counterparts, although the arrangements made to hold these supporting poles up usually required tethering in place themselves to prevent them from toppling over, as well.

As can be seen from this picture from the Victorian artist Thomas Marie Madawaska Hemy, the arrangements to do this involved ropes and pegs, very much in the style of a tent. As a curious aside, this picture—called “Goal!”—is routinely cited as having been painted in 1882, even though the use of nets wouldn’t be sanctioned by the Football League and FA for another ten years. If anything, it seems likely that this painting would likely have come from ten years after the date claimed for it.

But it was evident that this sort of arrangement behind goals couldn’t last. Many of these new football grounds didn’t have much space behind the pitch, and it became easier to add a second pole, bending the stanchion into an L-shape, and firmly attaching it at the angle of post and crossbar (it seems inconceivable, considering attitudes towards safety in sports ground at the time, that this change would have come about as a result of concerns for the welfare of players or supporters). This design became increasingly popular after the end of the First World War, as can be seen in this picture of the 1922 FA Cup Final between Huddersfield Town and Preston North End, which was played at Stamford Bridge.

Controversies continued, of course, with one of the great fears of the strikers of the time—along with the possibility that their next injury could be career-ending—being that the ball might strike the back stanchion and bounce back out, deceiving the referee into not awarding a goal. One potential answer to this was the D-stanchion, a smaller loop in (roughly) the shape of a capital D which would be attached to the top of the goal, often anchored into place with a second bar. This would achieve the aim of tethering the net back while significantly reducing the possibility of a stray bounce fooling the match officials. This design could be seen at Molineux from the 1930s on. (The below picture is from the famous floodlit friendly match between Wolverhampton Wanderers and Honved from 1954.)

So things stayed for the next few decades. The arrival of semi-regular television broadcasting brought the game into people’s homes in the 1950s, and this was quickly followed by the World Cup. In 1954, Switzerland seemed to prefer L-stanchions and boards poles along the base of goals. In Sweden four years later, the D-stanchion was preferred at every venue apart from the Rasunda in Stockholm, which was being used for the final. And in Chile in 1962 there seemed to be an effort at some degree of coordination. Three of the four venues used had an identical style of goal with curved stanchions of a design that called to mind the art deco movement of the interwar years. Only Arica, hundreds of miles to the north of the other three grounds, preferred a conventional L-stanchion, with the nets at the final venue in Santiago stretching far behind the goals like a wedding train.

By the 1970s, the stanchion-less box goal had become such an unfamiliar sight in England as to be something of a novelty when spotted. It was no great surprise that they were used across the board for the 1974 World Cup finals in West Germany. This type of arrangement had remained popular in the country, as can be seen from this video of a match between Bayern Munich and Borussia Moenchengladbach in 1966. This style became increasingly popular in Europe in the 1970s, but England remained something of a holdout against them.

When changes did come, they were influenced by the culture of the times. When incidents of hooliganism started to rise in the 1960s, pitch invasions started to become more commonplace. From the early 1970s, several clubs started to use a smaller “anti-hooligan” mesh on goals, the rationale being that traditional netting used a mesh big enough for anyone trying to scale a goal to get a foothold in. And in 1980 a controversy amplified by television would bring further changes at several clubs.

The Match of the Day cameras rocked up at Highfield Road in Coventry on the 6th September that year for an early season relegation four-pointer—three points for a win wouldn’t be introduced until the start of the following season—between Coventry City and Crystal Palace. After a goalless first half, three goals in the first ten minutes of the second had given Coventry a 2-1 lead when Palace’s Jerry Murphy was fouled on the left-hand side of the edge of the Coventry penalty area. Clive Allen stepped up to take the free-kick and absolutely thundered the ball past the Coventry goalkeeper Jim Blyth, only for it to bounce straight back out off the stanchion and back into play.

