Blackburn, Wigan, Portsmouth and the rest - why the Barclaysman era really was the best football has ever been

Social media isn’t usually a particularly joyful place. Even if you carefully massage the various algorithms such that you dodge the worst of the politics and the screaming matches, places like X (if we must call it that) are still mostly the preserve of the banal, the abusive and the bots, and even most sports content quickly breaks down into juvenile insults and points scoring. Except, for the last week or so, when the Barclaysmen came to save us.

Twitter (I just can’t, Elon) is now, for a little while at least, a safe haven where Millennials can sink into the warm pink glow of nostalgia, watching videos of the great players of a recent but no less bygone age pinging wondergoals in to the soundtrack of The Futureheads and Young Knives. How long has it been since we last saw Morten Gamst Pedersen’s rocket against Fulham from 2005, or contemplated the very existence of Hugo Rodallega?

Thanks to the Barclaysmen trend, we can think about it all day now – or at least, we can for a little longer, because not only are the big brands turning up to stomp all over the trend in typical fashion, but clubs who had nothing to do with the Barclays era are trying to muscle in too, and that sort of thing always kills the vibe. Back off, Brentford. Let us have our moment with Steed Malbranque x Mystery Jets compilations, and you can have yours in 20 years.

Of course, people being people, there have been those who felt a need to dissect the Barclaysman trend. A viral tweet claimed that those of us north of 30 only miss the football of that era because it happened when we were young and energetic and full of hope for the future, and didn’t have to fuss about mortgage rates. And there’s probably a kernel of truth in that, as nostalgia for a time when our knees didn’t seize up slightly in the mornings is indeed a powerful opiate, but there is more to it – the era of the Barclaysmen truly was a better time. And was, perhaps, football at its very best.

The era of the Barclays – which started somewhere after 2000, when Barclaycard became the Premier League’s title sponsor, and ends more or less whenever we want it to but certainly by the time the final Barclays deal ended in 2016 – was the perfect plotted point on the graph at which the technical quality of the game (going up) met the rapidly descending line which shows the game plunging towards a finances-first amorality. Because while football has in many ways become better, it’s also gotten a lot worse in several others.

There’s no doubt, for instance, that the technical quality of players continues to improve at pace. You only need to spend a little bit of time watching old black-and-white footage of the greats of yore to appreciate that we’ve come a long way from Brylcreemed gentlemen hoofing a two-ton leather ball upfield through the mud, and even footage of the best sides from the 2000s tends to have a certain scrappiness about it that wouldn’t be tolerated now. But while football is a better game now in terms of skill and its application than it was even when the Barclaysmen roamed the earth, it’s also rather less joyful.

We live in an age in which the tactical system is king and players at the top level are restricted to limited roles, no longer allowed to freewheel, improvise as they see fit and have a crack from 35 yards. Pep Guardiola would have the heads off half the players whose glorious strikes litter the compilation tapes (mainly those of the December 2006 goal of the month competition) for even trying from that sort of range. Defences are more organised, kinks are ironed out, and it’s all more tactical and frankly, a little more dull than it used to be.

That isn’t just the way it looks through the rose-tinted glasses of a journalist teetering on the brink of middle age, either. In 2006 (towards the end of the Early Barclays era), 22.3% of goals were scored from outside of the penalty area. Last season, that was down to 12.4%, and that’s part of a trend, not two cherry-picked outliers. Players are trying the outrageous less often, and as a consequence it happens less often. And that, by any sane standard, is less fun. If Marco van Basten played now, he would have crossed against the Soviet Union. Had he played for Sunderland in 2007, he would still have smashed it into the far side netting, although quite why the Black Cats would have been hosting the USSR at the Stadium of Light is unclear.

The players of the 2000s and early 2010s were still damned good. They still had smooth skills, dribbled at pace, passed beautifully and were willing and able to curl the ball in from improbable positions - but there was more joy in the way they were allowed to play the game. It’s not that football now is necessarily dull or hard to watch, but there’s a sense that most teams exist to be admired rather than enjoyed.

The game itself has changed irrevocably as well. It would be deeply revisionist to suggest that football in that era wasn’t well down the road towards becoming a hyper-capitalist entertainment industry first and an actual sport second, but there was still a certain sense of balance and the worst excesses of the modern game – state ownership, multi-club groups, paying Erling Haaland’s agent £35m, that sort of thing – were still in the future.

Sure, the wealthiest teams still won most of the trophies and had a clear competitive advantage, but lesser sides could still get close enough in terms of sheer fiscal clout to lure quality overseas players to their clubs. Would Benni McCarthy join Blackburn Rovers now? Would Portsmouth and Wigan Athletic have been able to assemble squads good enough to win the FA Cup? Granted, Pompey threw themselves over a financial cliff to do it, but they still got there with a starting eleven that had Sol Campbell, Papa Bouba Diop, Sylvain Distin and Niko Kranjčar all at the same time. Look at that team from 2008. Utaka, Muntari, Pamarot. Pure, unadulterated Barclays. And yes, I am a man who can sit around just naming old players and have the best time.

A part of the beauty of the Barclays was that the underdogs actually had a say. They mattered. Even when Manchester United or Chelsea were plainly the best team, they didn’t kerb stomp the opposition in the way that Manchester City do now. You didn’t make the trip to the Etihad with an overwhelming sense of dread, partly because the Etihad hadn’t been built yet. All of which is why the most successful players don’t feel like true Barclaysmen. It wasn’t really about the winning, and it’s hard to be a Barclaysman if you played at Old Trafford during the Ferguson years, for instance – although Dimitar Berbatov certainly made it work.

The Barclays era doesn’t have a monopoly on that confluence of romantic football in an era when American hedge fund owners didn’t control all of the clubs, of course. Serie A most certainly had it in the Nineties, for starters, and had it in spades. But of all the times and places in which the beautiful game lived up its name and we didn’t have to deal with Gianni Infantino and VAR and 115 charges, the Barclays era may have been the best of the lot.

But it had to end eventually. The money got too big, the pockets too deep, the coaches too bald. It’s hard to pinpoint the precise moment that the Barclays era ended - although it’s easy to pick out the start, which was in 2002 when Jay-Jay Okocha signed for Bolton Wanderers and became the first of the Barclaysmen, the Ur Barclaysman in whose shadow all others would stand – but it has little to do with the actual sponsorship deal. Instead, it’s about figuring out when the innocence was lost.

The end of the 2013/14 season seems like a strong candidate for the place where we draw the line. That was when Wigan stopped turning into Barcelona for two months at the end of every season and finally got themselves relegated. Blackburn and Swansea were gone, Portsmouth had already gone through administration, and Manchester City won their second Premier League title. The wealth of Abu Dhabi was crushing the romance out of the game one Sergio Agüero goal at a time. We still had Leicester City’s title win to come, granted, but somehow the sheer absurdity and unlikeliness of that marks it out as a distinctly post-Barclays moment.

Whenever you choose to believe that era ended, it has long gone now. A certain purity has been lost, and in exchange we got the Qatar World Cup, Enzo Fernández’s nine-year contract and Stockley Park. I don’t cling to football from 2005 because I’m older – for starters, I’m considerably happier now than I was then, as many thirty-somethings are once they get over the knee thing – but because it really was a better time for football, and perhaps the best it’s ever been.