Paul Rouse: Nostalgia was once a sickness. Now it's the only cure for United fans
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer of Manchester United celebrates his late winner during the 1999 Champions League Final against Bayern Munich at the Nou Camp in Barcelona, Spain. United scored twice in injury time to win 2-1.
Our sporting lives are soaked in nostalgia. The enduring memory of a past sporting experience holds a power to draw people back in time and evoke feelings of love and loyalty to a team or a moment or a place. This then colours how we see and feel about sport in the present.
There are multiple ways in which this works. It can be seen, for example, in the documentary film 'When We Were Kings', released in 1996 and centred on the 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle' heavyweight boxing match between the champion George Foreman and his famed challenger Muhammad Ali.
The fight was staged in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and draws on archival footage of celebrities, whose roll-call extends from musicians such as James Brown and B.B. King, and the boxing promoter Don King. There is amazing footage of the contemporaneous ‘Zaire 74’ music festival, as well as a host of celebrity interviewees.
The film was so good that it won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1996 and its power lay in the way it captured the emotions of the fight and everything that happened around it.
In this world, nostalgia is a great way to sell something. In part this explains the extraordinary money handed over for sporting memorabilia.
Some of these are landmark fashion moments which are key staging points in the process which has seen sporting leisure wear dominate the casual fashion marketplace.
For example, in 2021 a pair of Michael Jordan's game-worn Nike Air Ships from 1984 sold at auction for $1,472,000 at a sale in Las Vegas. Jordan wore the Air Ships – a forerunner of Air Jordans – in the mid-1980s and the person who held on to them either got very lucky, or had a nose for the way time has a way of increasing the value of certain things.
A more mundane example is the sale of replica jerseys from a bygone age. In 2019, Classic Football Shirts sold over 300,000 kits. Many of those who bought the kits were buying jerseys made and then worn in matches before they were even born.
But many others were investing in a time when they were young – or at least younger. And when their team was successful.
It is interesting that the term ‘nostalgia’ was first coined at the end of the 17th century by a physician who used it to denote a neurological condition among soldiers who were fighting in places far removed from their homes. It basically was an extreme form of homesickness, in which memories of home are almost only pleasant and positive. That is to say, nostalgia is about affectionate remembrance of the past – it is memory with the painful and disappointing bits taken out.
And the only relief from the condition of nostalgia came from the return home, or the promise of a return home.
In time, of course, the idea of nostalgia spread into wider discourse and it is now a word that is widely used, well beyond a medical context.
At the same time, the remembrance of past joy, past success is still fundamental to its meaning. And it is this promise of a return to that experience that helps explain its power in modern sport.
A wonderful current example can be found in Matt Dickinson’s new book, .
Reading this book in the hours either side of United’s filleting by Manchester City was a wonderful study in contrasts. There can be no return for Manchester United to the days of Ferguson’s grandeur – the nature of modern soccer has changed too much to permit that.
But it is all too apparent reading the book the extent to which the club has squandered its position of supremacy in English soccer.
More than anything else, Dickinson’s book is an extended exercise in nostalgia, both personal and collective.
The personal aspect of the remembrance lies, in the first instance, with the writer himself: “I wanted to celebrate a time when life had never seemed more thrilling; certainly not for me, who had come to love Manchester. Covering United was a prized job, not just for reporting on the biggest club in the world but experiencing a city so alive with music and nightlife, and much cooler people than me. We there anywhere better to live in the ‘90s?”
It is a reminder of the words of the poet William Wordsworth, who encapsulated the vigour and joy of youth: “Bliss was it that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.”
The nostalgia in this book flows through the portraits offered of the personalities who filled the dressing-room. There they are, on page after page, captured “in their athletic prime”, on their way to the most successful club season in English soccer history.
It is not all sweetness and light. There are magnificently gossipy reminiscences about bitter fallouts: Keane and Sheringham not talking; Cole and Sheringham not talking; rows going on with relative frequency.
But mostly there is a sepia-tinged warmth to the recollections. It is there in the collective nostalgia as well in the personal aspect. The sense of the shared emotion of the experience of being in a crowd and witnessing the extraordinary: Ryan Giggs’ goal against Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final replay or the mind-warping injury-time comeback in the Champions League final.
The younger generation of Manchester United fans who will read this book will be gripped by a sort of “vicarious nostalgia” – the emotion which allows people to relate to a celebration of a past which they never experienced the first time around.
The way sport is locked into tradition and a roll of honour means that the past lives always on the shoulder of the present. Current success holds its meaning mainly in relation to the context of what has previously been achieved.
One of the staples of television and of sports broadcasting apps is the retransmission of previously played matches. This is often filler but it has a capacity to pull you in for extended periods. The existence on the NBA and NFL and MLB apps of season after season of old games is a great example of their lure.
Sometimes watching old games is a serious mistake. There is nothing like watching a match from the past to strip it of much of what you believed to have happened – and of the illusions of quality that it held. This is a reversal of nostalgia and instead destroys the past by looking at it through the present.
There is no fear of that happening to Manchester United fans, however. There is, instead, the very real problem that the ’99 team might still have enough about them to beat the men who currently wear the jersey...