The Palace players surrounded the referee Derek Webb, who consulted with his linesman before confirming that they considered the ball not to have crossed the line. It was an extraordinary decision. The ball had quite clearly bounced down at an angle that it wouldn’t have come down from, had it hit the crossbar or post. Coventry went on to win the game 3-1, and after the match the Palace manager Terry Venables told commentator John Motson that he was “disgusted” by the decision.

Several clubs with L-stanchion goals - including Liverpool and Manchester United - started hanging their nets underneath the stanchions following this (non-)decision, while in the summer of 1981 West Ham United - for whom the crampedness behind the goals at the Boleyn Ground was an obvious issue - switched to a stanchion-less box style, while Coventry themselves replaced the L-stanchions that had fooled Derek Webb with D-stanchions at the same time.

There is an argument to be made that stanchion-free goals are safer for players, but while this is a fair claim to make, things don’t always work out that way. In September 1989, for example, Hamburg were playing Werder Bremen in a hotly-contested derby match in the Bundesliga when the Bremen forward Wynton Rufer lobbed the ball towards the Hamburg goal. Scrambling to get back, the Hamburg defender Ditmar Jakobs managed to clear the ball, but in a complete freak of an accident slid into the back of the goal, whereupon—look away now if you’re squeamish—one of the snap hooks securing the netting to its metal base went through the skin on his back and got lodged there. It took twenty minutes and some impromptu on-pitch surgery by physiotherapist Hermann Rieger and doctor Gerold Schwarz to dislodge him, but Jakobs never played again. At 36 years of age, Jakobs was coming to the end of his playing career anyway at the time of the incident, which could have been a lot worse. As Jakobs later told the magazine Der Spiegel:

“Further investigation revealed that during the rescue operation several spinal processes of the vertebrae had been cut off and important nerves had been severed, three centimetres from the spine.

“A complete regeneration of the nerves did not occur, pain and the disturbed motor function remained. My career had been terminated by the snap hook suddenly.”

In short, Jakobs might well have ended up paralysed as a result of this incident, and he wasn’t the first person in the history of German football to end up entangled in the back of a goal, either. Eighteen years earlier during a match between Borussia Moenchengladbach and Werder Bremen, Gladbach striker Herbert Laumen fell into the goal, causing it to collapse. It was established that one of the wooden posts had become rotten over time, and had completely snapped upon this collision taking place.

Gladbach were expecting the DFB to order the match to be replayed, but instead they awarded a 2-0 win to Bremen and fined Gladbach 1500 marks. Gladbach went on to win the league title by two points from Bayern Munich anyway but Laumen, who won two caps for his country in the late 1960s, left the club that summer. His destination? Werder Bremen.

And when it comes to goal posts and goal nets, controversy can come served extremely cold indeed. The 1978 World Cup finals were notable for the goal posts and netting being the same at all five of its six host stadiums. The Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires held nine matches during this tournament including the final, but almost forty years on a story emerged which wrapped the goal posts there in intrigue. The story had first appeared on the redoubtable In Bed With Maradona and ended up on the Guardian Sports Network. It can be read in full here, and it is an appealing one. A small act of defiance against a despotic junta, a message of resistance sent to a global audience behind the backs of a government that would likely have murdered anyone who made such claims publicly at that time.

There were, however, one or two issues with this version of events. Most obviously, the use of black bases around goal posts was commonplace for years prior to this tournament. Here they are, being used at the same stadium five years earlier, before the junta had even come to power. It’s believed that these bases were painted on in order to provide a little something extra for strikers to aim towards, but what we can say for certain is that they’d been there for years before the 1978 World Cup finals.

More than anything else, though, what stands out is that FIFA didn’t demand D-stanchions in 1974 or 1982, or at any tournament since then. Box goals, as used in West Germany, Spain—or at least in the case of Spain goals without stanchions; whether they counted as box goals or not is debatable—and all stops since then bar 1994, have been the authorities preferred method of supporting a goal net because, with no metal near the goals, they are considered safer. And FIFA didn’t start to come down too hard on uniformity within World Cup venues until Joao Havelange renegotiated commercial terms with sponsors after the 1982 World Cup finals. We have no reason that the writer didn’t report a story that he was told in good faith. There is, however, also cause to believe that he may have been told exactly that: a story.

But still the eccentricities continued. During a World Cup qualifying match between Hungary and England in 1981 played at the Nepstadion in Budapest, a Trevor Brooking shot got thoroughly wedged in a D-stanchion. Continuing the 1980s’ tendency towards eccentricity in this regard, in the aftermath of the 1984 European Championships in France, the businessman Jean-Claude Darmon was brought in to modernise the French game, which had been lagging behind other countries both in terms of attendances and commercial revenues for some time.

One of Darmon’s bright ideas was to weave the three stripes of Adidas into goal nets, but after complaints from rival sportswear manufacturers Puma, FIFA confirmed that they considered the goal nets to be part of the fixtures of the pitch and refused to allow it. Still, though, from the summer of 1986 nets started to appear on Ligue Un goals with the word “BUT” (the French word for “GOAL”) printed across them in a scream bubble (a jagged speech bubble). They only lasted one season and they didn’t appear at every Ligue Un stadium, but certainly nothing like them has been seen before or since.

By the early 1990s the box goal, with nets pulled back and attacked by cords to poles in the ground had taken over across much of Europe, and England was the last of the major leagues to fully adopt them. Euro 96 proved to be the tipping point. UEFA’s style guide required them for the tournament, so they were installed at Wembley after the 1996 FA Cup final between Manchester United and Liverpool, as well as at the other grounds used as venues for the tournament. Just over a quarter of a century on, only one club out of the 92 that make up the Premier League and EFL have retained a D-stanchion. Step forward Leyton Orient, the last holdouts.

Colour of netting aside, these once near-ornate furnishings of football pitches have been been jettisoned in favour of the homogenised and purely functional, and in light of this Facebook groups and the like have sprung up, sharing photographs of non-league grounds which haven’t yet been updated, park and municipal pitches and those abroad that have survived the cull and, of course, pictures from the past. The language in the comments can occasionally get something approaching sexual, and it’s not always clear, the extent to which some of them are being serious or not.

And it’s not even the act of being stanchion-free that is the issue. In Mexico at the 1986 World Cup finals there was not a stanchion in sight, but the inside of the goals was easily big enough to house a small family. Four years later in Italy, there was a pleasingly mixed bag on view, with large billowing nets at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome. At both tournaments, the goals themselves were part of a visual spectacle which added to the sense of occasion. Scoring a goal in these tournament, such a design choice was heavily implying, is the pinnacle of world football. This is An Event.

Now they’re just another piece of equipment, all function and no form. And the situation in the non-league game is even worse than in the Premier League or EFL, with a large number of artificial pitches resulting in an influx of portable goals with disfiguring wheels and diagonal metal supports between the back of the posts and the base.

I know, I know, I know. This is categorically not a matter of the utmost importance (or of any real importance whatsoever), and it was notable while researching this piece how many of the others on this subject read like something approaching mea culpas, as if this is little more than some weird, middle-aged peccadillo that should remain not just in the closet, but in a lead-lined box inside said closet. Some may think that it this is precisely what it is.

Except aesthetics do matter. There was a time when a goal in a football match was something akin to a portmanteau image of the wild extremes that the game can invoke in people. In the background, a group of dancing, hugging, kissing men collectively enjoy their high. In the foreground, a disconsolate goalkeeper rummages around for the ball in the goal as though hunting for something in an attic before half-heartedly half-volleying it back to the centre spot and then standing, hands on hips, possibly shaking his headed slightly at the rank incompetence of his defenders.

Now when a ball hits the goal, it often pings jarringly around the inside of it like a pinball or, worse still, at such a force that the entire base lifts from the ground. Groundsmen of the world, I understand that being able to mow with ease is important and I know that player safety is paramount. But do goals have to look so… half-arsed? Scoring one is now more valuable to all directly concerned than ever before. It’s time that it felt like it again.